Crypto scams are becoming more prevalent, and investors should be aware of this trend so that they can protect their finances. Victims frequently receive a link to a crypto trading platform that looks legitimate, shows fabricated gains, and eventually takes every dollar the target puts in. By the time the victim tries to withdraw funds, the money has already gone through a chain of wallets built to vanish.
These schemes now carry a price tag that dwarfs every other form of cybercrime on record. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, released in early 2026, puts total reported cryptocurrency fraud losses at $11.4 billion in 2025. That figure, drawn from complaints filed with the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), exceeds business email compromise, ransomware, and every other digital fraud category the FBI tracks.
The Treasury Department has flagged the problem from a different angle, and estimates pegged American losses to Southeast Asia-based scam operations alone at more than $10 billion in 2024. Because that figure covers only one regional slice of crypto fraud while the FBI’s number spans all complaint categories, the two are not directly comparable. Both figures, however, point to the same conclusion: losses are massive and still climbing.
Where the money goes and who runs the operations
The dominant scheme behind the numbers is known in law enforcement circles as “pig butchering,” a term that refers to the way scammers fatten a target’s trust before draining their accounts. Operators spend weeks or months cultivating relationships with victims through messaging apps, social media, or dating platforms. The fraudulent investment sites they eventually introduce to victims are slick with real-time dashboards showing fictional portfolio growth. Victims often invest more money after seeing those fake returns, sometimes liquidating retirement accounts or borrowing against their homes to come up with additional funds.
Many of these operations run out of fortified compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and other parts of Southeast Asia. The workers inside these compounds are frequently trafficking victims themselves who were lured by fake job postings and then held under guard, forced to run fraud scripts targeting Americans and other Westerners. In October 2025, a federal grand jury indicted the chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Group for operating forced-labor scam compounds engaged in cryptocurrency fraud. The case tied organized crime, human trafficking, and billions in stolen savings into a single indictment.
Federal response: seizures, sanctions, and early warnings
The U.S. has ramped up its enforcement against these crimes, though the scale of recoveries remains small relative to total losses. The Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force, announced in January 2025, had at that point seized and forfeited roughly $401.7 million in pig-butchering proceeds, with forfeiture proceedings filed for an additional $80 million. Those are real, court-documented recoveries, but they account for only a fraction of the $11.4 billion in reported losses for 2025.
Additionally, the Treasury Department has applied financial pressure through sanctions to try to reduce these scams. The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) has targeted networks in Southeast Asia tied to scam operations and separately sanctioned a Burma-based armed group and associated companies linked to organized crime schemes aimed at Americans.
On the prevention side, the FBI runs “Operation Level Up”, which is a program designed to identify and directly contact victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud while the scam is still in progress. The goal of this operation is straightforward: reach people before they send more money. The operation’s effectiveness is unclear, however, and as of late April 2026, the FBI has not published data on how many people the program has contacted or how many avoided further losses after receiving a warning.
What the numbers do not capture
The $11.4 billion almost certainly understates the magnitude of losses as a result of these scams. IC3 data reflects only losses that victims voluntarily report through the bureau’s online portal. This figure excludes those who never file, those who do not know IC3 exists, and those who are too embarrassed to report. Further, a significant number of victims gets pulled into secondary scams before they have a chance to report the first scam.
The FBI has warned specifically about fraudsters impersonating IC3 employees and contacting people who already lost money, promising to recover stolen funds for an upfront fee. A related scheme involves criminals who pose as legitimate cryptocurrency exchanges, convincing victims to transfer remaining assets under the guise of account security. In other words, the same population that drives the $11.4 billion figure is being targeted again, and those repeat losses may never show up in the data.
Other gaps limit what the public can learn. The FBI has not released a geographic breakdown of losses by state or metro area, leaving local regulators and law enforcement without a clear picture of their own exposure. No federal agency has published recovery-rate data showing what share of stolen crypto eventually makes it back to victims. Additionally, international cooperation remains opaque: U.S. indictments and sanctions are unilateral tools, and public records show little evidence of coordinated enforcement with Cambodian, Burmese, or other Southeast Asian governments against the compounds where many of these scams originate.
The AI factor no one can measure yet
The FBI’s 2025 report flags artificial intelligence (AI) as a growing enabler of fraud, but no federal dataset breaks out AI-assisted scams as a separate category. The concern is concrete: voice-cloning tools can now mimic a family member’s voice from a few seconds of audio, deepfake videos can make a scammer look like a trusted contact on a live call, and automated chat scripts allow a small team of scammers to run personalized conversations with hundreds of targets simultaneously. Each of these capabilities lowers the cost of running a scam and raises the number of people a single operation can reach. Without a way to measure that shift, enforcement agencies risk calibrating their response to yesterday’s threat while the next wave of losses is already underway.
What to do if you are targeted
Anyone who suspects they have been drawn into a crypto investment scam should file a complaint with IC3 directly and verify that any communication claiming to come from the FBI matches the bureau’s published contact channels. The FBI has stated clearly that its agents will never ask for payments, gift cards, or cryptocurrency transfers to recover stolen funds. Any such request is itself a scam.
Federal agencies have shown that they can seize hundreds of millions in stolen assets and sanction the networks that move the money, but the gap between $401.7 million recovered and $11.4 billion reported lost speaks for itself. Until enforcement, international cooperation, and public awareness catch up to the speed at which these operations scale, the numbers are likely to keep climbing.
