The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FCEN), which is under the U.S. Treasury Department, stated that after reviewing 33,900 reports of suspicious activities submitted between September 2023 and December 2025, they discovered approximately $12.7 billion in suspicious funds that were related to digital asset investment scams. These cases affected all 50 states of the United States as well as several territories.
The number of reports and the amounts involved continue to rise.
According to FinCEN, this batch of reports comes from approximately 1,300 financial institutions, covering banks, crypto companies, and securities firms. Among them, international remittance and currency service providers submitted 55% of the reports, involving an amount of about 5.5 billion US dollars, with most coming from digital asset-related enterprises; banks reported suspicious amounts totaling around 6.4 billion US dollars.
On a monthly basis, both the number of reports and the amount involved are on the rise. In October 2023, financial institutions submitted a total of 590 reports involving $485.7 million; by December 2025, the number of monthly reports had increased to 2,482, with the amount involved rising to $833.5 million.
FinCEN also points out that $12.7 billion does not equate to the actual losses incurred by the victims. Reports of suspicious activities may include unfinished transactions, duplicate reports, or errors in the data provided, hence the total amount may be overstated due to double-counting.
Most of the proceeds from fraud are transferred to USDT.
According to FinCEN, the related scams did not rely on newly issued tokens but instead used commonly available digital assets in the market. The report identified at least 22 types of crypto assets, with the more common ones including Ethereum, USDT, and USDC.
However, regardless of the assets that the victims initially purchased, chain analysis shows that the proceeds from fraud are usually converted into stablecoins and almost all of them flow towards USDT. Subsequently, they are transferred through the DeFi protocol or digital asset exchanges outside of the United States.
Some financial institutions have also discovered that the same collection addresses receive transfers from multiple victims around the same time, which provides clues for identifying connections between different cases.
Scam networks are concentrated in Southeast Asian parks.
FinCEN indicates that many related criminal organizations are located in fraud parks in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. These parks often lure people through false recruitment, then restrict their personal freedom and force them to participate in fraud activities.
The sources of funds for the victims also indicate significant loss pressures. FinCEN mentioned that some of the transfers came from pension accounts, home equity loans, second mortgages, and personal loans. There are cases where a woman transferred nearly $640,000 from her pension, and another victim lost over $1 million in just 6 months.
In recent years, US law enforcement agencies have been stepping up efforts to recover such funds. According to FinCEN, their rapid response program has intercepted $1.8 billion in funds since 2015 and recovered over $1 billion for 5,790 American victims. Previously, the US Secret Service collaborated with Coinbase to track down and recover USDT involved in the cases, and the US Department of Justice also sought to confiscate $225 million in USDT related to a fraud network in Southeast Asia.
