President Trump to Highlight Crackdown on Overseas Crypto Scams

President Donald Trump will use a White House event on Wednesday to spotlight his administration’s push against foreign criminal networks that lure Americans into fake crypto investments, a White House official told Reuters.

The remarks are part of a broader event on cyber crime prevention. Trump and members of his cabinet plan to point to the government’s seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites and its work to shut down online impersonation scams, the official reportedly said.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are expected to attend.

The event follows a March executive order in which Trump directed the Justice Department to prioritize the identification and prosecution of online scammers. He followed that with a memo directing the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies to surveil foreign criminal hacking groups.

Record losses in internet and crypto scams

The numbers behind the crackdown are grim. Americans filed more than one million complaints with the FBI about internet scams in 2025, a 17% increase from 2024, and reported record losses.

Crypto fraud accounted for more than half of that damage. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 181,565 crypto-related complaints and $11.366 billion in losses for 2025, making digital assets the single most loss-heavy category in the report. Crypto investment scams drained $7.2 billion of that total.