Key Takeaways
- Police dismantled a cybercrime ring that infected state agencies, freezing nearly $18.5M in bank assets.
- Authorities seized $1.7M in crypto from self-custody wallets, marking Brazil’s largest seizure of this kind.
- Detectives found seed phrases during raids, moving illicit funds into state custody to halt the scheme.
Over $1.7 Million Recovered From Self-Custody Wallets During Operation ClickFix
Brazilian police reached a milestone by executing the largest seizure of funds from self-custody wallets, which do not depend on a third-party service provider to be accessed.
On Wednesday, the Civil Police of Santa Catarina revealed the results of Operation ClickFix, a high-level enforcement action targeting criminal groups that used social engineering to trick users into installing malicious programs to correct false browser errors. Through this scheme, the group pushed victims to introduce malicious code into the OS terminal to obtain full control of the affected devices.
The malware infected sensitive institutions, including Brazilian agencies, the police force, and judicial systems. Several companies that drive the Brazilian market supply chain were also affected.
The operation, executed on September 10, involved 17 search-and-seizure orders and two arrest orders against the group’s heads. The action seized over a million in urban properties and resulted in the freezing of nearly $18.5 million in bank accounts linked to the group’s actions.
Eduardo Graebin, a detective at the Cybercrime Repression Police Station/State Directorate of Criminal Investigations, was responsible for seizing the group’s cryptocurrency assets, calling it “the largest seizure of this nature ever recorded among the Civil Police of Brazil.”
He revealed that during the operation, police located four seed phrases, and it was necessary to import and analyze the wallets to identify the assets in each one and transfer the funds to the Santa Catarina Civil Police institutional account on Foxbit.
In partnership with Chainalysis, which provided tools to help identify the assets, over $1.7 million in crypto was moved in 13 operations and placed under police custody.
“This result demonstrates, in a concrete way, how specialized technical knowledge and the use of appropriate tools can represent the difference between locating or failing to seize more than one million reais in assets related to criminal activity,” Graebin concluded.
ClickFix is just the latest operation of Brazilian authorities against criminal entities that use crypto assets in their criminal model. In April, as part of Operation Narco Fluxo, two popular singers were arrested for their links to a $320 million crypto money laundering ring.
In July, Brazilian Federal Police dismantled an international trafficking ring that moved over 6.5 tons of cocaine to Europe and used a network of shell companies to launder money using cryptocurrency
