FinCEN Ties $13B in Crypto Scam Proceeds to Overseas Criminal Networks

Nearly $13 billion in suspicious crypto activity traces back to investment scams operated from overseas compounds, FinCEN said Thursday. The Treasury bureau put the figure in a new analysis.

The review drew on 33,904 suspicious activity reports filed between September 2023 and December 2025, according to FinCEN. Roughly 1,300 institutions contributed. The bureau attributed the bulk of the schemes to “transnational criminal organizations” operating scam centers from compounds in Southeast Asia.

In practice, that means staffed compounds run the fraud. Not individuals acting alone. Much of it is pig butchering, the romance-investment variant where a victim is manipulated into buying crypto on the promise of large returns.

Money services businesses filed 55% of the reports and flagged $5.5 billion. Most of those filers were crypto exchanges. Banks filed 41%, flagging $6.4 billion. Securities firms accounted for the rest: $784.5 million.

Filings grew 10.9% per month on average. Reported sums grew faster: 18% per month. Volume climbed from 590 reports worth $485.7 million in October 2023 to 2,482 reports worth $833.5 million in December 2025.

FinCEN cautioned that the climb may partly reflect wider adoption of its search term following a 2023 alert. Totals can also double-count transfers, attempted payments, and filer errors. Even so, reported losses grew faster than the number of reports.

Scammers used at least 22 different digital assets. Ethereum, USDT, and USDC turned up most often. Invented tokens were rare. Blockchain analysis cited by FinCEN showed proceeds were nearly always swapped into stablecoins, almost exclusively Tether’s USDT, then routed through decentralized-finance protocols or exchanges outside the United States. Some firms spotted the pattern because scammers reused collection addresses across multiple victims.

Victims turned up in all 50 states. Losses were financed from retirement accounts, home-equity lines, second mortgages, and personal loans. One woman sent nearly $640,000 from her retirement fund. Another lost more than $1 million over six months.

Elder exploitation appeared in about 25% of reports. That tracks closely with the 24.4% share of the US population aged 60 and older. FinCEN concluded older adults were neither disproportionately victimized nor disproportionately robbed.

“Digital asset investment scams pose one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today,” said Gene Lange, performing the duties of Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, in the Treasury release.

FinCEN devoted a section of the report to self-harm risk. It pointed affected individuals to the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

The compounds sit mostly in Cambodia, Laos, and Burma, FinCEN said. The UN numbers staff in the hundreds of thousands, many of them trafficked through fake job adverts. Interpol has warned the model is spreading beyond Southeast Asia.

US authorities seized more than $25 million tied to such schemes this year. Since 2015, FinCEN’s Rapid Response Program has interdicted $1.8 billion. It recovered just over $1 billion for 5,790 American victims.

Separately, FBI figures counted $4.8 billion in fraud losses among Americans over 60 in 2024. Senators cited that number when introducing the GUARD Act, a bill that would fund blockchain-tracing tools for local police. The bill has not been enacted.