Crypto scams in US enforcement

182 US enforcement actions against crypto scams since January 2024

Americans reported $11.37bn in crypto-related losses to the FBI in 2025, 22% more than the year before. Crypto investment fraud alone was $7.23bn, which the FBI calls the highest source of financial losses to Americans that year. Complaints involving crypto ATMs and kiosks reported $389.0m in losses, $257.5m of it from people aged 60 and over, and people targeted by fake recovery services reported $1.40bn in losses, a figure the FBI says may include what they lost to the earlier scam. Source: FBI, 2025 IC3 Annual Report, pp. 52–53.

The enforcement ledger holds 75 criminal steps against crypto scams (charges, pleas, convictions and sentences) and 72 civil actions and settlements; the other 35 are seizures and other steps. A case can appear once for each step, so these are documents, not separate cases. Download the rows: enforcement.csv · enforcement.json. The median prison term across the 24 sentences that included prison time is 7.5 years. The largest figure in a scam document is $40.00bn: Terraform Labs co-founder sentenced to 15 years for crypto fraud tied to the UST and LUNA collapse causing $40 billion in losses.

Crypto ATM scams: the FBI’s figures by state and age.

Financial institutions see it too. FinCEN, the Treasury’s financial intelligence unit, counted about $12.70bn in financial activity tied to suspected crypto investment scams, across 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act reports filed between 8 September 2023 and 31 December 2025. That is activity institutions flagged, not confirmed losses. Source: FinCEN, 3 September 2026.

Where to report a crypto scam

• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3): The main US place to report a crypto scam, even with no loss. Give the wallet addresses, transaction hashes, amounts and dates.
• Federal Trade Commission: Consumer fraud reports, shared with law enforcement.
• SEC tips and complaints: Fraud involving an investment offering, token sale or trading platform.
• CFTC complaints: Fraud involving crypto trading, futures or commodity pools.
• People aged 60 and over can call the National Elder Fraud Hotline, 833-372-8311, for help filing.

The FBI warns against crypto “recovery” services, especially any that charge a fee up front. Reporting is free. How stolen crypto really comes back

• Crypto investment fraud93
• Pig butchering and other trust scams46
• Ponzi schemes43

Pig butchering and other trust scams

Someone builds trust, often through a dating app, social media or a wrong-number text, then steers the victim to a fake trading platform.

Ponzi schemes

Early investors are paid with later investors’ money, under cover of crypto trading, mining or lending returns.

Crypto investment fraud

False claims to sell a token, fund, trading bot or platform.

A scam here is any action the ledger files under trust scam, Ponzi scheme or investment fraud. Each summary says what its document announced, and a charge or lawsuit is an allegation until a plea, conviction or settlement. Security firms and the FBI count far more scams than reach a US agency’s press office, so this is the enforcement record, not a list of every scam.

Each row is one published step in a case, linked to its source document, so a case can appear again as it moves from charge to plea to sentence. Where one step was announced twice within days, it counts once. Justice Department rows are press releases whose headline names crypto. Figures are the main amount each document states, and for charges they are allegations. Allegations are unproven unless a conviction, plea or settlement is stated. Summaries and stages are machine-read from the document and checked automatically, so the linked document is the authority.

Cite this Bitminer.io, “Crypto scams in US enforcement”, data to 5 November 2026, https://bitminer.io/ledger/scams/. Free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with credit and a link. How this is built · Frozen copy of November 2026’s data