Cryptocurrency Scams: Americans Lost Billions to Fraud

An 85-year-old woman in Texas walks into a Bitcoin Depot kiosk. She feeds $40,000 in cash through the scanner. One hundred-dollar bill at a time. On her phone, a man claiming to be from the IRS keeps telling her this is the only way to protect her retirement savings. By the time her grandson finds the receipts, the money is already on-chain. Gone.

She is one of 13,460 Americans who filed a crypto kiosk fraud complaint with the FBI in 2025. Together they reported $389 million in losses. A 58% jump from the year before. And that's just the ATM slice of the total.

Zoom out. Chainalysis, in its 2026 Crypto Crime Report, clocked on-chain scam inflows at roughly $17 billion for the year. Up from at least $9.9 billion in 2024. Meanwhile FBI IC3 put reported US cryptocurrency fraud at $11.366 billion for 2025 alone. 181,565 complaints. Average: $62,604 per victim. Read those numbers twice. These are not exchange hacks. These are scams. People groomed, phoned, phished, or conned into sending money they will never see again.

This article is a tour of what the 2026 crypto fraud landscape actually looks like. Where the money went. Which scams grew. And what victims, regulators, and exchanges are doing to claw any of it back.

How much money was lost to crypto scams in 2025?

More than ever. That's the short answer. The longer one depends on who is counting.

Chainalysis, in its 2026 Crypto Crime Report, tallied roughly $17 billion in on-chain scam inflows for 2025. At least $14 billion of that was confirmed on-chain. Meanwhile the FBI IC3, in its April 2026 release, pegged US-only cryptocurrency fraud at $11.366 billion. That's up 22% from $9.3 billion in 2024. Of that US total, $7.228 billion came from what the FBI categorizes as cryptocurrency investment scams specifically. The two numbers don't fully overlap. One tracks global on-chain flows. The other tracks reported US victim complaints. You have to read both.

Dig into IC3 and the subset gets more grim. 181,565 separate crypto complaints were filed in 2025. More than 18,589 of those victims lost over $100,000 each to a single crypto scheme. That's not a rounding error on top of smaller losses. That's a distinct population of people who got wiped out individually.

Three numbers from the Chainalysis data tell you where the curve is headed:

• Average scam payment jumped 253% YoY, from $782 in 2024 to $2,764 in 2025.
• Impersonation scams grew 1,400% YoY, with severity per case up another 600%.
• AI-enabled scams generated 4.5x more revenue than non-AI ones ($3.2M per operation vs. $719K).

Read those three lines together and the story writes itself. Scams are fewer in count. They are much, much bigger per victim. And the machinery behind them got industrialized.

Breakdown of crypto fraud types by dollar losses

Not all scams are equal. Some drain a retirement account in two months of slow grooming; some wipe a wallet in three seconds of approval phishing. Here is how the major categories stack up based on Chainalysis, FBI IC3, and NCA data from 2024-2026.

Pig butchering remains the dominant dollar-value category. The Chen Zhi / Prince Group case in Cambodia, forfeited by the US DOJ in October 2025 for 127,000 BTC worth approximately $15 billion (the largest crypto forfeiture in history) revealed compound operations earning more than $30 million per day at peak. Chainalysis notes that a single Chinese-language money-laundering network processed $16.1 billion in illicit crypto in 2025 alone, about $44 million per day across more than 1,799 wallets.

Pig butchering: the fastest-growing crypto scam

Pig butchering is slow. It isn't a phishing link. It's weeks, sometimes months, of ordinary-looking conversation.

Typical setup: a scammer opens a cold message on WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, or a dating app. They build rapport. They share fake photos of a comfortable life, casually mention a trading mentor, or name-drop a "quant platform" their uncle supposedly told them about. Eventually they offer to help the target make their first crypto investment. Small deposits work. Withdrawals work. Trust builds. Then the target puts in real money. Retirement savings. Home equity. Borrowed funds. At the end, the platform shows massive paper gains that mysteriously cannot be withdrawn without paying "tax" or "unlock fees". Those fees just become more of the loss.

