FBI Seizes $560,000 in Bitcoin (BTC) From Hamas Fundraising Network

Five Affidavits Behind the Seizures

The U.S. Department of Justice announced on Wednesday that it has confiscated more than $560,000 in cryptocurrency that was being funneled to Hamas, and has taken control of the domains and servers the group relied on to solicit donations and recruit supporters online. The department published five affidavits alongside the announcement. Three of them — dated March 25, June 25 and Oct. 10, 2025 — document the crypto warrants that account for the full $560,000. The remaining two, dated July 29 and Aug. 18, 2026, authorize the infrastructure seizures that followed.

A crypto warrant, the instrument at the center of the first three affidavits, lets federal agents seize digital assets held at specific blockchain addresses rather than funds parked in a bank — a mechanism prosecutors have leaned on increasingly as terror-finance networks migrate on-chain. The warrants here targeted wallets and accounts allegedly operated on behalf of Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades.

Prosecutors say the fundraising machine was deliberately engineered to frustrate tracing: an encrypted group chat directed would-be donors to a fundraising website where wallet addresses rotated constantly. Investigators broke through by cultivating human sources who identified and tracked the rotating addresses, an effort that produced intelligence on thousands of individuals who contacted the Hamas-linked platforms seeking to contribute, whether in digital assets or through conventional payment rails.

The FBI also seized the domains and servers powering Alqassam.ps, the group's main website, giving agents the ability to intercept further crypto donations as they arrived. That shift matters operationally: agents were no longer reconstructing past flows after the fact but standing inside the pipeline itself. The two infrastructure warrants, signed weeks apart across the summer of 2026, indicate the investigation was still widening when the announcement landed. Federal prosecutors cast the combined actions as a signal that neither online networks nor digital assets can shield Hamas fundraising from law enforcement.

Bitcoin and Tether Across 18 Addresses

While the public announcement stayed silent on which digital assets were involved, accompanying court filings identified Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Wrapped Ethereum, Tether (USDT) and Tron (TRX) across 18 Tether-controlled addresses and three Binance accounts allegedly linked to financing a foreign terrorist organization. The disclosure is notable for the breadth of the mix: five instruments at once, spanning Bitcoin — whose ledger, reorganized under the Segregated Witness upgrade, records every transfer permanently and publicly — as well as Ethereum, dollar-pegged Tether and Tron.

“Hamas relied on cryptocurrency and online platforms to solicit funds from donors around the world,” Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division, said in a statement. “The FBI will continue to use its authorities to intercept illicit funds and prevent terrorist organizations from exploiting digital networks to finance their operations.”

“A message to Hamas: We will stop your fundraising for terror,” U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro said in a statement. “Your networks are not secure, your crypto is vulnerable, and we will not stop until your ability to wage war is defeated.”

The sweep caps a multiyear enforcement arc. Israeli police froze Hamas-linked Binance accounts in 2023, and in a separate 2024 review Binance said it had frozen roughly 14% of the more than 1,500 wallets flagged by Israel. In March 2025, a U.S. warrant produced the seizure of about $201,400 in crypto from addresses that authorities said had received more than $1.5 million since October 2024, a step the department detailed at the time. Taken together, the filings sketch a fundraising pipeline that kept mutating — new addresses, new assets, new hosting — while leaving a forensic trail at every step. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

Traceability Cuts Both Ways

The operative lesson sits in the primary record itself: the DOJ press release describes an investigation that converted blockchain transparency into an investigative asset. Bitcoin's open ledger exposes every hop, a design property privacy protocols such as Mimblewimble were created specifically to avoid, and purpose-built privacy coins like Turtlecoin remain niche tools with thin adoption among sanctioned networks. Once investigators map a single address, clustering techniques tend to unwind the rest of the graph. For ordinary holders, the episode is a custody reminder that runs from verifying addresses to avoiding blind signing on hardware wallets. Expect more seizure-led actions of this shape.