Consumer Federation of America reports crypto scams cost Americans $80.7B in 2025, a 22% year-over-year increase.
Regulation & Gov ·
The Consumer Federation of America estimates that crypto scams cost Americans $80.7 billion in 2025, representing a 22 percent year-over-year increase. This figure is substantially higher than the $11.4 billion in crypto fraud losses officially reported by the FBI, suggesting widespread underreporting among victims.
Cryptocurrency's technical properties—irreversible transactions, pseudonymous addresses, and the absence of a central authority to reverse transfers—create structural advantages for fraudsters. Scams operate across multiple vectors, including fake investment platforms promising outsized returns, phishing attacks designed to harvest credentials, social engineering schemes that build trust before requesting funds, on-chain exploits targeting protocol mechanics, and increasingly AI-augmented fraud using synthetic voices and deepfakes. Investment fraud remains the largest loss category by dollar volume, with fake platforms consistently ranking as the most damaging class of crypto-related losses tracked by law enforcement.
The gap between consumer reports and official FBI figures remains substantial, indicating that many victims either do not file complaints or their losses go undetected. The persistence of these schemes reflects the constantly shifting tactics fraudsters employ, adapting to whatever combination of technology and psychology encounters the lowest resistance in targeting digital asset holders.