Trump targets overseas crypto scams as Americans lose billions

U.S. President Donald Trump plans to use a White House cybercrime summit to highlight his administration’s takedowns of scamming crypto investment sites, which are targeting millions of Americans who have suffered record fraud losses in 2022.

Who will be in the room and what they will showcase

According to a White House official quoted by Reuters, President Donald Trump and some cabinet secretaries will reveal how the government has disrupted foreign scams and prevented Americans from using fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Attorney General Todd Blanche are among those who will take part in the meeting.

The crypto section is part of a larger gathering dedicated to cybercrime prevention. Administration officials will likely focus on showcasing seized websites and efforts made to curb online impersonations. The White House has not announced any new takedown totals or criminal organizations yet.

The enforcement figures behind the pitch

Some recent cases make for the talking points of the event. On October 13, the Justice Department reportedly issued a joint border-wide operation in Ghana and Nigeria, resulting in 28 arrests, seizure of over 3.7 million accounts and pages tied to fraud operations, and over $11 million worth of assets marked for freezing. Coinbase, Binance, Meta, Google, and Microsoft all participated in the operation.

Another action, led by Brooklyn prosecutors, aimed at a multinational scam that targeted Russian speakers and seized 241 fraudulent domains and 112 servers. Meanwhile, a Scam Center Strike Force, consisting of the DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, State Department and OFAC of the Treasury Department, froze roughly $938 million worth of cryptocurrency, including $52 million worth of assets seized in one day in September.

Such seizures seem to be insignificant compared to the scale of the issue. For example, according to FinCEN, over 33,000 reports filed between September 2023 and December 2025 reported $12.7 billion in fraudulent financial transactions.

Record losses in the FBI’s 2025 report

The scale is still rising. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center handled 1,008,597 complaints during the year 2025 compared to 859,532 in the previous year. That marked an increase of about 17% and losses of about $21 billion.

The use of crypto led to over half the loss reported. According to statistics released, there were 181,565 complaints with losses totaling $11.366 billion related to crypto in 2025, which made it the highest in the entire report, and investment scams amounted to $7.2 billion. The FBI identified that the operations behind most of these crimes were based in Cambodia, Laos and Burma, using trafficked individuals as forced labor within scam facilities.

The older generation suffered most. Individuals who were 60 years and above lost about $4.43 billion due to crypto investments. There was a loss of $389 million from crypto ATMs, an increase of 58% from 2024 and $1.4 billion from recovery scams that targeted previous victims.

Why Trump’s own ventures cloud the message

These measures are concurrent with Trump’s personal crypto projects. According to Reuters’ investigations, Trump and his sons have gained $2.3 billion to their family assets thanks to their core crypto operations, which investors buying into them have lost approximately as much. The World Liberty Financial (WLFI) token sales raised more than $1.4 billion for the family, and the TRUMP (TRUMP) meme coin was able to raise around $616 million amid investors’ more than $700 million losses, according to Benzinga.

The Democratic members of Congress have suggested that the family uses the presidency for its own enrichment, which the White House has denied. Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman, stated for Reuters that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

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