Cryptocurrency is now the single largest loss category the FBI tracks for older Americans, bigger than the report’s separate figures for investment fraud, romance scams and tech-support cons. In its newly released 2025 Internet Crime Report, the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center found that people 60 and older filed 42,271 complaints referencing cryptocurrency last year, reporting $4.35 billion in losses. No other single line item on the report’s list of elder-fraud categories comes close to that dollar figure.
What “42,271 Crypto Complaints” Actually Covers
IC3 tags a complaint “Cryptocurrency” whenever the scam involved digital currency in some form, regardless of how the scheme started. That covers romance scams that pivot into a fake crypto investment platform, job scams that require a “training deposit” paid in crypto, government-impersonation calls demanding crypto payment, and the crypto ATM/kiosk incidents covered elsewhere in the report. According to the 2025 Internet Crime Report, people 60 and older filed exactly 42,271 of those complaints in 2025, with combined losses of $4,347,081,557 — the figures behind the headline.
That total sits inside a broader elder-fraud picture that grew fast in 2025. IC3 counted 201,266 complainants age 60 and older overall, reporting roughly $7.7 billion in losses across every fraud type, up 37% from 2024. Cryptocurrency-tagged complaints alone made up more than half of that entire elder-fraud dollar total, more than every other type of scam IC3 tracks for that age group combined.
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How “Pig Butchering” Actually Works
The FBI’s cryptocurrency investment fraud guidance lays out the scheme step by step, and it rarely starts with an obvious pitch. Contact often begins on a dating site, through a text claiming to be a wrong number, or in a social media message, and the scammer spends weeks building a relationship — expressing romantic interest, mirroring a victim’s life circumstances, or claiming shared hardships — before ever mentioning money. Once trust is established, the scammer introduces a cryptocurrency “investment platform” and often lets the victim withdraw an early profit to prove it’s real. Losses accelerate once the victim is fully invested: when they try to withdraw everything, the platform demands invented “taxes” or “fees” to unlock the funds, and the account stays frozen no matter how much more the victim pays.
A large share of the $4.35 billion total traces back to this exact pattern. The report’s own age breakdown for cryptocurrency investment fraud specifically shows 13,685 complaints from people 60 and older in 2025, with $2,763,921,910 in reported losses — the largest single piece of the broader crypto total, and consistent with investment fraud being the costliest crime type IC3 tracks for older Americans overall.
Operation Level Up: the FBI’s Response to “Pig Butchering”
The bureau’s main countermeasure is Operation Level Up, a joint effort with the U.S. Secret Service that proactively identifies people who are still in the middle of a cryptocurrency investment scam and calls or emails them before they lose more money. As of December 2025, the operation had notified 8,103 victims, 77% of whom did not yet realize they were being scammed, with an estimated $511,511,288 in losses prevented. The page describes cases where victims were in the process of liquidating a 401(k), selling a home, or taking out a loan to keep feeding the same fraudulent platform before the FBI reached them. Agents identify themselves only through an “@fbi.gov” email address or a verifiable field-office callback, precisely because scammers impersonate the operation itself to run a second scam on the same victim.
Seniors Carry a Bigger Loss Share Than Complaint Share
Nationally, IC3 recorded 181,565 cryptocurrency complaints in 2025, totaling $11,366,669,732 in losses. People 60 and older made up about 23% of that complaint count but nearly 38% of the dollar losses — a gap that shows up across the report’s other categories too, where older victims tend to lose more per incident than younger age groups filing the same type of complaint. The FBI’s April 2026 announcement of the report called cryptocurrency-related complaints among the costliest it tracked in a year when total cyber-enabled fraud losses approached $21 billion nationwide.
Reporting Losses Even After the Money Is Gone
Both FBI resources are blunt about what to do if you suspect you’re already involved: stop sending money immediately, never pay a “tax” or “fee” to unlock a frozen account, and don’t pay anyone who contacts you afterward promising to recover lost crypto for a fee — that follow-up contact is typically a second scam targeting the same victim list. File a report at IC3.gov even if the funds are unrecoverable, including any wallet addresses, transaction IDs and screenshots of communication with the scammer. Reports feed the same system that lets the FBI identify other victims tied to the same platform or wallet address, which is how Operation Level Up has been able to reach people before their losses grow further.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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