President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to highlight his administration’s work against foreign criminal networks that pull Americans into fraudulent crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters.
Trump and members of his cabinet are expected to point to seized fraudulent investment websites and to efforts against online impersonation. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are all expected to attend.
The enforcement push is backed by sobering data from the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report. Complaints involving cryptocurrency reached 181,565 in 2025 with losses of $11.366 billion, a 22% increase on the previous year. Crypto investment fraud accounted for 61,559 complaints and $7.228 billion of the money, and victims over 60 lost $2.764 billion of that total. Total losses across all internet crime passed $20 billion for the first time from more than one million complaints, and the FBI now takes close to 3,000 reports a day.
The framework for the crackdown comes from Executive Order 14390, signed by Trump on March 6, which directed the attorney general to prioritize prosecutions of cyber-enabled fraud, including scam centers and sextortion schemes. The order required an action plan within 120 days and created an operational cell inside the National Coordination Center. It also directed the attorney general to recommend a Victims Restoration Program within 90 days, funded from money clawed back or forfeited from scam networks, and told the State Department to press foreign governments with sanctions, visa restrictions, trade penalties and the expulsion of complicit diplomats. A follow-up presidential memorandum on August 12 expanded the use of commercial cybersecurity firms for attribution and disruption work.
The White House event is described as a progress report rather than a new policy launch. The Scam Center Strike Force, launched by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro in Washington in November 2025, had restrained about $938 million as of September. The Secret Service Washington Field Office announced forfeiture actions covering more than $25 million across five investigations in July, with individual complaints ranging from $285,000 to $12.09 million. The largest action to date remains the $225.3 million pig-butchering seizure filed in June 2025, which recovers only about 2% of twelve months of reported damage.
In September, the Strike Force announced action against a Chinese-language Telegram marketplace that sold custom scam investment websites, money laundering services and recruitment for scam compounds. Investigators seized two wallets holding about $12 million and sought restraints on 47 more tied to laundering vendors. More than $52 million was restrained across the network, and the Treasury Department imposed sanctions the same day. The DOJ credited Tether with proactive help, noting that stablecoin proceeds are generally easier for authorities to stop before they disappear than bitcoin, which has no issuer with that power.
In a separate West Africa-focused joint operation, the DOJ reported 28 arrests and said companies including Meta, Google, Binance and Coinbase removed more than 3.7 million accounts, Pages and Groups linked to law enforcement impersonation, digital arrest extortion and crypto investment fraud. Private-sector partners identified more than $11 million in potentially freezable funds, but the release did not report any money returned to victims.
The article also highlights the gap between frozen funds and victim refunds. Frozen is not forfeited, and forfeited is not paid. Victims in the OneCoin scheme could file remission petitions only in 2026, with a June 30 deadline. Britain’s largest crypto seizure—about 61,000 bitcoin linked to Zhimin Qian’s fraud in 2018—was still unresolved in 2026, with investors in China challenging how compensation should work.
The FBI warns that enforcement announcements can fuel recovery scams. Fraudsters may claim a victim’s funds were among those recovered and demand a small fee. The FBI says it does not work with private law firms or crypto recovery services, and its staff will never contact anyone directly to ask for information or money.
Reuters also reported that Trump and his sons have added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while investors attracted to those ventures took a $2.3 billion loss. Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in October 2025 after Binance pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program. Congress has been working on a separate track, with senators introducing the SAFE Crypto Act to improve federal coordination against crypto scams.
