Americans reported $11.4 billion in losses linked to cryptocurrency fraud last year, 22% more than in 2024, highlighting the growing scale of digital asset fraud, an FBI report revealed Tuesday.
“Cryptocurrency investment scams are sophisticated long-term scams that use psychological manipulation, apparent legitimacy and exploitation of cryptocurrencies to deceive victims into investing large sums of money,” the report said.
The report also said that most crypto scams are perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia that exploit victims of human trafficking as forced labor to run the operations.
Crypto analytics firm Chainalysis released a report in January revealing that as much as $17 billion in crypto was lost worldwide to scams and fraud by 2025. Impersonation, crypto exchange scammers and AI-generated scams against individuals gradually surpassed losses to cyber attacks as the leading methods used to report digital criminals, according to Crime.
The FBI noted in its report that the number of victims increased significantly. In 2025, there were 181,565 complaints involving cryptocurrency, an increase of 21%. The average damage per case was $62,604, highlighting how victims are often drawn into schemes that extract significant amounts rather than small amounts, the agency said.
The losses are also highly concentrated. Nearly 18,600 complainants each lost more than $100,000, suggesting many victims are losing life-changing amounts, including savings and retirement funds.
More broadly, crypto scams are now at the center of a major increase in online fraud. Americans filed more than 1 million cybercrime complaints by 2025, with losses exceeding $20.8 billion. Fraud and fraud made up the overwhelming majority of those losses, reflecting what the FBI describes as a rapidly evolving threat landscape.
