Americans were duped out of more than $5.6 billion last year through fraud schemes involving cryptocurrency, the FBI said in a report released Monday that shows a 45% jump in losses from 2022.
The FBI received nearly 70,000 complaints in 2023 by victims of financial fraud involving bitcoin, ether and other cryptocurrencies, according to the FBI.
The most rampant scheme was investment fraud, which accounted for $3.96 billion of the losses.
“The decentralized nature of cryptocurrency, the speed of irreversible transactions, and the ability to transfer value around the world make cryptocurrency an attractive vehicle for criminals, while creating challenges to recover stolen funds,” wrote Michael Nordwall, assistant director of the FBI’s criminal investigative division.
Scammers will often make contact through dating apps or social media to build trust over several weeks or months before suggesting cryptocurrency investing, the FBI said.
Once the relationship is built, they convince the targets to use fake websites or apps to invest their money, sometimes even allowing the victims to withdraw small amounts of money early on to make it seem legitimate.
In some cases, those victims are then targeted by bogus businesses claiming they will help the victim recover the cryptocurrency they lost, according to the FBI.
FBI officials say Americans of all ages can be a target of such scams, and should be extremely cautious when presented with investment opportunities from people they’ve never met in real life.
The FBI report read in part:
”Dear Reader: As the use of cryptocurrency in the global financial system continues to grow, so too does its use by criminal actors. In 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received more than 69,000 complaints from the public regarding financial fraud involving the use of cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin, ether, or tether. Estimated losses with a nexus to cryptocurrency totaled more than $5.6 billion. While the number of cryptocurrency-related complaints represents only about 10 percent of the total financial fraud complaints, the losses associated with these complaints account for almost 50 percent of the total losses.
Complaints filed in 2023 show that criminal actors exploit cryptocurrencies in each scheme category tracked by IC3. The exploitation of cryptocurrency was most pervasive in investment scams, where losses accounted for almost 71 percent of all losses related to cryptocurrency. Call center frauds, including tech/customer support scams and government impersonation scams, accounted for about 10 percent of losses associated with cryptocurrency.”
