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Americans Lost $11 Billion to Crypto Scams Last Year. Most of It Ended at a Gas Station

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Security

Americans reported more than $11.366 billion in cryptocurrency losses in 2025, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, and the agency logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints overall. A smaller slice of that damage ran through crypto kiosks: 13,460 complaints tied to the machines and $389 million lost, with people 60 and older accounting for about two-thirds of the total. “By the time a victim is at a kiosk, they are already deep in the scammer’s trance,” said CertiK’s Stefan Muehlbauer, as cities and regulators started treating the kiosks less like convenience tech and more like a public-safety problem. Spokane, Washington, moved to ban all crypto ATMs, while Washington, DC’s attorney general sued Athena Bitcoin over allegations that 93% of its early DC transactions were fraud.

A record year for crypto fraud, and a familiar pattern

The new number to sit with is this: Americans reported losing more than $11.366 billion to crypto-related scams in 2025. The figure comes from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which said the IC3 2025 Annual Report was released on April 6, 2026.

The same report logged 181,565 cryptocurrency-related complaints, and said crypto losses made up more than half of the $20.877 billion in total internet-crime losses IC3 tracked in 2025. That is the first time the bureau’s reported losses cleared $20 billion, a threshold that makes the category harder to dismiss as a niche problem.

Investment scams dwarf the kiosk problem

It is tempting to picture the scam as a shady machine in the corner of a convenience store, but the largest line item was crypto investment fraud: $7.2 to $7.228 billion across roughly 61,559 complaints, up 25% from 2024. That is where a lot of the money goes missing, often after weeks of grooming and persuasion.

Still, kiosks are becoming their own story. IC3 counted 13,460 kiosk-related complaints in 2025, tied to $389 million in losses, and the losses jumped 58% year over year, per the FBI’s kiosk complaint data. In that subset, victims 60 and older accounted for $257.4 million across 6,188 complaints, roughly two-thirds of the category’s losses.

When cities and attorneys general step in

Some local governments have decided the machines are not worth the headaches. Spokane, Washington, became the largest municipality in the U.S. to ban all crypto ATMs inside city limits after a unanimous vote, with the ban implemented in June 2025. Detective Tim Schwering summed up what pushed it forward: “Cases started flowing my way where people were getting ripped off by cryptocurrency machines.”

Spokane Valley followed with its own unanimous ban in May 2026, citing at least 10 documented cases of significant financial loss and 1 confirmed suicide linked to kiosk-related scams. Meanwhile in Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued Athena Bitcoin Inc. on September 8, 2025, alleging 93% of deposits at the company’s 7 local Bitcoin ATMs were scam-driven in its first 5 months operating, plus undisclosed fees up to 26% and refusals to refund victims, per the lawsuit announcement.

The prevention work, and the sheer footprint of the machines

The FBI is also leaning into outreach. Operation Level Up notified 3,780 potential victims in 2025 and is credited with preventing an estimated $225.9 million in losses that year, part of more than $500 million prevented since the program launched in 2024.

That effort has to scale across a very American reality: as of mid-2025, the U.S. hosted roughly 30,433 Bitcoin ATMs, and a CNBC report in January 2026 put about 80% of the world’s bitcoin teller machines on U.S. soil.