Crypto scams took $17 billion last year. 2026 could be even worse
2025 was a banner year for cryptocurrencies on many fronts. Global regulation eased. Stablecoins powered $46 trillion in annual transactions. And major shifts in U.S. government policy spurred wider adoption. But with that expansion came a notable bump in crypto fraud.
A new report from Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform based in New York City, estimates that $17 billion in crypto was stolen last year through fraud and scams. Impersonation scams, where criminals pretend to be trusted entities or use fake tokens or websites to trick victims into sending them crypto, were up a jaw-dropping 1,400% year over year.
And while it’s much too early to gather any conclusive data for 2026, the year got off to an inauspicious start. Earlier this month, the FBI warned about the use of Bitcoin ATMs, saying the devices are a magnet for scammers to convince people to send money (their entire life savings, in some cases) overseas. And just this week, the fintech firm Betterment confirmed that hackers had broken into its systems earlier this month and used the data to send a fraudulent crypto note to users, which funneled money to a wallet controlled by the attacker.
Meanwhile, former New York Mayor Eric Adams launched a new crypto token on Monday that he said would combat antisemitism and promote blockchain education. It quickly lost 81% of its value, bringing about accusations of a “rug pull” across the crypto community.
Chainalysis warned in its report that this could be just the beginning of another year of new highs. “As we move into 2026, we expect further convergence of scam methodologies as scammers adopt multiple tactics and technologies simultaneously,” it wrote.
Early projections by Chainalysis indicate scammers in 2025 received at least $14 billion on-chain, a transaction that occurs directly on the blockchain (compared with a speedier and cheaper but riskier off-chain transaction). That’s a big jump from last year’s initial estimate at the same time of $9.9 billion.
Ultimately, the 2024 number settled at $12 billion following recalculations. The 2025 total is projected to come in above $17 billion, as more bogus wallet addresses are uncovered in the coming months. That would make last year’s rise in crypto scam losses the biggest since 2020 to 2021, when they doubled. Subsequent years have been fairly flat, hovering between $12 billion and $13 billion.
Scams were not only happening more frequently last year, the people perpetrating them were also pocketing more each time. The average scam payment in 2025 was $2,764, a 253% increase over 2024’s $782.
“The 2025 data reveal the extent to which cryptocurrency-enabled scams are becoming more sophisticated, organized, and efficient,” Chainalysis wrote. “There are no silver bullets to tackling such entrenched, industrial-scale scamming activity, and to be effective, a multipronged response is required.”
Impersonation scams were the biggest driver of losses. Not only were the number of those sorts of cons significantly higher, but the average amount people paid to the groups behind them was up 600%. Crime syndicates in East and Southeast Asia drove many of these, the report says, with forced labor compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and other regions forcing trafficking victims to operate the scams—the most prolific of which was a phishing scam that targeted users of the E-ZPass toll collection system with a fake “outstanding toll.”
Artificial intelligence is becoming a weapon of crypto scammers as well. The technology’s ability to leverage large language models and deepfake technology makes the schemes more realistic. As a result, scams that used AI vendors to create on-chain links averaged a haul of $3.2 million, compared with $719,000 for those without.
While fraud was on the rise last year, there were some victories by law enforcement. Police in the U.K. recovered 61,000 in stolen Bitcoin. And TerraUS and Luna crypto developer Do Kwon, a Stanford graduate known by some as “the cryptocurrency king,” pleaded guilty in August to fraud charges stemming from the collapse of Terraform Labs, the Singapore-based firm he cofounded in 2018. Customers lost $40 billion in that fraud, a figure that exceeded the total losses of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. Kwon was sentenced to 15 years in prison.