Most crypto scams do not break into anything; they persuade you to send the coins yourself, and a blockchain payment usually cannot be pulled back. Below are the six schemes behind most reported losses, a red-flags table and a plan for the first hours after money moves. Scams paid by wire, card or transfer app are covered in money transfer scams, and the crypto hub explains the wider market.
How much money do crypto scams take?
Billions of dollars a year: complaints to the FBI that involved crypto reported $11.37 billion lost across 181,565 complaints in 2025, a 22% rise in losses from 2024.
That is more than half of the $20.9 billion in losses reported to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) that year. People aged 60 and over filed 42,271 of the crypto complaints and lost $4.35 billion, up from $2.84 billion in 2024.
| Scheme in the FBI's 2025 crypto data | Complaints | Reported losses |
|---|---|---|
| Investment fraud, including pig butchering | 61,559 | more than $7.2 billion |
| Tech and customer support impostors | 17,355 | $1.23 billion |
| Recovery scams | 10,516 | $1.4 billion |
| Romance and confidence scams | 5,925 | $395 million |
| Crypto ATMs and kiosks | 13,460 | $389 million |
| Government impersonation | 5,955 | $281 million |
| Phishing and spoofing | 7,164 | $111 million |
The categories overlap, so the rows do not add up to the total, and the recovery figure can include money lost in the earlier scam that led to the recovery pitch.
The Federal Trade Commission, which collects its own reports, told Congress in March 2026 that reported fraud of all kinds came to $15.9 billion in 2025, from 3 million fraud reports. About half went to investment scams, and crypto was the second-costliest way victims paid, after bank payments. The FTC's 2024 Data Book, the latest dollar breakdown by payment method we could verify, put crypto losses at $1.42 billion for that year.
How does a pig-butchering scam work?
It is a slow con: a stranger spends weeks becoming a friend or partner, then steers you to a trading site showing profits you can never withdraw.
Contact often starts with a text that seems to reach the wrong number, a social media message or a dating match. FinCEN, the Treasury's financial-crimes unit, reviewed 33,904 suspicious-activity reports that financial institutions filed from September 2023 through 2025 and found about $12.7 billion in transactions tied to suspected schemes of this kind, a measure of flagged activity rather than confirmed losses. Its September 2026 alert notes that IC3-reported losses to these crypto investment scams grew from $907 million in 2021 to $7.2 billion in 2025.
The money usually leaves through a real exchange: victims are coached to open an account, buy coins and send them to an address the fake platform supplies. The dashboard then shows gains, and the requests grow, from a bigger deposit for a premium tier to a loan and finally a tax or release fee before any payout.
Many of these operations run from compounds in Cambodia, Burma and Laos, where FinCEN says criminal gangs have trafficked hundreds of thousands of people and forced them to run the scams. Enforcement is growing but slow. The Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force had seized and forfeited more than $401 million in crypto by November 2025, and a month earlier prosecutors filed to forfeit about 127,271 bitcoin tied to the Prince Group, the largest forfeiture action in the department's history.
Worked example: How a fake platform escalates
Week 1: you deposit $1,000 after a new online friend shares screenshots of winning trades. A week later the site shows $1,180, an 18% gain.
Weeks 2 to 8: you add $9,000, then $25,000 from savings. The dashboard reports a balance of $96,000.
Week 9: you ask to withdraw. Support says a 20% profit tax of $19,200 must be paid first, in crypto, to a new address.
The real position: the $35,000 you sent ($1,000 + $9,000 + $25,000) left your exchange account the moment each transfer confirmed. The $96,000 is a number in a database the scammers control, and the $19,200 would be lost as well.
What is address poisoning?
Address poisoning is a trick that plants a lookalike address in your wallet's history so that you copy it by mistake the next time you send funds.
Addresses on Ethereum-style networks are 40 hexadecimal characters after the 0x prefix, and most wallets used to shorten them on screen to the first and last few characters. Attackers generate an address that matches those visible ends, then send you a tiny amount, a zero-value transfer or a counterfeit token from it, so it sits in your history beside the real one. Carnegie Mellon University researchers, writing for the 2025 USENIX Security Symposium, counted 270 million such attempts against 17 million victims on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain over two years to mid-2024, with at least $83.8 million lost in 6,633 incidents.
Very few attempts work, about 0.01% on Ethereum, but the ones that do can be large. The median Ethereum loss was $2,169 and the average $45,853, and one victim sent about $4 million in USDC to a lookalike in two transfers within 10 blocks.
Worked example: A poisoned address, character by character
Say you pay a contractor in USDC every month at this address. Every address here is made up.
