The crypto-fraud numbers keep climbing, and every total is a floor

Two annual reports set the baseline for how much money crypto crime moves, and both landed higher this year. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) tracks what Americans report losing. Chainalysis traces what actually moves across public blockchains. Read together, they describe a problem that is still accelerating, in figures that almost certainly understate it.

Start with the reported losses. The IC3's 2024 Internet Crime Report, published in April 2025, logged a record $9.3 billion in U.S. cryptocurrency-related losses, up 66% from 2023, across nearly 150,000 complaints that referenced crypto. The IC3's 2025 report, released April 6, 2026, pushed that figure to $11.37 billion, cited in 181,565 complaints, a 21% jump in complaint count and roughly a 22% rise in dollars lost.

Those crypto losses sit inside a larger fraud picture. The 2025 report tallied about $21 billion in total losses across 1,008,597 complaints, according to the IC3, with cyber-enabled fraud alone accounting for $17.6 billion, about 85% of everything reported.

Where the growth is

The fastest-moving category is investment fraud. Crypto investment schemes accounted for $5.8 billion in 2024 and rose to about $7.2 billion in 2025, a 25% increase, per the IC3. That is the bucket that includes the Southeast Asian 'scam center' operations the FBI's new Scam Center Strike Force was created to target, alongside its earlier Operation Level Up.

The on-chain view is starker. Chainalysis's 2026 Crypto Crime Report, published January 8, 2026, estimates at least $154 billion in illicit crypto value received in 2025, a 162% jump, driven by a 694% surge in value flowing to sanctioned entities. Stablecoins now make up 84% of illicit transaction volume, up from 63% a year earlier.

Scams specifically cost victims about $17 billion in 2025 by Chainalysis's estimate, with at least $14 billion of that received on-chain. Two curves stand out: impersonation scams rose more than 1,400% year over year, and the average scam payment climbed to $2,764 from $782, a 253% increase the firm attributes to AI-enabled operations scaling up.

AI shows up in the reported data too. The IC3 counted roughly 22,000 AI-related complaints in 2025 totaling $893 million. Outright theft also set records: North Korean hackers stole about $2 billion in 2025, per Chainalysis, including the February 2025 Bybit breach of nearly $1.5 billion, which the firm calls the largest heist in crypto history.

Who pays, and why the totals run low

The demographic pattern is consistent. Victims aged 60 and older lost the most, $2.8 billion in 2024, according to the IC3, a pattern investigators tie to investment and confidence fraud that unfolds over weeks or months.

Every figure here is a floor. IC3 totals only capture losses that victims actually report, and shame, confusion, and unrecovered funds keep many complaints from ever being filed. Chainalysis figures are explicit lower bounds that get revised upward as more criminal addresses are identified: the firm's first estimate for 2024 was $40.9 billion, later revised to $57.2 billion, a roughly 40% upward correction after the fact.

In other words, the newest number for any given year is rarely the final one. The direction, though, has not reversed. Here is what the pattern means for readers:

• Treat any 'investment' contact that begins with an unsolicited text, DM, or wrong-number message as a scam-center opener until proven otherwise.
• Be skeptical of platforms that show growing 'profits' but require new deposits or fees before you can withdraw, a hallmark of investment fraud.
• Assume AI can fake a familiar voice, face, or credential; verify urgent money requests through a separate, known channel.
• If you are helping someone 60 or older, ask directly about new online 'advisors' or crypto accounts, since this group absorbs the largest share of losses.
• Report losses to the FBI's IC3 even if recovery seems unlikely; unreported cases are exactly why the official totals run low.

The reports disagree on method, reported complaints versus traced blockchain flows, but not on trajectory. By both measures, 2025 was worse than 2024, and both institutions expect their 2025 figures to be revised, like the years before them, upward.

— Sources: [FBI IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report](https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf) · [Chainalysis 2026 Crypto Crime Report](https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/2026-crypto-crime-report-introduction/) · [Chainalysis 2026 — Scams](https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/crypto-scams-2026/) · [CoinDesk: FBI says Americans lost $9.3B to crypto in 2024](https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2025/04/24/fbi-says-americans-lost-usd9-3b-to-crypto-scams-in-2024)