By President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to highlight his administration’s work against foreign criminal networks that pull Americans into fraudulent crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters. Trump and members of his cabinet are expected to point to seized fraudulent investment websites and to efforts against online impersonation, two of the channels through which crypto scams reach their victims.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are all expected to attend. The scale of what they are addressing is documented, because crypto scams cost Americans more money last year than any other category of internet crime the FBI tracks.
The FBI Counted 181,565 Crypto Complaints and $11.37 Billion in Losses
Complaints involving cryptocurrency reached 181,565 in 2025 with losses of $11.366 billion, a 22% increase on the previous year, according to the IC3 annual report. The average loss was $62,604 and 18,589 people reported losing more than $100,000 each.
Crypto investment fraud accounted for 61,559 of those complaints and $7.228 billion of the money, and victims over 60 lost $2.764 billion of that total. Total losses across all internet crime passed $20 billion for the first time, from more than a million complaints, and the FBI now takes close to 3,000 reports a day. A further 10,516 complaints involved recovery scams, in which people who had already lost money to crypto scams were charged again by operators promising to get it back.
Investor Takeaway
Crypto scams produced the single largest loss category in the FBI’s 2025 data, which is why the enforcement push is aimed at the payment rail rather than at any one platform.
Executive Order 14390 Set Up This Machinery Eight Months Ago
Trump signed Executive Order 14390 on 6 March, directing the attorney general to “continue to prioritize prosecutions of defendants engaged in cyber-enabled fraud, including scam centers and sextortion schemes.” The order names scam centers directly, which is where the crypto scams aimed at Americans are physically run, and describes a shadow economy fueled by stolen identities, coercion, forced labor and human trafficking. It gave agencies 120 days to deliver an action plan naming the transnational criminal organizations behind scam centers and required an operational cell inside the National Coordination Center to run the federal response.
Two parts of that order matter more than the prosecution language, and neither has produced a visible result yet. The attorney general was told to recommend a Victims Restoration Program within 90 days, funded from money clawed back or forfeited from the networks running crypto scams, and the secretary of state was told to press foreign governments with sanctions, visa restrictions, trade penalties and the expulsion of complicit diplomats. A follow-up presidential memorandum on 12 August expanded the use of commercial cybersecurity firms for attribution and disruption work.
The Seizures Are Small Against What Crypto Scams Took
The government has results to show, and they are modest next to the numbers above. The Secret Service Washington Field Office announced forfeiture actions covering more than $25 million across five investigations in July, with individual complaints ranging from $285,000 to $12.09 million. The largest action to date remains the $225.3 million pig-butchering seizure filed in June 2025.
Set against $11.37 billion of reported losses in a single year, the biggest seizure in the program’s history recovers about 2% of twelve months of damage. Enforcement has also leaned on exchanges, with Coinbase freezing more than $3 million during a DOJ-led operation against the Southeast Asian rings behind many crypto scams, while source countries have begun moving on their own, including Cambodia’s criminal penalties for scam-center operators. The Justice Department meanwhile dissolved its dedicated crypto enforcement unit in April 2025, which is the structural question hanging over any new prosecution commitment.
Trump’s Family Crypto Ventures Sit Inside the Same Story
A Reuters investigation found the president and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while investors they attracted have taken a $2.3 billion loss. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Reuters that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
Trump also pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in October 2025, after the exchange pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program and Zhao left the company. Congress has been working a separate track, with senators introducing the SAFE Crypto Act to improve federal coordination against crypto scams.
Investor Takeaway
The enforcement architecture against crypto scams already exists on paper, so Wednesday’s event is a progress report rather than a policy launch.
