The $560,000 in confiscated cryptocurrency is the smaller half of the operation. The FBI also came away with information on thousands of people who tried to give.
The Justice Department seized more than $560,000 in cryptocurrency raised for Hamas and took control of the servers the group used to collect it, prosecutors said on Tuesday.
The money is the least interesting part. According to the department's account, a group chat on an encrypted messaging platform pointed supporters at a fundraising website, which handed each donor an address drawn from a rotating set. That design defeats naive blockchain surveillance: no single address accumulates enough traffic to become an obvious target, and the set can be refreshed faster than any watchlist updates. What it cannot survive is losing the page that publishes the addresses. The FBI's Albuquerque field office, working with human sources, identified and seized the domains and servers behind AlQassam.ps, the main site of Hamas's military wing. Holding the infrastructure, the bureau says, let it intercept donations meant for the Al Qassam Brigades.
Three seizure warrants were unsealed, covering operations on 25 March 2025, 25 June 2025 and 10 October 2025. Two further affidavits, dated 29 July and 18 August this year, were published alongside them. The gap between the last seizure and the announcement is roughly eleven months, which is the sort of delay that usually means an operation was still live.
None of this looks like a chain-analysis case. The court documents credit multiple human sources with identifying and tracing the funds; the cryptographic trail was the thing being followed, not the thing that produced the lead. Prosecutors have leaned on blockchain forensics so heavily in recent years that it is easy to forget the technique has a ceiling. Rotating addresses raise that ceiling. Owning the web server that hands them out removes it.
The second half of the operation is the part that will occupy compliance desks. Using the same sources and methods, the FBI says it obtained information on thousands of individuals who contacted Hamas online in an attempt to donate, by cryptocurrency and by conventional means, and that the information "will be used in the FBI's future counterterrorism efforts." No charges against any of those people have been announced. Most of them are presumably outside US jurisdiction. They are now in a file.
Special Agent in Charge Justin A. Garris of the Albuquerque field office was candid about the objective. "Reducing the capabilities of foreign terrorist organization's ability to receive donations and creating distrust in communications to their donors was the primary focus of this latest operation," he said. Distrust, not recovery. Half a million dollars is not a meaningful dent in the finances of a group that has run cross-border smuggling and taxation operations for two decades. Convincing prospective donors that the address they are about to send to is being watched by the FBI is worth considerably more than the funds themselves, and it costs nothing to maintain.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg framed it as attrition, promising to keep "infiltrating its online networks, confiscating its cryptocurrency, and shutting down its websites." US Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro was less measured: "Your networks are not secure, your crypto is vulnerable, and we will not stop until your ability to wage war is defeated." The rhetoric is aimed at donors as much as at Hamas, which is the point.
For the industry the case sits alongside a widening set of enforcement tools that do not require a court to move first. The Treasury spent the summer expanding designations until any firm serving Iran's crypto sector could be sanctioned, a standard broad enough to catch service providers who never knowingly touched a sanctioned counterparty. Tether froze $42.4 million belonging to two Thai businessmen who say no warrant was ever produced. Binance handed Russian authorities the KYC file that put a Ukraine donor in prison. The mechanisms differ; the direction does not. Identity attaches to crypto transactions at more points every year, and increasingly the attachment happens at the endpoint rather than on the chain.
There is a defensible version of the objection here, and it is not about Hamas. A designated foreign terrorist organisation has no claim to due process over its donation server, and the October 7th Task Force is named in the filing for obvious reasons. The question is what precedent the technique sets. Seizing a website and continuing to operate it as a collection point turns law enforcement into the counterparty, and everyone who transacts with it becomes a subject of investigation by the act of trying. Applied to terrorism finance that is proportionate. Applied more loosely it is a general-purpose method for building lists of people who intended to do something.
The case is being prosecuted by Assistant US Attorney Tejpal Chawla and Trial Attorney Jacques Singer-Emery, with the FBI's counterterrorism and cyber divisions and its New York field office supporting Albuquerque. The bureau holds AlQassam.ps and the servers behind it.
Protocols and fundraising operations alike spend their security budgets on contracts and cryptography and almost nothing on the web server that tells people where to send the money. Hamas rotated its addresses for months. It left the domain exactly where it was.
