Trump to spotlight crackdown on overseas crypto scams at White House event

President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to spotlight his administration's push against foreign criminal networks that lure Americans into fake crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters. The remarks form part of a broader event on cyber crime prevention, at which Trump and cabinet members are expected to point to the government's seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites and its work to shut down online impersonation scams.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are expected to attend. The event follows a March executive order in which Trump directed the Justice Department to prioritise the identification and prosecution of online scammers, and a subsequent memo directing the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies to surveil foreign criminal hacking groups.

According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, Americans filed more than one million complaints about internet scams in 2025, a 17 per cent increase on 2024, and reported record losses. Crypto-related complaints numbered 181,565, with losses of $11.366 billion, making digital assets the single most loss-heavy category in the report; crypto investment scams accounted for $7.2 billion of that total. The FBI traced much of the activity to organised criminal enterprises in Cambodia, Laos and Burma that use victims of human trafficking as forced labour inside scam compounds, contacting targets through text messages, social media, dating apps and digital ads before steering them to fake platforms showing fabricated profits.

Americans aged 60 and older bore the heaviest burden, with $4.43 billion in crypto-related losses, the FBI data shows. Crypto ATM scams produced $389 million in losses, a 58 per cent jump from 2024, and recovery scams targeting prior victims generated a further $1.4 billion. Chainalysis data from January indicated that illicit crypto addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162 per cent increase, while North Korea-linked hackers stole $2 billion over the year, including the $1.5 billion Bybit exploit.

Enforcement has produced some results: the FBI's Operation Level Up notified 3,780 victims of active crypto investment fraud in 2025 and saved an estimated $225.8 million, while a Scam Center Strike Force combining the Justice Department, FBI, Secret Service, State Department and Treasury's OFAC targets the Southeast Asian compounds. Reuters reported that Trump and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while the investors they courted have absorbed a $2.3 billion hit; in October 2025 Trump pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the Binance founder convicted after the exchange pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering programme. Democrats in Congress have accused the Trump family of using the presidency to enrich itself through its crypto ventures, a charge the White House rejects. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said that "all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people."