Crypto scams did not become less sophisticated in 2025. They became more convincing, more industrialized, and more likely to use the language of security, customer support, and recovery to persuade people to move their own assets.
This update uses public reporting rather than an in-house survey. Reported losses are not a census of every victim, but they are a useful warning about the scale and pattern of the problem.
What the 2025 data says
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The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 181,565 complaints involving cryptocurrency and $11.366 billion in reported losses in 2025. The report lists $62,604 as the average reported loss and says that 18,589 complainants reported losses above $100,000. See the FBI's 2025 IC3 Annual Report.
Investment fraud was the largest reported crypto-loss category: 61,559 complaints and $7.228 billion in reported losses. The same report recorded 10,516 recovery-scam complaints and $1.4 billion in losses, while cautioning that those losses can include the original fraud that led victims to seek recovery help.
Impersonation is the connective tissue. In separate, economy-wide fraud data, the FTC said consumers reported $3.5 billion in losses to impostor scams in 2025. These scams often arrive as a text, phone call, email, social-media message, or fake search result that claims an account is at risk and demands an immediate transfer to "protect" it. Read the FTC's 2025 impostor-scam update.
The patterns to recognize
A security emergency that requires a transfer. A real wallet, exchange, bank, or government agency does not need you to move crypto to a stranger's address to secure it.
A support agent who contacted you first. Fake customer support can appear in search ads, social replies, Telegram, text messages, and calls. Find the official support route independently; do not rely on the link or number supplied in the message.
A recovery promise after a theft. Someone who says they can reverse a completed blockchain transaction, recover it for an upfront fee, or needs a tax, insurance, or software payment to release funds is setting up a second loss.
A request for a seed phrase or remote control. A seed phrase is the wallet. Anyone who has it can take the assets. Do not type it into a website, send it in chat, or install remote-access software because a stranger told you to.
Returns, access, or urgency that cannot be independently verified. Fake investment platforms make balances and profits look real until the victim tries to withdraw. Verify a business, its licensing claims, and its official contact information away from the promoter's own website.
If you think you are being targeted
- Stop sending funds and do not add gas to a compromised wallet without a plan.
- Save the wallet addresses, transaction hashes, usernames, domains, messages, and payment instructions.
- Contact the legitimate exchange or wallet provider through a contact method you find independently.
- Report the incident to IC3 and ReportFraud.ftc.gov. A report may help an investigation even when it cannot reverse a completed transaction.
- If assets are still trapped in a compromised wallet, describe the situation through our free evaluation form. We can assess narrow sweeper-bot and stuck-asset cases, but we cannot recover funds that already reached an address controlled by a thief.
For a checklist focused on vetting recovery services, read How to tell a legitimate crypto recovery service from a scam. The 2021 scam-survey summary remains available as historical site research; this report supersedes it for current public figures.