The scale on the other side of the keyboard is staggering. UN OHCHR experts warned in May 2025 that at least 300,000 people from 66 countries are trapped in Southeast Asian scam compounds. 75% of them are in the Mekong region. Amnesty International's June 2025 investigation identified 53 active compounds across 13 Cambodian districts. Documented cases include torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention. When the DOJ unsealed the Chen Zhi / Prince Group indictment in October 2025, court filings described 10+ forced-labor compounds running 76,000 social-media grooming accounts off roughly 1,250 mobile phones.

Who gets targeted? Mostly people 30-60 years old, professionally employed, and with savings worth the scammers' time. OFAC, in a November 2025 estimate, said Americans alone lost roughly $10 billion to Southeast Asian pig-butchering schemes in 2024. A 66% YoY jump. Across the Atlantic, the UK closed the Yadi Zhang case with the recovery of roughly 61,000 Bitcoin (~£5 billion). One of the largest crypto seizures in British history.

Bitcoin ATM scams and the $389M kiosk crisis

Bitcoin ATMs, often called crypto kiosks, work like irreversible gift cards. Once the cash inside becomes crypto, there is no chargeback. There is no bank to call. There is no reversing the transaction. That irreversibility is exactly what makes them so attractive to scammers, and why this whole category exploded in 2024-2025.

The playbook is nearly identical every time. The victim gets a phone call. The caller says they are from a bank, or the IRS, or the Social Security Administration, or local police, or sometimes Microsoft support. They manufacture urgency: your account has been hacked, a warrant has been issued in your name, your identity is compromised, you need to act in the next hour. Tell no one. Don't hang up. Withdraw cash from your bank. Now drive to this specific crypto kiosk. Now scan this QR code. When the victim scans, the cash-to-crypto deposit goes straight into a scammer wallet. Some callers stay on the phone through the whole drive.

Here's what that playbook looks like in 2025 numbers. Americans over 60 accounted for $257.4 million of the $389 million in ATM-scam losses, per FBI IC3. AARP's analysis of the same FBI data puts seniors at more than 66% of reported crypto kiosk fraud losses. Bitcoin Depot, the biggest US operator with more than 25,000 kiosks across the country, paid $1.9 million to settle with the state of Maine for defrauded residents. Seventeen US states have now passed kiosk-specific legislation: daily transaction limits, on-screen fraud warnings, refund windows in some cases.

Outside the US, the pattern repeats. Australian Federal Police reported roughly AUD 3 million lost to crypto ATM scams in one 12-month period, again mostly victims over 60. The 60+ cohort in the US lost $4.4 billion across all crypto-fraud categories in 2025, according to IC3. Roughly 40% of the country's total crypto-fraud losses. One demographic. Everyone else combined is less.

AI deepfake scams and approval phishing

AI has changed both the volume and the quality of crypto fraud. The same models that summarize our inbox now voice-clone a CFO to authorize a $25 million wire, or generate synthetic video of a celebrity endorsing a fake investment platform.

Chainalysis's 2026 report on AI-enabled fraud reads bluntly. Operations using AI generate an average of $3.2 million in revenue each. Non-AI operations bring in $719,000. Median daily revenue: $4,838 with AI, $518 without. AI-driven operations also move faster — 35.1 transfers per day on average, nearly 10x the non-AI rate. Phishing kits engineered with AI-generated content hit what Chainalysis describes as "688x more effective" outcomes measured in dollars per successful attack. That last stat is the one that changed the business model.

Approval phishing is the second AI-adjacent pattern. It dominated 2024 and then collapsed in 2025. Check Point Research tracked total wallet-drainer losses falling 83% year over year, from $494 million in 2024 to $83.85 million in 2025. Phishing infrastructure fractured. Law-enforcement action killed major kits. Inferno Drainer technically reactivated in August 2025, using EIP-7702 account-abstraction exploits to drain $2.54 million in a single month, but the scale never came back.

How approval phishing actually works: the scammer tricks you into signing a transaction that grants their wallet permission to spend your tokens. You see a polished "claim your airdrop" or "connect wallet" page. You sign. Nothing visible happens. Then, over the next minutes or days, a drainer contract moves your assets out while you go about your day.

