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 cryptocurrency investments, a White House official told Reuters.

The remarks will be delivered as part of a wider White House gathering on cybercrime prevention. According to the official, Trump and members of his cabinet intend to highlight the government's seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites and its efforts to dismantle 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. breadth of the lineup — spanning law enforcement, national security and defense roles — is itself a measure of the scale the administration now assigns to the scam-fraud problem.

Wednesday's event builds on a March executive order in which Trump directed the Justice Department to prioritize the identification and prosecution of online scammers. He followed up with a memo directing the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies to surveil foreign criminal hacking groups.

Americans Reported Record Scam Losses in 2025

The numbers behind the crackdown are grim. More than one million complaints about internet scams were filed with the FBI in 2025, a 17% increase from 2024, and reported losses reached record levels.

Crypto fraud accounted for more than half of the damage. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints and $11.366 billion in losses for 2025, making digital assets the single most loss-heavy category in the report. Crypto investment scams drained $7.2 billion of that total. Put another way, crypto generated fewer than one in five of the complaints the bureau received last year yet more than half of the losses, a disparity that shows how heavily digital-asset fraud outweighs other categories on a per-case basis.

The FBI traced much of the activity to organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia — in Cambodia, Laos and Burma — that use victims of human trafficking as forced labor inside scam compounds. Criminals make contact through text messages, social media, dating apps and digital ads before steering victims to fake platforms that display fabricated profits. When victims try to withdraw, scammers demand taxes and fees and vanish. Operating from foreign soil, these compounds sit beyond the reach of domestic U.S. policing alone, a reality reflected in the multi-agency composition of the government's response.

Americans aged 60 and older bore the heaviest burden, with $4.43 billion in crypto-related losses. Crypto ATM scams produced $389 million in losses, a 58% jump from 2024, and recovery scams that target prior victims — fraudsters posing as helpers who promise to reclaim lost money — generated another $1.4 billion.

The global picture is worse. Chainalysis data from January showed illicit crypto addresses received at least $154 billion in 2025, a 162% increase from 2024. North Korea-linked hackers stole $2 billion over the year, including the $1.5 billion Bybit exploit, the largest crypto heist on record.

Enforcement Results and Political Controversy

Enforcement has produced some solid 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. A Scam Center Strike Force combining the DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, State Department and Treasury's OFAC targets the Southeast Asian compounds. What remains to be seen is whether Wednesday's event produces new measures beyond the seizures, victim notifications and strike-force operations already underway.

According to Reuters, 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 program.

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."

This article is based on reporting by Micah Zimmerman, first published by Bitcoin Magazine.