Crypto was the biggest fraud enabler in 2025

Entirely unsurprising, especially given the kind of people who pimp crypto.

Americans lost $7.2 billion to crypto investment scams in 2025, according to a new report from the FBI, making it the top source of financial losses from fraud reported to the agency last year. Many people don’t call the FBI after getting scammed, which means the real total is likely far larger.

The news comes from the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) annual report, released (April 6), which tracks not just crypto investment fraud, but online scams targeting the elderly, and ransomware attacks, among others. The agency received 1,008,597 total complaints in 2025, up from 859,532 complaints in 2024. The total amount lost was over $20 billion last year. - Gizmodo

Billions stolen in Bitcoin scams

Sadly this is probably just a taste of what's going to happen in coming years with crypto in general.

The FBI’s latest annual report reveals a sharp rise in Bitcoin-related fraud, with U.S. victims losing $9.3 billion in 2024 — a 66% increase from the previous year.

Total cybercrime losses reached $16.6 billion across more than 859,000 complaints filed to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)...

Of particular concern is the impact on older Americans. Victims aged 60 and above reported 33,369 Bitcoin-related fraud cases, amounting to more than $2.8 billion in losses.

The average loss per senior victim was $83,000 — more than four times higher than the average across all cybercrime. - BiTBO