By Mike Reese
Lincoln County Commissioner

In February, a Las Vegas business owner was charged in a $24 million cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme that took money from more than 400 investors. He told them their funds were safe, backed by the FDIC, earning steady returns. Some believed him for years. By the time they realized the truth, their savings were gone — sent overseas through digital channels designed to make the money almost impossible to get back.

That case is not unusual in this state. The FBI’s Las Vegas field office has been warning about “pig butchering” scams for years — long-running frauds that start with a friendly text or social media message and end with retirees losing everything they worked for to operators based abroad. Nationally, Americans reported $9.3 billion in losses to crypto-related crime in 2024, a 66 percent jump from the year before. The victims hit hardest were over 60. Many of them live here.

As a County Commissioner in Nevada, I have seen what these schemes do to families. The victims are not gamblers chasing risky bets. They are hard workers, veterans, retirees, and small business owners. People who trusted what they were told. People whose money was gone before law enforcement even knew it had been stolen.

The reason these crimes are so hard to stop is not that our investigators lack skill or commitment. It is that the cryptocurrency industry has built itself around tools that let money move outside the rules that every traditional bank has to follow. Anti-money laundering laws cover a bank teller who handles a wire transfer, but disappears when the exact same transfer runs through a piece of crypto software that has no formal controls. Crypto platforms that serve American customers can register and operate their headquarters in another country and walk away from the obligations that U.S. banks must obey every day. By the time the money lands in a foreign jurisdiction, getting it back becomes a matter of treaties, and luck.

Right now, the U.S. Senate is moving the Digital Asset Market CLARITY Act toward a floor vote. The idea behind it is sound: cryptocurrency markets have grown faster than the laws meant to govern them, and clear rules are overdue. But the version of the bill that cleared the Senate Banking Committee in May leaves the most important loopholes wide open. It does not give the Treasury the explicit authority it needs to act against the anonymizing tools that scammers and money launderers rely on. It does not close the offshore escape hatch. It does not bring decentralized crypto platforms under the same basic rules as everyone else.

Senator Cortez Masto and Senator Rosen should not vote to move the CLARITY Act forward until those gaps are closed. Nevadans have already lost too much to a system that lets criminals stay one step ahead. Passing legislation that locks those gaps into law would compound the damage, not fix it.

Law enforcement in this state works hard every day to protect Nevadans from financial crime. Congress needs to do its part. The CLARITY Act, as written, fails that test. It can still be fixed — and it must be before it becomes law.