Pierluigi Paganini
May 30, 2025
The U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Philippines-based company Funnull Technology Inc. and its admin Liu Lizhi for enabling romance scams, causing $200M in U.S. victim losses.
A romance scam is a type of online fraud where a scammer pretends to build a romantic relationship with someone to gain their trust and ultimately exploit them, often for financial gain.
Upon establishing an online romantic relationship, crooks attempt to manipulate the victims into sending them money or other sensitive or financial information that could be used later in other fraudulent activities.
Funnull Technology Inc. supports crypto scams by bulk-buying IPs and selling them to cybercriminals to host fake platforms. Linked to most scams reported to the FBI, it caused over $200M in U.S. victim losses. Funnull uses domain generation algorithms and templates to mimic trusted sites and evade takedowns. In 2024, it also altered developer code to redirect users to scams and gambling sites tied to Chinese money laundering.
“Today, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Funnull Technology Inc., a Philippines-based company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams, commonly known as “pig butchering,” along with its administrator, Liu Lizhi.” reads the press release published by the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). “Americans lose billions of dollars annually to these cyber scams, with revenues generated from these crimes rising to record levels in 2024.”
Funnull Technology Inc. has emerged as a critical player in the global cybercrime ecosystem, systematically fueling cryptocurrency scams that have defrauded U.S. victims of over $200 million since 2022. Operating under the guise of a legitimate IT infrastructure provider, the company bulk-purchases IP addresses and leases them to cybercriminals, who use these resources to host fraudulent platforms mimicking trusted exchanges like Coinbase or Binance.
Liu Lizhi, a Chinese national and administrator of Funnull, helped assign domains used in crypto scams, phishing, and online gambling. OFAC sanctioned both Liu and Funnull under Executive Orders 13694 and 14144 for supporting cyber activities that threaten U.S. national security and economic stability. Liu also managed internal documents tracking employee tasks tied to these operations.
All U.S.-based assets of sanctioned individuals or entities, including those linked to Funnull, are now blocked and must be reported to OFAC. U.S. persons are generally prohibited from conducting transactions involving these blocked parties. Violating these sanctions can lead to civil or criminal penalties, and even indirect dealings may trigger enforcement actions.
The FBI also released a FLASH alert to disseminate indicators of compromise (IOCs) associated with malicious cyber activities linked to Funnull Technology Inc. (Funnull).
“Since January 2025, the FBI has identified 548 unique Funnull Canonical Names (CNAME) linked to over 332,000 unique domains. In April 2025, a sample of eight domains were analyzed to depict a CNAME analysis that resolved to four CNAMEs tied to Funnull infrastructure.” reads the alert.
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