President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to spotlight his administration's push against foreign criminal networks that lure Americans into fake crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters.
The remarks are part of a broader event on cyber crime prevention. Trump and members of his cabinet plan to point to the government's seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites and its work to shut down online impersonation scams, the official reportedly said.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are expected to attend.
The event follows a March executive order in which Trump directed the Justice Department to prioritize the identification and prosecution of online scammers. He followed that with a memo directing the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies to surveil foreign criminal hacking groups.
Record losses in internet and crypto scams
The numbers behind the crackdown are grim. Americans filed more than one million complaints with the FBI about internet scams in 2025, a 17% increase from 2024, and reported record losses.
Crypto fraud accounted for more than half of that damage. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints and $11.366 billion in losses for 2025, making digital assets the single most loss-heavy category in the report. Crypto investment scams drained $7.2 billion of that total.
The FBI traced much of the activity to organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia — in Cambodia, Laos and Burma — that use victims of human trafficking as forced labor inside scam compounds. Criminals make contact through text messages, social media, dating apps and digital ads before steering victims to fake platforms that display fabricated profits. When victims try to withdraw, scammers demand taxes and fees and vanish.
Americans aged 60 and older bore the heaviest burden, with $4.43 billion in crypto-related losses. Crypto ATM scams produced $389 million in losses, a 58% jump from 2024, and recovery scams that target prior victims generated another $1.4 billion.
The global picture is worse. Chainalysis data from January showed illicit crypto addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase from 2024. North Korea-linked hackers stole $2 billion over the year, including the $1.5 billion Bybit exploit, the largest crypto heist on record.
Enforcement has produced some solid results. The FBI's Operation Level Up notified 3,780 victims of active crypto investment fraud in 2025 and saved an estimated $225.8 million. A Scam Center Strike Force that combines the DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, State Department and Treasury's OFAC targets the Southeast Asian compounds.
According to Reuters, Trump and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they courted have absorbed a $2.3 billion hit.
In October 2025, Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted after the exchange pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program.
Democrats in Congress have accused the Trump family of using the presidency to enrich itself through its crypto ventures, a charge the White House rejects.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that "all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people."
