Unpopular Opinion: Crypto Scam Victims Aren't Stupid

At a White House cybercrime event on Oct. 22, the Trump administration put a number on its fight against overseas crypto fraud: about $833 million in fraudulent crypto transactions halted, according to a White House official who briefed CoinDesk ahead of the event. The same official said the Homeland Security Task Force has seized 503 fake crypto investment websites and notified nearly nine thousand crypto scam victims that they were being targeted. The Treasury Department formed a multi-agency Scam Center Strike Force last November to go after so-called pig-butchering operations run out of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines. CoinDesk reported that crypto-related scams have stolen tens of billions of dollars from U.S. citizens.

The scale of the theft

Reuters reporting on the crackdown put the headline figure next to the wider damage: Americans filed more than a million complaints about internet scams with the FBI last year, up seventeen percent from 2024, and reported the highest losses the agency has ever recorded. Crypto is a huge share of that. FBI data logged roughly one hundred eighty-two thousand crypto complaints in 2025 and $11.37 billion in U.S. crypto fraud losses, with crypto investment scams alone draining $7.2 billion of that total. And those numbers only count the crypto scam victims who actually report. The scam centers behind much of it are not lone hackers. Treasury described them as widespread and well-funded organized-crime operations, according to CoinDesk's account of the department's November announcement, and the U.S. has sanctioned some of the websites and infrastructure the networks rely on.

How the scam actually works

"Pig butchering" is the crime world's term for a romance-investment con, and the name describes the method: fatten the target with trust, then slaughter their savings. It usually starts with a wrong-number text or a match on a dating app. Over weeks of daily conversation, the stranger becomes a confidant, sometimes a romantic partner, and eventually mentions a crypto platform where they claim to be making serious money.

The victim puts in a small amount and watches fabricated profits roll in on a slick dashboard the scammers control. Encouraged, they deposit more, sometimes tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. The trap snaps shut at the withdrawal screen: fake tax bills and liquidity fees appear, and when the money runs out, the person and the platform both disappear. Kerberus, citing reporting by CNB, explains that these scams succeed because they exploit human psychology more than technology. Nobody is hacked. Victims are persuaded and emotionally groomed over weeks into decisions that feel logical at the time, and by the time crypto scam victims realize the dashboard is fake, the damage is done.

AARP documented what that looks like at its worst for crypto scam victims. Dennis Jones, 82, met a woman who called herself Jessie on Facebook and chatted with her for months. She talked him into a major crypto investment that was a complete fraud. Jones lost his life savings, and after the money was gone, he died by suicide. His daughter Laura said on AARP's The Perfect Scam podcast that there was not enough money left even to pay for his headstone. AARP calls the crime "financial grooming," and notes that the frontline scammers in these networks are often themselves victims of human trafficking, forced to run the cons from scam compounds.

Shame is doing the scammers' work

AARP's study found that nearly one in ten adults over fifty has been asked to send money or get involved in a crypto investment by someone they met through an online romance. Adults between 50 and 64 were more than twice as likely to be targeted as adults 65 and older, and fifty-five percent of crypto scam victims never reported the crime, most likely because they felt embarrassed or ashamed. That last number is the one that should bother everyone. Crypto scam victims stay silent, and silence is exactly what a scam network needs: no report means no warning to the next target and nothing for investigators to build a case from.

Here is the unpopular opinion: the mockery is part of the con. Every "how could anyone fall for that" comment makes the next crypto scam victim less likely to speak up. People get fleeced by professionals who do this all day from industrial-scale call centers, and the response is to laugh at the mark. That is backwards. Being conned by a professional criminal is not a character flaw, and treating it like one keeps the pipeline of new victims full. Young people are not exempt, either. The idea that growing up online makes you immune to manipulation is a myth, as the data on Gen Z falling for cyberattacks shows, and romance scams have already found their way into AI relationships too.

The crackdown numbers are real progress. Seizing hundreds of websites and freezing hundreds of millions in stolen crypto takes infrastructure offline faster than the networks can rebuild it. But new websites are cheap, and new victims are plentiful as long as admitting you were scammed feels worse than the scam itself. Crypto scam victims are not stupid. They are the product of a system that grooms them for months and then shames them into silence. The fastest way to starve the scam centers is to make reporting the crime easier than hiding it.