U.S. law enforcement seized $225 million in crypto under Operation Big Tuna, including a wallet a Turkish court had ordered seized to repay scam victim Nivie Kaul. The assets are in U.S. custody with no distribution mechanism named, leaving identified victims unable to collect.
A Turkish court ordered a wallet holding more than $100 million seized in 2023 so that Nivie Kaul could recover part of the $8 million she lost to a crypto scam. Before Turkey could distribute the money, U.S. law enforcement took custody of that wallet and other holdings totaling $225 million under an operation named Big Tuna, aimed at an alleged scam compound in the Philippines.
The result is a restitution logjam: the assets are frozen, the victims are identified, and no mechanism yet exists to move the funds from U.S. custody back to the people who lost them. Kaul, a California resident who gave up her work as a legal consultant to learn crypto tracing after U.S. law enforcement told her it could not help, had already tracked her money across digital ledgers and filed a claim in Turkey. Turkish prosecutors described the network she exposed as a professional money-laundering ring feeding the shadow economy behind the global scam industry.
"Victims who trace their own funds across chains often arrive at the courthouse before the government does, and that creates competing claims over the same wallet," said Diana Chen, a crypto regulation analyst who tracks digital-asset enforcement filings. "Custody is not the same as restitution, and the gap between the two is where these cases sit for years."
The procedural obstacles are structural rather than incidental. U.S. forfeiture rules generally route seized assets through a judicial process in which the government must establish title before any distribution, and victims must file claims inside a defined window. Where a foreign court has already asserted jurisdiction over the same wallet — as Turkey did — the two proceedings do not automatically reconcile. Kaul's claim sits in that overlap: a Turkish seizure order on one side, U.S. custody on the other, and no agreed protocol for which court's judgment controls the transfer.
The scale of the underlying fraud makes the delay consequential. Kaul's loss alone was more than $8 million, and the wallet Turkey ordered seized held over $100 million. Big Tuna's total haul of $225 million is the largest single crypto seizure tied to scam-victim restitution to date, which means the precedent set here will govern how every comparable case is handled. Few scam victims ever recover their money; the Big Tuna wallets were, for a period, the clearest exception available.
The distinction matters because the U.S. government's crypto holdings are not a victim fund. Assets seized in enforcement actions enter government custody, and returning them requires either a successful forfeiture proceeding with an approved claims process or a court-ordered distribution. Neither has produced a payout in this case. The wallet Turkey identified remains in U.S. hands, and the $225 million total has not been allocated to identified claimants.
That gap is now visible to the retail users the scam industry targets. Crypto fraud losses have pushed victims toward self-directed tracing — learning block explorers, following funds across bridges, filing claims in whichever jurisdiction shows a receptive court — precisely because official channels have been slow. When a victim succeeds at that work and still cannot collect, the lesson transmitted to the market is that recovery depends on which government physically holds the keys, not on the strength of the claim.
The comparison with other jurisdictions sharpens the point. Turkey moved from investigation to a seizure order within roughly a year of Kaul's filing, while the U.S. action produced custody without a distribution mechanism. For exchanges and compliance teams, the practical implication is that seizure announcements and victim-recovery announcements are separate events, and the second one has no published timeline.
What happens next turns on how U.S. authorities structure the claims process for the Big Tuna wallets and whether they recognize the Turkish order. Until a distribution mechanism is named, the $225 million remains a headline number rather than a recovery — and Kaul's $8 million remains unrecovered despite a court on the other side of the world having already agreed she was owed it.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
