Cryptocurrency accounted for more than half of all scam and cybercrime losses reported to the FBI in the United States last year, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America, which puts the estimated true cost of crypto fraud at $80.7 billion for 2025.
The reported figure and the estimated one are very different numbers, and the gap between them is worth understanding before the larger one gets repeated.
Where the $80.7 Billion Comes From
The CFA, a coalition of non-profit consumer groups, based its headline figure on FBI data showing $11.37 billion in crypto scam losses reported to the agency in 2025, a 22% increase on the prior year. That $11.37 billion is a count of what victims actually told law enforcement.
To reach $80.7 billion, the CFA applied a 7.1x multiplier drawn from a 2017 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, which found that only 14% of fraud victims ever report their losses. The CFA describes the adjustment as conservative and applies the same multiplier to every figure in the report.
The reasoning behind it is sound in principle. Fraud is chronically under-reported, because victims are embarrassed, do not know where to report, or assume nothing can be done, and the reported total is certainly lower than the real one. Ari Redbord, global head of policy at blockchain intelligence firm TRM Labs, said in April that the FBI number is ‘an important benchmark’ that ‘captures only part of the picture,’ working from a similar assumption that around 15% of victims report.
The execution is where it gets stretched. The survey behind the multiplier is nine years old and covers fraud in general, at a time when most of the crypto scam industry as it exists today had not been built. A single blanket multiplier also assumes reporting rates are identical across romance scams, investment fraud and account compromises, which is unlikely given how differently those crimes are experienced. And $80.7 billion is not something anyone counted. It is $11.37 billion multiplied by 7.1.
Who Produced the Number
The CFA’s own position is relevant to how the report should be read. The organisation has filed a class action lawsuit against Meta over scam advertising, and the report identifies Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp as the platforms most frequently associated with scam activity.
Ben Winters, the CFA’s director of AI and privacy, said ‘tech companies are too often allowed to avoid accountability,’ pointing to the bipartisan SCAM Act, a proposed bill that would bar online platforms from displaying fraudulent or deceptive advertising.
A larger headline figure strengthens both the litigation and the legislative case. That does not make the underlying FBI data wrong, and the argument that platforms carry responsibility for scam advertising is a serious one. It does mean the choice to multiply every figure by 7.1 was made by an organisation with a stake in the resulting number being large.
Investment Fraud Dominated the Landscape
Investment fraud was the single largest category of crypto-related crime in 2025. The FBI logged $8.6 billion in reported losses from investment scams, which the CFA scales to an estimated $61.4 billion. Reported investment fraud losses rose 32% compared with 2024, and that growth rate is measured rather than extrapolated.
Across all categories of internet crime, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 1,008,597 complaints and $20.9 billion in reported losses, a 26% increase year over year. The CFA scales that broader figure to $148.2 billion, or roughly $1,009 per US household.
Two findings within the reported data stand out. Americans over the age of 60 lost $4.4 billion to crypto fraud alone, nearly 40% of total reported crypto losses, despite being a minority of crypto holders. And the FBI counted AI-enabled crime as a separate category for the first time, logging $893 million across 22,364 complaints, which establishes a baseline for a category that did not previously exist in the statistics.
Enforcement Actions and Notable Cases
The FBI’s Operation Level Up, which contacts potential victims before they transfer funds, has now notified 8,000 people and prevented $500 million in losses, including $225.9 million stopped in 2025 alone.
Domestic prosecutions included an Oklahoma man sentenced to five years in prison over a $9.4 million crypto Ponzi scheme. Internationally, a bipartisan Scam Center Task Force established last year has seized approximately $25 million from fraudulent crypto investment platforms and online romance schemes.
In the largest forfeiture action in Justice Department history, prosecutors moved to seize 127,271 Bitcoin, then valued at $15 billion, from Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi in connection with forced-labour scam compounds in Cambodia. Prince Group has denied involvement in scam operations, and the case has not been tried.
What the Numbers Say to Do
Three things in the reported data are directly useful, and none of them depend on the multiplier.
Investment fraud is the dominant category and the fastest-growing one, at $8.6 billion reported and up 32%. The losses are not mostly hacks or technical exploits. They are people being persuaded to send money to something presented as an investment opportunity, which means the defence is scepticism about the offer rather than better security software.
The over-60 concentration is the most actionable finding in the report. Nearly 40% of reported crypto fraud losses came from a group that makes up a small share of crypto owners, and the practical response for many readers is a conversation with a parent rather than a change to their own habits.
And Operation Level Up exists because the only reliable point of intervention is before the money moves. Once a transfer is made, recovery is rare, which is why the $500 million the programme claims to have prevented is a more meaningful number than most of the recovery figures in the report.
