The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center released its 2025 annual report earlier today, revealing that cryptocurrency-related fraud drained more than $11.3 billion from American victims last year — a figure that now accounts for more than half of all reported cybercrime losses nationwide.
The report, covering data gathered from the FBI’s IC3 platform, logged a total of 1,008,597 complaints with $20.877 billion in combined losses — a 26% jump from 2024 .
Within that staggering total, the cryptocurrency descriptor alone generated 181,565 complaints and $11.366 billion in losses, making digital assets the single most loss-heavy category tracked in the report.
For context, cryptocurrency fraud losses sat at roughly $27 million in 2017. By 2025, that number had multiplied more than 400 times .
Crypto investment scams are the top threat
At the center of the crisis is cryptocurrency investment fraud — a breed of long-con scheme the FBI describes as using “psychological manipulation, the appearance of legitimacy, and exploitation of cryptocurrencies to deceive victims into investing large sums of money”.
These scams generated $7.2 billion in reported losses in 2025, making them the single greatest source of financial harm to Americans for the year .
The mechanics follow a recognizable pattern. Criminals initiate contact through text messages, social media platforms, dating apps, or digital advertisements. Victims are drawn into what appear to be exclusive investment groups led by knowledgeable insiders, then directed to send cryptocurrency to fraudulent platforms that display fabricated profits and offer loans to encourage deeper investment.
When victims attempt withdrawals, scammers demand taxes and fees before vanishing with all deposited funds.
The FBI identifies the source of these operations as organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia — particularly in Cambodia, Laos, and Burma — that use victims of human trafficking as forced labor to operate the scam centers .
Crypto as a payment tool for fraud
The report does not limit cryptocurrency’s role to investment scams. Across the board, digital assets were the dominant payment method in fraud, with cryptocurrency used in 72% of investment fraud transactions, 43% of tech support scam transactions, and 40% of government impersonation scheme payments. The data makes clear that scammers across multiple crime categories have standardized on crypto as the preferred method for extracting and moving money.
Investment fraud as a broader crime category reached $8.648 billion in losses, with the cryptocurrency component accounting for the largest share. Tech support scams that involved digital assets produced $1.226 billion in losses on their own.
Seniors bear the heaviest burden
Among all demographic groups, Americans aged 60 and older were hit the hardest. This group filed 44,555 cryptocurrency-related complaints and suffered $4.43 billion in losses, more than any other age bracket . Within the crypto investment fraud subcategory, the 60-and-older group reported $2.76 billion in losses, compared with $1.38 billion for those aged 50 to 59.
Crypto ATM and kiosk scams — a subset where criminals direct victims to physical machines using QR codes — produced 13,460 complaints and $389 million in losses, a 58% loss increase from 2024.
Seniors filed 6,188 of those complaints and absorbed $257.5 million of those losses, or roughly 66% of the total .
Recovery scams, in which fraudsters target prior crypto victims with promises to reclaim lost funds, generated another 10,516 complaints and $1.4 billion in losses . The 60-plus group again led with $540.5 million in recovery scam losses alone.
The Bureau has not been passive. Operation Level Up, launched in January 2024, uses IC3 complaint data to identify and notify victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud while they are still being scammed . In 2025 alone, the operation notified 3,780 victims and saved an estimated $225.8 million — 78% of those notified had no idea they were targets of a scam . In one case, agents stopped a victim from liquidating $750,000 from his 401(k) to send to fraudsters; in another, a woman was prevented from selling her home to fund a $500,000 “investment.”
A separate initiative — the U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Columbia Scam Center Strike Force — combines the DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, State Department, and Treasury’s OFAC to pursue and dismantle Southeast Asian scam compound operations . The Strike Force targets Chinese organized crime affiliates running operations across the region and works to cut off U.S.-based internet infrastructure the compounds exploit.
Since Operation Level Up launched, the FBI reports more than $500 million in total savings across all notified victims — a number the agency views as a floor, not a ceiling, given how many victims never report.
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Micah first discovered Bitcoin in 2018 but remained a skeptic on the sidelines for too long. Since 2021, he has covered crypto and business and now works as a news reporter for Bitcoin Magazine, based in North Carolina.