Operation Atlantic, the National Crime Agency-led international takedown announced in April 2026, specifically targeted approval-phishing operations. The operation froze $12 million in funds across multiple exchanges, identified more than 20,000 victims, and documented $45 million in suspected cryptocurrency fraud losses globally. "This intensive action has led to the safeguarding of thousands of victims in the UK and overseas, stopped criminals in their tracks," NCA Deputy Director of Investigations Miles Bonfield said in the announcement.

Operation Atlantic: international crypto scams takedown

Operation Atlantic is a useful case study because it shows what modern anti-scam work actually looks like. Not a perp-walk arrest with a press photo. A quiet, multi-country, cross-exchange freeze on a laundering network.

The UK's National Crime Agency ran point, working with US and Canadian law enforcement. Investigators identified wallets tied to approval-phishing campaigns. They followed the money as it moved through mixers and into deposit addresses at centralized exchanges. Then they coordinated with those exchanges to freeze $12 million before the criminals could withdraw it. The campaign had targeted more than 20,000 individual victims across multiple countries.

One UK victim in the Operation Atlantic file lost more than £52,000 to a single approval-phishing chain. According to the NCA, that loss is representative, not extreme. Modern wallet-drainer operations now run on mid-five-figure average losses per victim. Not pocket change.

Three things about this operation are worth flagging. One: speed. The freeze moved before criminals could launder the funds out. Two: cooperation. Three national agencies, multiple exchanges, all working from shared wallet intelligence. Three: messaging. The NCA publicly named the operation and its scope. That both reassures victims and signals to scammers that approval phishing is now a priority target.

Biggest crypto scams of 2024-2026 by dollar loss

A small number of mega-cases dominate the totals every year. Here are some of the largest crypto scam and fraud events that closed or became public between 2024 and early 2026.

Between Bybit ($1.5B theft), the Prince Group forfeiture ($15B), and the Yadi Zhang recovery (~£5B), a single 12-month window accounts for more than $20 billion in crypto moved by either theft or seizure. Recovery rates vary enormously. Chainalysis reports assisting US law enforcement with approximately $34 billion in cumulative crypto seizures through 2025. Small wallet thefts see 60-80% recovery when reported within 90 days; large individual hacks often recover under 1% absent a major DOJ action. For pig-butchering victims, the odds of clawing money back are usually low; for industrialized approval-phishing, exchange-level freezes can meaningfully reduce losses, as Operation Atlantic shows.

FBI IC3 data on crypto scams and losses in 2025

If there's one public dashboard worth watching for US-based crypto fraud, it's the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Every year IC3 aggregates victim complaints and publishes the Internet Crime Report. The 2025 edition landed in April 2026 and the numbers are bad.

Here are the US-only highlights:

• $11.366 billion total in cryptocurrency-related fraud reported by US victims. Up 22% from 2024's $9.3 billion.
• $7.228 billion of that tied specifically to cryptocurrency investment scams — fake trading platforms, mostly.
• $389 million lost to Bitcoin ATM / crypto kiosk scams, spread across 13,460 complaints. That's +58% year over year.
• 181,565 crypto-related complaints, with an average reported loss of $62,604.
• 18,589 US victims who reported losses of more than $100,000 each to a single crypto scheme.
• Americans 60 and older filed 44,555 crypto complaints and lost $4.4 billion. Nearly 40% of the US total.

Across every category combined, US internet-crime losses hit $20.9 billion in 2025. Crypto alone drove more than half of that. More than every other scam type put together.

One caveat IC3 itself acknowledges. These are reported losses. Plenty of victims never file a complaint, either because they don't know IC3 exists, because they're embarrassed, or because they assume the case is unrecoverable. Researchers who study underreporting tend to assume the true figure is two to three times what IC3 publishes.

Who falls for crypto scams? Victim demographics

The stereotype is a technologically lost retiree. The reality is broader, and in some ways scarier.

Seniors dominate ATM and impersonation fraud. Americans over 60 make up more than 66% of reported Bitcoin ATM scam losses. The 60+ cohort lost $4.4 billion to crypto fraud in 2025 per FBI IC3, and the FTC's older-adults report tracked a jump in senior losses from $2.4 billion in 2024 to $7.7 billion in 2025 once underreporting gets factored in. Why this cohort? Accumulated savings. Trust in authority figures (the phone "FBI agent" trick still works). Lower baseline familiarity with how crypto actually works.

