The FBI revealed in a Monday press release that Americans submitted 181,565 complaints of schemes involving cryptocurrency and reported losses totaling around $11.4 billion last year, a 22% increase from 2024.
The age range most affected were people older than 60. Those in this category had the highest crypto complaint count at 44,555 with losses at $4.4 billion, per the annual report from the Internet Crime Complaint Center, a division of the FBI tasked with gathering intelligence on cybercrime.
One cybercrime the report pointed to was cryptocurrency investment fraud, which are sophisticated long-term scams using psychological manipulation, an appearance of legitimacy, and exploitation of cryptocurrencies to deceive victims into investing large sums of money.
“These scams are largely perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labor to run the scam operations,” per the report.
The FBI report comes as the crypto ecosystem is still reeling from a recent $270 million exploit that was planned six months in the making, a change from the initial estimate of multiple weeks.