Americans reported $11.4 billion in losses from cryptocurrency scams last year, 22% more than in 2024, highlighting the growing scale of digital asset fraud, an FBI report showed Tuesday.
“Cryptocurrency investment scams are sophisticated, long-term scams using psychological manipulation, the appearance of legitimacy, and exploitation of cryptocurrencies to deceive victims into investing large sums of money,” the report said.
The report also states that most crypto scams are perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia that exploit human trafficking victims as forced labor to run their operations.
Cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis released a report in January revealing that up to $17 billion worth of cryptocurrencies were lost globally to scams and frauds in 2025. Identity theft, cryptocurrency exchange impostors, and AI-generated scams against individuals were gradually overtaking losses from cyber attacks as the top methods used by criminals to steal digital assets, according to the Crypto Crime Report.
The FBI noted in its report that the number of victims had increased significantly. In 2025, there were 181,565 complaints regarding cryptocurrency, an increase of 21%. The average amount of damages per case was $62,604, showing how victims are often drawn into schemes that extract substantial amounts rather than small amounts, the office said.
Losses are also highly concentrated. Nearly 18,600 plaintiffs each lost more than $100,000, suggesting that many victims are losing life-changing sums, including savings and retirement funds.
More broadly, crypto scams are now at the center of a broader rise in online fraud. Americans filed more than 1 million cybercrime complaints in 2025, with losses exceeding $20.8 billion. Fraud and scams account for the vast majority of these losses, reflecting what the FBI describes as a rapidly evolving threat landscape.