Real: 0x5f3a91c0d47e2b8a6c19d0e7f4b2a83c5d6e7c4b
Lookalike: 0x5f3a2e8817bb40c9f3a6d21e05c7798a14b07c4b
Your wallet shows both as 0x5f3a…7c4b. Matching those 8 hex characters takes 16⁸, about 4.3 billion tries on average. At the 516 million addresses a second the researchers measured on one server graphics card, that is about 8 seconds of work (4,294,967,296 ÷ 516,437,000). Matching 10 characters takes about 1.1 trillion tries, or roughly 35 minutes. Matching all 40 is beyond any computer, which is why the middle of the address is where a fake gives itself away.
The fixes are habits rather than software. Copy the address from its source every time, such as your exchange's deposit screen or a saved contact you have verified, never from transaction history. Compare the middle characters as well as the ends. Treat an unexpected zero-value or dust transfer as a sign that someone is targeting your wallet, and leave it alone. If the slip was an honest mistake rather than a scam, sent crypto to the wrong network covers what can be recovered.
How do wallet drainers and fake airdrops empty a wallet?
They get you to sign a permission instead of a payment; once a malicious contract may spend a token, it can take that token later without asking.
On Ethereum and similar networks, an app needs an allowance before it can move your tokens, and many request an unlimited one. Ethereum.org's guide to revoking access spells out the catch: the permission has no expiry date, disconnecting your wallet from the website does not cancel it, and a contract with unlimited access can take those tokens even after you move your funds off its platform. Revoking costs a small network fee and does not affect staked positions.
Fake airdrops are the usual bait. An FBI warning from June 2025 described tokens dropped into Hedera wallets with a memo link to a site that asked people to connect their wallet or enter their seed phrase, after which the wallet was emptied. The pattern repeats on every chain: a free token, a claim page and a signature request nobody reads closely. A real airdrop never needs your recovery phrase, and the FBI's advice is to confirm any free-token offer with the provider before accepting it.
Who are the fake support agents and recovery services?
They are impostors claiming to be your exchange, your bank, a federal agency or a law firm, and each version ends with a demand to move or pay crypto.
Support impostors reach people through pop-up warnings, texts about a suspicious login and calls claiming an account is at risk. The FTC describes a script aimed especially at older adults: a caller says the victim's bank account is compromised and tells them to withdraw cash and feed it into a bitcoin ATM to keep it safe. Scammers have even called the machines safety lockers.
Recovery scams target people who have already lost money. The FBI logged 10,516 complaints and $1.4 billion in reported losses in 2025, a figure that can include losses from the scam that came first. Its August 2025 warning about fictitious law firms lists the tells: claims to be an authorized partner of US agencies, which no law firm is; knowledge of the exact amounts you lost; fees in crypto or gift cards; and refusal to appear on video. Scammers have also posed as IC3 staff. The FBI says IC3 does not reach out to victims directly and never charges to recover money.
Are crypto giveaways and celebrity offers ever real?
No: any promise to return double the crypto you send, whether from a famous name, a company account or a livestream, is a scam every time.
Giveaway scams run on hijacked or lookalike social accounts, fake news stories and, more and more, AI-generated video of executives and celebrities. The FTC warns that a celebrity offering to multiply your crypto is a scammer and that promises of free money are always fake. The FBI counted 8,712 crypto-linked complaints in 2025 that involved artificial intelligence, with $742 million in losses. The same test covers job offers paid in crypto, task apps that require deposits and prizes that need a fee first: when money has to flow to a stranger before anything flows back, walk away.
Why do scammers send victims to bitcoin ATMs?
Because a crypto kiosk turns cash into coins within minutes and sends them straight to the address on a QR code the scammer supplied.
Complaints involving crypto ATMs and kiosks reported losses of $388,981,267 across 13,460 complaints in 2025, up 58% from 2024. People 60 and older filed 6,188 of those complaints and lost $257 million, and Texas led the states at $56.8 million. FTC data showed the trend early: losses at bitcoin ATMs rose nearly tenfold from 2020 to 2023, the median reported loss in the first half of 2024 was $10,000, and about 86% of people who lost money at a machine in that period had been fooled by a fake government agency, business or tech support line.
The machines are also expensive. FinCEN's August 2025 notice to operators put typical kiosk fees at 7% to 20% of the transaction. Some states now set limits: California caps each customer at $1,000 a day at a kiosk and, since January 2025, limits charges to the greater of $5 or 15%. Limits slow a scam down but do not stop one that spreads deposits across days or machines.
IC3's guidance for anyone standing at a kiosk is direct. If the operator calls to say the transaction looks like fraud, stop. Never scan a QR code that a stranger sent you. If you have already paid, keep every receipt, because the transaction ID, the receiving address and the kiosk location are what investigators need.
