$11.3 billion. That is what Americans handed to crypto scammers in 2025, straight from the FBI’s own report. And when the White House stands up today to announce its big crackdown, look at what they will not say out loud: not one of those 181,565 victims was holding their own keys.
Read that again. Every dollar was handed to somebody else. A fake exchange. A fake trading app. A Bitcoin ATM in a gas station. A stranger on a dating app. Not a single seed phrase in the entire $11.3 billion pile.
The numbers they just put in the record
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged more than one million internet scam complaints in 2025 — a 17% jump over 2024. Crypto did not just lead the damage. It swallowed more than half of it.
- 181,565 crypto complaints and $11.366 billion in losses — the single most loss-heavy category in the report.
- $7.2 billion of that was crypto investment scams: fake platforms showing fake profits.
- Americans aged 60 and older lost $4.43 billion.
- Crypto ATM scams: $389 million, up 58% in one year.
- Recovery scams — the vultures who call previous victims and promise to get the money back — took another $1.4 billion.
- Chainalysis says illicit crypto addresses pulled in at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase. North Korea-linked hackers alone took about $2 billion, including the $1.5 billion Bybit heist.
The FBI traced much of it to organized crime in Cambodia, Laos and Burma, where trafficked workers are locked inside scam compounds and forced to run the fraud. Fake profits on a fake dashboard. Then when you try to withdraw, they demand taxes and fees — and vanish.
And today the President stands in front of a camera
According to Reuters, Trump will use a White House cybercrime prevention event today to highlight the administration’s push against foreign criminal networks. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are all expected in the room. The event will spotlight the government’s seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites and its work shutting down online impersonation scams.
It follows a March executive order directing the Justice Department to prioritize prosecuting online scammers, and a memo directing Homeland Security to work with private companies to surveil foreign criminal hacking groups.
Sounds great. Now watch what happens next, because this is where the story turns.
Why this is your problem, not theirs
That $11.3 billion number is not a warning. It is ammunition. It is the stat every regulator, every central banker and every politician who wants to touch self-custody has been waiting for, and they will quote it every time they come for your wallet.
France already voted to make you declare every single coin you hold — including the ones nobody else can see. Russia banned peer-to-peer Bitcoin and told citizens they cannot move coins from an exchange to their own wallet. Neither of those laws does a thing about a scam compound in Cambodia.
Because here is the part that should make you furious. The victims in that FBI report were not rugged by Bitcoin. They were rugged by custody. They used platforms that held their money, apps that showed them numbers instead of coins, ATMs that took cash and promised a balance, and stablecoins that somebody else can freeze. See what actually happened when Bitcoin Depot and the ATM machine business imploded — the people using those machines were not holding keys either.
And when custody fails, they do not blame custody. They blame the asset. Read how a single cloud outage froze a custodial exchange while Bitcoin itself never stopped producing blocks.
So the same institutions whose entire business model is holding your money for you are now going to write the safety rules. Rules that will land on the one group of people who were never victims in the first place.
Meanwhile Bitcoin did not care about any of it. It traded around $84,500 today, up 2%, with spot ETFs pulling in more than $549 million across Monday and Tuesday.
The Love Is Bitcoin Takeaway
Bitcoin did not lose $11.3 billion. Custody did.
The scam was never Bitcoin. The scam has always been “send your money to somebody else and trust them to give it back.” Every one of those 181,565 complaints is a person who did exactly that — and every one of them would have been untouchable with a seed phrase and a hardware wallet on a shelf.
That is the mic-drop: the safest person in this entire $11.3 billion story is the paranoid weirdo with a metal seed plate whose coins no exchange, no court and no scam compound can move. Self-custody is not the risk. It is the only thing in the article that removes the middleman who takes the money.
If you are going to own Bitcoin, own it. Buy with a service that does not need to hold your coins, and move them straight to hardware you control. Start here: bullbitcoin.com via LoveIsBitcoin with coupon code LOVEISBITCOIN, and pair it with a wallet whose keys never leave your hands — see how to choose one.
Not your keys, not your coins. It is boring advice right up until it is the only advice that would have saved you.
So here is the question: if not a single one of those 181,565 victims was holding their own keys, why is YOUR wallet the thing they want to regulate?
This article is for education only and is not financial advice. Coupon code LOVEISBITCOIN at https://loveisbitcoin.com/bull.
$11.3 BILLION STOLEN FROM AMERICANS BY CRYPTO SCAMS — AND NOT ONE VICTIM HELD THEIR OWN KEYS