Mid-career professionals dominate pig butchering in dollar terms. Average pig-butchering loss per victim runs into the high six figures, sometimes seven. The profile skews 35-55, professionally employed, and sitting on the kind of savings that make weeks of grooming worth a scammer's time. This group is not unsophisticated. They write code. They negotiate mergers. They just don't expect a three-month WhatsApp relationship to end with their retirement gone.

Younger retail speculators dominate rug-pull and memecoin losses. Smaller dollar amounts per victim, way more victims per incident. The emotional driver is different here: thrill, not trust. FOMO, not intimacy.

Even the scam-aware get hit. Approval phishing and clipboard-hijacking wallet malware catch experienced crypto users all the time. A phishing page can be pixel-identical to a real dApp. Knowing how self-custody works doesn't save you from a drainer contract that mimics a protocol you already use.

Red flags: how to spot crypto scams early

Every big scam category shares a small number of tells. If you hold crypto, or know someone who does, learning these is not optional anymore. The attack surface keeps getting wider.

• Urgency and secrecy. Anyone telling you to act right now, to stay on the phone, or to keep this from your family is running a scam. Real banks don't work that way. Real IRS agents don't work that way. Police don't work that way.
• Returns that sound too good. Guaranteed daily yields. Doubled deposits by morning. "Insider" memecoin allocations with a two-hour window. All of these are sales funnels for pig-butchering and rug pulls alike.
• A platform that only works one direction. Can you deposit easily but can't withdraw? That's not a server glitch. That's the exit.
• Wallet permissions you don't understand. If a dApp asks you to sign a transaction granting unlimited token approvals, cancel it. Better yet, use a burner wallet for anything unfamiliar. Revoke.cash exists for a reason.
• Celebrity or influencer "endorsement". Nearly every deepfake crypto scam uses a face you trust. Elon. A billionaire. A news anchor. Verify through the person's verified channel; an ad on YouTube or Instagram is not evidence of anything.
• Unsolicited DMs. WhatsApp, Telegram, LinkedIn, Instagram. Pick your poison. If a stranger starts the conversation and investing or crypto comes up within the first five messages, stop replying and block.

A simple rule of thumb for anyone over the age of 50. If an "opportunity" requires a new wallet, a new platform you've never heard of, and a specific crypto kiosk in a gas station you've never visited, it is a scam. Every single time.

What to do if you've lost money in a crypto scam

Stop the bleeding first. Then report. Then, cautiously, think about recovery.

Step 1: Freeze what you can. Did the funds leave a centralized exchange? Contact that exchange right now. Some will flag or temporarily freeze destination wallets if you reach them fast enough. Did the funds leave a self-custody wallet? Immediately revoke any active token approvals using a tool like Revoke.cash or Etherscan's token-approval checker.

Step 2: Preserve evidence. Screenshots of the scam platform. Wallet addresses you sent to. Transaction hashes. Phone numbers. Chat transcripts. Exact figures. Exact timestamps. Exact tickers. Don't delete anything, don't edit anything.

Step 3: Report to law enforcement. In the US, you file at IC3.gov and notify your state attorney general. In the UK, Action Fraud and the NCA. In Canada, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. In Australia, Scamwatch and AFP. Your report feeds into operations like Operation Atlantic, where enough individual complaints eventually connect into a seizure. Your wallet address might be the missing link in an investigation already running.

Step 4: Be extremely skeptical of recovery services. The single most reliable follow-on scam to a crypto scam is a recovery scam. Someone contacts the victim claiming they can get the money back for a fee. Legitimate recovery is almost always either automatic through exchange cooperation, or part of a law-enforcement seizure. If someone cold-calls you to offer recovery services, treat that phone call as a second fraud attempt. Hang up.

Marco Lucchetti

Marco Lucchetti is a senior content strategist and blockchain analyst at Plisio. With over 7 years of experience in cryptocurrency research, DeFi protocols, and payment technologies, Marco specializes in creating clear, data-driven content for a global crypto audience. His work focuses on transaction tracing, crypto compliance, and the future of blockchain infrastructure.