Americans Lost Over $11 Billion to Crypto Scams in 2025. The FBI’s IC3 Report Shows How.

The Numbers: A Record in Almost Every Category

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 1,008,597 total complaints in 2025, the first year in the IC3’s 25-year history that complaints exceeded one million. This compares to 859,532 complaints in 2024 — a 17% year-over-year increase. Reported losses totaled approximately $20.8 billion, the highest ever recorded by the center.

Cyber-enabled fraud — meaning crimes where technology was a primary vehicle rather than a secondary tool — accounted for 85% of all reported losses and 45% of all complaints. The IC3 receives approximately 3,000 complaints per day. The center notes, as it does in every annual report, that reported figures represent a significant undercount: many victims do not report, and many do not realize they have been victimized until after the money is gone.

Americans who filed complaints involving cryptocurrency reported 181,565 complaints totaling more than $11 billion — the highest losses of any category tracked in the report. Within that figure, crypto investment fraud alone accounted for $7.2 billion, making it the single largest source of financial loss from fraud reported to the FBI in 2025.

Table 1 — FBI IC3 2025 Report: Key Loss Categories

Pig Butchering: The Dominant Scam Architecture

The FBI categorizes cryptocurrency investment fraud as “confidence-enabled cryptocurrency investment fraud”, though the industry term “pig butchering” — derived from the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan, referring to the practice of fattening a pig before slaughter — has become widely used. The term reflects the deliberate trust-building phase that precedes the financial extraction.

The mechanics are consistent: a scammer contacts a target through social media, a dating app, a messaging platform, or an unsolicited text message. They establish a friendship or romantic relationship over days or weeks, building credibility and emotional investment. At some point, the conversation turns to a highly profitable investment opportunity in cryptocurrency. The victim is directed to a platform — often a sophisticated-looking website or app — where they can watch their investment grow in real time.

The platform shows fabricated returns. The victim is encouraged to invest more. When they eventually attempt to withdraw, there are always obstacles: taxes to pay, fees to unlock funds, verification requirements. The withdrawal never completes. The scammer, and the money, disappear.

These operations are industrialized and geographically concentrated. The FBI and law enforcement partners have traced the bulk of pig butchering operations to scam compounds in Southeast Asia — particularly in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos — as well as the Middle East, Africa, and South America. These are not individual criminals working alone; they are organized crime syndicates that recruit, traffic, and sometimes enslave workers to staff call-center style operations around the clock. Some workers in these compounds are themselves trafficking victims, lured by false job offers.

Investment fraud now accounts for 49% of all cyber-related complaint losses tracked by the IC3 — close to half of the entire fraud ecosystem by dollar value. The trajectory is steep: crypto investment fraud losses were $3.9 billion in 2023 and $5.7 billion in 2024 before reaching $7.2 billion in 2025. That represents an 84% increase in two years.

Elder Fraud: $7.7 Billion Taken From Americans Over 60

The IC3 has maintained a dedicated elder fraud section in its annual report for several years, and the 2025 figures represent a significant escalation. Americans aged 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints and were linked to approximately $7.7 billion in reported losses — a 37% increase from the $5.6 billion reported in 2024.

Older Americans are disproportionately targeted for structural reasons. They typically hold more accumulated wealth than younger cohorts, are more likely to hold retirement savings in accessible accounts, may be less familiar with digital scam tactics, and are more likely to be socially isolated — which makes the relationship-building phase of pig butchering more effective.

The consequences are frequently catastrophic in ways that go beyond dollar figures. The FBI’s Operation Level Up, which proactively contacts victims while scams are still in progress, has documented cases where victims were in the process of liquidating their 401Ks, selling their homes, or taking out large loans before being contacted by agents. The FBI’s Operation Level Up page documents that 80 victims were referred to FBI victim specialists for suicide intervention — a figure that gives some dimension to the psychological devastation these crimes cause. One documented victim was surviving on disability pay and had already paid scammers $1,200, planning to cut into his food budget to send more.

Operation Level Up: Proactive Intervention at Scale

Operation Level Up, launched in January 2024 as a joint initiative between the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, represents a structural shift in how law enforcement approaches cryptocurrency investment fraud. Rather than waiting for victims to file reports after the fact, the operation uses sophisticated analytical techniques to identify victims who are currently being defrauded and contacts them directly.

