President Donald Trump will highlight his administration’s crackdown on overseas crypto scam networks at a White House event Wednesday. The announcement comes as Americans reported over $7.2 billion in crypto investment fraud losses in 2025, according to FBI data.
Enforcement actions and seizures
A White House official stated that Trump and cabinet members, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Attorney General Todd Blanche, will showcase seizures of fraudulent crypto investment websites. The administration aims to demonstrate efforts to stop online impersonation scams.
Recent enforcement numbers illustrate the scale of these operations:
- International Operation (Oct. 13): The Justice Department announced an operation leading to 28 arrests in Ghana and Nigeria. It removed more than 3.7 million scam-linked accounts and pages and identified over $11 million in potentially freezable funds. Participants included Coinbase, Binance, Meta, Google, and Microsoft.
- Brooklyn Prosecutors: Separately disrupted 241 scam domains tied to a multinational crypto scheme targeting Russian speakers, seizing 112 servers.
- Scam Center Strike Force: This broader effort has restrained roughly $938 million in crypto, including $52 million restrained in a single day in September alone.
Scale of the underlying problem
The recoveries represent a fraction of the total suspected activity. FinCEN identified $12.7 billion in suspected scam-related financial activity across more than 33,000 reports filed between September 2023 and December 2025. The FBI reported that Americans filed over 1 million internet crime complaints in 2025, with crypto investment fraud accounting for more than $7.2 billion of those losses.
| Metric |
Value |
Source/Context |
| Restrained Crypto Assets |
$938 million |
Scam Center Strike Force |
| Suspected Scam Activity |
$12.7 billion |
FinCEN (Sep 2023-Dec 2025) |
| Reported Fraud Losses |
$7.2 billion |
FBI (2025) |
| Internet Crime Complaints |
1 million+ |
FBI (2025) |
What the Numbers Show
A stark divergence exists between enforcement recoveries and total reported losses. While the Scam Center Strike Force has restrained $938 million, this figure represents approximately 13% of the $7.2 billion in reported crypto investment fraud losses for 2025 alone. Furthermore, the $12.7 billion in suspected scam-related activity identified by FinCEN over a two-year period dwarfs the single-day restraint of $52 million recorded in September, highlighting the challenge of asset recovery relative to the volume of fraudulent inflows.
Controversy surrounding Trump’s crypto ties
The crackdown message faces scrutiny due to the President’s own connections to the crypto industry. A Reuters investigation found that Trump and his sons added at least $2.3 billion to their family fortune through crypto ventures, while investors who bought in lost roughly the same amount.
World Liberty Financial (CRYPTO: WLFI) contributed the largest share, directing more than $1.4 billion in token sales to the family. The TRUMP (CRYPTO: TRUMP) meme coin brought in about $616 million for them against more than $700 million in investor losses.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly stated that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
Additional context includes:
- U.S. authorities sanctioned two men tied to a World Liberty-linked resort project in East Timor during a separate crackdown. World Liberty said it had no knowledge of or relationship with either individual.
- Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in October 2025, after Zhao’s company pleaded guilty to failing to maintain anti-money laundering controls.
- Trump signed a March executive order directing the DOJ to prioritize prosecuting online scammers and tasked the Department of Homeland Security with working alongside private companies to track foreign hacking groups.
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