DDC COURTHOUSE, July 18 – In December 2025,
Inner City Press wrote to Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui
about the "sz" — seizure warrant — docket piling up sealed
in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia:
ships, cryptocurrency, domain names, a Telegram channel,
taken by the federal government in secret and, in most
cases, kept that way indefinitely.
Judge Faruqui, who authorized the
seizure of a Russian oligarch's superyacht, referred the
question to Lisa Klem, Special Assistant to Chief Judge
James E. Boasberg. Two emails to Klem went unanswered. A
follow-up call yielded "I'll look into it." Since then:
nothing.
So Inner City Press went case by
case. As of this month, the 2026 "sz" docket runs at least
through 26-sz-44. Checked one number at a time on PACER,
case after case returns the identical result: "SEALED v.
SEALED; Case is not available to the public" (and on
CourtListener no results at all, because a fully sealed
case never even generates the docket shell that RECAP's
automated tools would need to index it.)
A sealed case built this way
is not merely hard to find. It is invisible to every
public records tool that exists, unless the court itself
chooses otherwise. It has chosen, after a fashion. Buried
under "Opinions/Court Documents" on the court's website
sits a page titled "Unsealed Orders, Opinions, Documents
and Docket Reports," with a "Seizure Warrants" tab by
year.
Of the 44 cases filed in 2026 that Inner
City Press has now confirmed, exactly six appear there.
Inner City Press opened every document link on that page.
Four of the six go nowhere at all — stub pages captioned
"Unsealed as Specified" or "Case Unsealed as Specified"
that repeat only what the table already shows: no order,
no affidavit, no reasoning. A fifth points to a PDF for
the seizure of the M/T Bella 1 that is, on inspection,
entirely unreadable — an empty scanned file with no
extractable text.
The sixth and last case still standing,
26-sz-31, and a seventh pulled from the 2025 archive,
26-sz-32, were also scanned images with no searchable text
— Google's own automatic transcription tools succeeded on
two of the four documents we tried, and failed, even on a
second attempt, on the other two.
Where it worked, what it revealed was worth
the trouble. Case 26-sz-31 seeks forfeiture of 503 domain
names used in what the FBI calls "pig butchering" —
cyber-enabled and cryptocurrency investment fraud, so
named for how scammers fatten a victim's trust before the
slaughter. The affidavit, sworn before Magistrate Judge
Matthew J. Sharbaugh, describes the FBI's "Operation Level
Up" initiative: as of March 2026, agents have notified
8,935 Americans that they were being scammed, 77 percent
of whom had no idea. Estimated savings from those
interventions: $562,726,245. Ninety-three of those victims
were referred to an FBI victim specialist for suicide
intervention "due to the devastating nature of these
scams."
One elderly victim, living on disability,
had already sent scammers $1,200 and was preparing to cut
into his food money to send more. Nationally, the FBI's
Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded losses from these
schemes rising from $5.8 billion in 2024 to $7.2 billion
in 2025 — a 24 percent jump in one year.
The same affidavit cites, by number, five
other sealed cases nobody outside the government would
otherwise know exist: 24-sz-50, 25-sz-31, 25-sz-32,
25-sz-51, and a related matter in Maryland. The 44 cases
Inner City Press counted are very likely a floor, not a
ceiling. Case 26-sz-32 seeks forfeiture of a single
Telegram channel, "POGO JOB HIRING 2023!!!!," 6,564
members, used to recruit workers with false promises of
high-paying jobs abroad. What awaited them, per a
cooperating trafficking victim's sworn account, was a
compound in Cambodia's Anlong Veng district: passports
confiscated, movement restricted, twelve-hour shifts,
threats and physical abuse for those who didn't comply.
The affidavit cites the UN's own estimate
that criminal syndicates hold at least 220,000 people from
more than 40 countries captive at scam compounds across
Cambodia and Myanmar, generating an estimated $12.5
billion a year — nearly half Cambodia's formal GDP. The
trafficked workers were then forced to run an elaborate
four-phase script against Americans: a fake bank fraud
alert, a fake transfer to the "NYPD" or "FBI," a fake
Homeland Security money-laundering investigation, and
finally a fake appearance before the Supreme Court of New
York.
Seven named U.S. victims, from
California to Connecticut, lost sums ranging from $2,500
to $595,000 in a single wire; laundered proceeds were
traced to cryptocurrency platforms the UK and the U.S.
Treasury have separately designated as illicit scam
infrastructure.
This is what the six-entry webpage
discloses nothing about. It is also, unmentioned anywhere
on that page, what Judge Faruqui's own words say should
never have stayed hidden this long. In a real signed order
from the 2025 archive, the one document on either year's
page that is neither a stub nor an unreadable scan, Judge
Faruqui writes, quoting his own prior opinion:
"Transparency requires courts to timely unseal — with
redactions if needed — every judicial decision, including
[seizure] warrants." In re Search of One Device & Two
Individuals under Rule 41, 784 F. Supp. 3d 234, 255
(D.D.C. 2025).
The judge who wrote that sentence is the
judge who in April told Inner City Press the Instagram
video used in a VOSR case might be docketed (it wasn't)
and who referred the seizures question to the Special
Assistant now listed as the point of contact for a second,
even more obscure federal tribunal housed on the same
court's website: the Alien Terrorist Removal Court,
created by Congress in 1996 and, per its own new site,
hearing its first case in thirty years this year — also
outside PACER, also without the respondent's identity
disclosed, despite a statute that flatly requires the
removal hearing to "be open to the public."
Inner City Press has written directly to
that court's presiding judge and continues to press.
Forty-four sealed cases. A webpage that
discloses six. Only two documents searchable in any
systematic way, describing $560 million in prevented fraud
losses, ninety-three suicide-intervention referrals, and
hundreds of trafficking victims held captive across
Southeast Asia. No way to know, from anything the court
publishes, that any of it existed at all — until someone
counts, one case number at a time, and pays for the PDFs
the government would rather keep behind a "Sealed v.
Sealed" wall.
Inner City Press will be down in DDC in
August. This court is too important not to.