The program works by aggregating IC3 complaints, analyzing patterns in cryptocurrency wallet flows, and tracing money moving into criminals’ wallets in real time. When agents identify a victim mid-scam, they reach out by phone and email. The intervention often happens before the victim has lost the majority of what scammers were attempting to extract.

By the time the 2025 IC3 report was released in April 2026, Operation Level Up had contacted 8,103 victims. Of those, 77% were unaware they were being scammed at the time of contact. Estimated savings to victims through the program: $511.5 million.

The 77% figure is worth pausing on. More than three quarters of the people Operation Level Up contacted actively believed they were participating in a legitimate investment. Many were watching fabricated profits grow on their screens. The sophistication of the platforms, the patience of the scammers, and the emotional trust built over weeks or months means that the FBI’s intervention is often the first signal a victim receives that anything is wrong.

AI Deepfakes and the New Scam Toolkit

The 2025 IC3 report is the first in its 25-year history to include a dedicated section on artificial intelligence-enabled crime. The numbers in this section are almost certainly undercounted: 22,364 AI-related complaints totaling $893 million — but the FBI explicitly acknowledges that many victims have no idea AI tools were used against them.

Scammers are deploying AI across multiple stages of their operations. Voice cloning allows fraudsters to replicate the voice of a family member, financial advisor, or public figure with only a small audio sample. Video deepfakes are used to impersonate celebrities — Elon Musk is cited as among the most commonly impersonated public figures — in fake investment pitches that appear to show the real person endorsing a platform. AI-generated documents, including fake regulatory filings, tax records, and identity verification materials, are used to add layers of legitimacy to scam platforms.

AI also enables scam operations to scale in ways that were not previously possible. A single operator can now manage multiple simultaneous relationships using AI tools to draft messages, maintain consistent personas across platforms, and translate communications in real time. The industrialization of fraud that pig butchering compounds represented is accelerating further with AI augmentation.

Bitcoin ATM Fraud: $333 Million and a ‘Clear and Constant Rise’

Bitcoin ATM fraud — where victims are directed to deposit cash into cryptocurrency kiosks that then transfer funds to scammer-controlled wallets — generated more than $333 million in losses in 2025 across over 12,000 complaints. This figure represents a sharp increase from $250 million in 2024 and $114 million in 2023. The FBI described the trend as a “clear and constant rise” that is “not slowing down.”

There are now more than 45,000 Bitcoin ATMs across the United States, located in gas stations, convenience stores, grocery stores, and pharmacies. The machines are designed for speed: a transaction takes minutes, and once funds leave the kiosk, recovery is extremely difficult. AARP’s director of fraud victim support has noted that “requesting crypto is now the No. 1 preferred method of criminals” for extracting money from victims once a social engineering campaign has succeeded.

Older Americans are particularly targeted by Bitcoin ATM fraud. The 2024 IC3 report found that adults 60 and older accounted for over 85% of reported fraud losses involving crypto kiosks. Victims are typically told — by someone impersonating a government agency, law enforcement, or a bank — that they owe money and must pay immediately via Bitcoin ATM to avoid arrest or account seizure. The scenario creates a combination of fear and urgency that bypasses critical thinking.

The Undercount Problem: $20 Billion Is Not the Real Number

Every figure in the IC3 report represents a floor, not a ceiling. The FBI states explicitly that reported losses are a fraction of actual losses, for several compounding reasons.

First, many victims do not report. Shame, embarrassment, the belief that nothing can be done, and the traumatic nature of the crimes all suppress reporting rates. The FTC, which tracks a parallel dataset, estimated in its own 2025 report that when underreporting is taken into account, the actual cost of fraud to consumers for 2024 alone could be as high as $195.9 billion. The FBI’s IC3 figure for 2025 — $20.8 billion — likely represents somewhere between 10% and 20% of actual losses when underreporting is factored in.

Second, victims who do report often underreport. Particularly in investment fraud cases where losses occurred over months, victims may not accurately account for every transfer. The emotional difficulty of cataloguing the full extent of a loss that involved relationship betrayal compounds the underreporting of dollar amounts.

Third, the IC3 only captures reports from American victims. Pig butchering and AI-enabled fraud are global phenomena. The operations targeting American victims are the same operations targeting people in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. The $20.8 billion figure is exclusively the American portion of a global fraud ecosystem whose total scale runs into hundreds of billions annually.