New figures put a number on the crypto scam industry

On September 3, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a US Treasury agency, published an analysis of suspected crypto investment scams. It looked at 33,904 reports filed by US financial institutions between September 2023 and the end of 2025, and tied roughly $12.7 billion in financial activity to those suspected scams.

The agency notes that people of every age were targeted, across all 50 US states and several territories.

If you are dealing with this right now, Still Online is not an emergency service. If you are in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. For reporting routes and support where you live, see Get help.

Why the number is bigger than it looks

That $12.7 billion figure comes from one country's banking system, and only from reports that financial institutions chose to file about activity they found suspicious. It does not count money sent from other countries. It does not count people who never told their bank. It does not count anyone who realized too late that the money had already left the system.

So the honest way to read it is not as a total. It is as a partial view from one window, and the view from that one window is enormous.

What is actually behind it

FinCEN describes these frauds under several names you may have seen: pig butchering, romance baiting, cryptocurrency confidence schemes. The pattern the reports show is consistent. Someone approaches using an assumed name and a false identity, presenting as a potential romantic partner, a new friend, or a new business contact. Websites and mobile apps are built to imitate real investment services.

What matters is the machinery underneath that, and this is the part most people never hear about.

FinCEN found that scam center operators buy their tools on what it calls guarantee marketplaces, online markets selling services like bulk account creation, phishing and money laundering. They hire professional money launderers to set up accounts and shell companies, then move the proceeds through networks of money mules and stablecoin transfers to exchanges abroad.

Interpol's Global Financial Fraud Threat Assessment, published in March 2026, adds another layer. It found that AI-assisted fraud is around 4.5 times more profitable than older methods, and that systems now exist which can plan and run an entire fraud campaign with little human input. It also found sextortion being deliberately folded into romance and investment scams, often using scripts and AI-generated content.

If that last part is what happened to you, our guide on what to do when someone threatens to share private photos covers the practical steps.

Not one country's problem, and not one region's

FinCEN attributes most of these operations to criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia running industrial-scale compounds. That is where the model started, but it has not stayed there.

In a joint statement in July 2026, UNODC and the European Union said the scam center model has spread to the Middle East, Africa, Eastern and Southeastern Europe, South Asia, the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and that no region is immune. By late 2025, people identified as trafficking victims inside these operations came from nearly 80 nationalities.

United Nations estimates put more than 300,000 people in Southeast Asia alone in a position where they are being forced to carry out online fraud. They are recruited through fake job ads, and UNODC has warned that they are often treated as offenders rather than as the trafficking victims they are.

That is worth sitting with for a moment. The person who messaged you may have been reading from a script, in a building they could not leave, for people who owned their passport.

This does not change what was done to you, and you do not owe anybody sympathy you do not have. But it does change the shape of the thing. You were not outwitted by one clever individual. You were processed by an industry that employs hundreds of thousands of people, buys its tools wholesale, and runs on scripts refined across millions of conversations.

If this happened to you

FinCEN's guidance to victims is to contact your financial institution immediately. Speed matters more than anything else in the first hours, because once funds move through exchanges abroad the practical options narrow fast.

Then report it where you live. Reporting routes vary by country, and the Get help page is the place to start.

And one thing that is not procedural. Investment fraud carries a particular kind of shame, because people assume the victim was greedy or careless. The figures above are the answer to that. This is an industry with a supply chain, a labor force and a research budget. Being targeted by it says nothing about your judgment.

As Interpol's Secretary General put it when the assessment was published, the cost of financial crime is not only money. It is people's savings, their dignity, and sometimes their life.

Still Online is not an emergency service. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number. For reporting routes and support services in your country, see Get help.