Which red flags show up in most crypto scams?
The strongest signal is pressure from someone you have never met in person to move money quickly, in crypto, to an address they control.
| Red flag | What is usually going on | Safer response |
|---|---|---|
| A stranger or new match brings up crypto investing | The opening of an investment scam | End the money talk and never invest through a link they send |
| A platform shows steady, outsized daily gains | The dashboard is invented | Treat smooth high returns as evidence of fraud, not skill |
| Withdrawals need a tax, fee or extra deposit first | The final squeeze before the site vanishes | Pay nothing more and report it |
| Your exchange, bank or an agency calls about a problem | An impostor using fear | Hang up and call the number on the official website |
| Someone asks for your recovery phrase or a screen share | An attempt to take over the wallet | Refuse; no real support agent needs either |
| A free token or NFT appears with a claim link | Drainer bait | Ignore it and do not connect your wallet |
| A wallet prompt asks to approve unlimited spending | Approval phishing | Reject it, or cap the allowance at the amount you mean to spend |
| You are told to take cash to a crypto ATM | The payment step of an impersonation scam | Stop; no police department or agency demands payment this way |
| A law firm or agency offers to recover lost crypto for a fee | A recovery scam | Do not pay; report the contact to IC3 |
| A tiny or zero-value transfer appears from an unknown address | Address poisoning setup | Copy addresses only from a verified source |
Worked example: What 1% a day would really mean
A platform shows your $10,000 earning 1% a day. Compounded for a year, that is $10,000 × 1.01³⁶⁵, or about $378,000, a 37-fold gain. No regulated investment pays anything close to that; numbers like these exist only on screens the scammer controls.
What should you do in the first hours after a crypto scam?
Stop paying, cut off access to whatever is left, and get the transaction details to the platform you paid from and to the FBI while the trail is fresh.
Stop paying and stop replying
Any fee, tax or deposit demanded to release your balance is part of the scam, however the contact frames that last payment.
Secure what is left
If you signed a token approval on a suspicious site, revoke it through a revoke tool or your wallet's permissions screen; each revocation costs a small network fee. If you typed your recovery phrase anywhere, revoking is not enough: set up a new wallet with a new phrase on a device you trust and move the remaining funds at once. Change your exchange and email passwords and turn on app-based two-factor codes. How to store crypto safely covers backing up the new wallet.
Call the exchange or platform you sent from
Use the contact route inside its official app or website, not a number from a search result. Give the receiving address and transaction ID, and ask it to flag the address and keep its records. If the coins were a stablecoin such as USDC or USDT, say so: issuers including Circle and Tether can freeze tokens at an address, generally at law enforcement's request, so a quick report matters. The top stablecoins page lists the main issuers.
Collect the evidence
Write down every transaction ID (on Bitcoin and Ethereum, a 64-character string of letters and numbers), the addresses, amounts, dates and times, the websites, usernames and phone numbers used, and how contact began. Screenshot the chats and the fake dashboard before they vanish. The FBI says to report even with gaps.
Report to the FBI and the FTC
File a complaint at ic3.gov and a report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. For investment pitches, the SEC (sec.gov/tcr) and the CFTC (cftc.gov/complaint) also take tips. People 60 and older can call the Justice Department's elder fraud hotline at 833-372-8311 for help filing. File a local police report too; the FBI specifically advises it for kiosk victims.
Expect a second approach
Anyone who contacts you afterward offering to trace or recover the coins for a fee is almost certainly running the next scam. Real investigators do not charge victims.
Speed matters because many victims do not yet know they are being robbed. Agents on the FBI's Operation Level Up contacted 3,780 crypto investment fraud victims in 2025, and 78% had not realized it was a scam.
What are the risks of trying to recover stolen crypto?
The biggest risk is losing more money to a second scam, because recovery offers target exactly the people most desperate to get funds back.
Blockchain analysis can show where coins went, but it cannot reverse a transaction. Getting money back takes a freeze by the exchange or issuer holding the coins, or a seizure by law enforcement followed by a forfeiture case in court that can take years. Paying an up-front fee, handing over copies of your ID or granting anyone access to your accounts in the hope of recovery adds to the damage. If you were scammed, ask a tax professional whether any of the loss is deductible, since that depends on the facts.
Scams also feed on a misunderstanding of what crypto is. Even without fraud, prices are volatile and a coin can lose most or all of its value, so a pitch built on smooth, steady profits should always raise doubt. Coins held on a platform are not protected like bank deposits either; FDIC vs SIPC explains what each program covers, and whether crypto is safe on an exchange covers custody risk. For live prices on the coin scammers most often request, see the bitcoin page, and how blockchain works explains why a confirmed transfer cannot be recalled.