Crypto Scammers Stole At Least $14 Billion in 2025 — The Worst Year Ever
Blockchain's dark side just posted record profits.
Forget the bull runs and institutional adoption headlines — 2025 saw digital asset thieves pull off the heist of the century. While retail investors chased the next moonshot, sophisticated bad actors were quietly engineering the largest capital extraction in crypto history.
The $14 Billion Wake-Up Call
That staggering figure isn't a market correction or a failed protocol. It's pure, unadulterated theft. The mechanisms ranged from old-school phishing to complex smart contract exploits, proving the ecosystem's security maturity still lags far behind its financial ambition. Regulators are scrambling, but the cat's already out of the bag — and it's wearing a hoodie.
Security Theater vs. Real Protection
Exchanges touted new compliance suites. Wallet providers hyped biometric locks. Yet the money kept vanishing. The narrative that 'crypto is for criminals' gets a fresh coat of paint with every nine-figure hack, drowning out legitimate innovation. It's the ultimate marketing problem: how do you sell decentralization when the biggest news is centralized fraud?
The Institutional Irony
Here's the cynical finance jab: traditional banks lose more to fraud annually, but they've mastered the art of quietly socializing the losses. Crypto's transparency is its own PR nightmare — every theft is a public, on-chain spectacle. Wall Street's old guard must be chuckling into their martinis.
The path forward isn't more gatekeepers. It's better code, relentless education, and a community that values security as much as it does gains. The $14 billion lesson? Build faster, or keep funding the world's most expensive bug bounty program.
Criminals turn to AI for bigger paydays
The adoption of artificial intelligence is the primary source of thieves’ increased profits. According to research from Chainalysis, scammers adopting AI technology are earning over $3.2 million per operation, whereas those using traditional techniques only generate about $719,000.
The average daily income of fraudsters with AI capabilities is $4,838, more than ten times the $518 earned by businesses without AI.
In July 2025, J.P. Morgan released a report that demonstrated how thieves are now using deepfake speech and video in romance scams and phony investment schemes called “pig butchering.” Thieves are able to complete more transactions faster than in the past since these convincing fakes make it almost impossible for victims to realize they are being duped.
In December 2025, Brooklyn prosecutors charged 23-year-old Ronald Spektor with stealing $16 million from Coinbase users. The success of the scam is suggested by the claimed $250,000 in incentives given to a former Coinbase customer support employee who revealed information about 70,000 customers. Scammers used this insider information to pose as “support agents” and deceive victims into moving money into “safe” wallets that they actually controlled by making them believe their accounts were in danger.
Police fight back
Law enforcement agencies around the world are stepping up their efforts to keep pace. Will Lyne, head of the Metropolitan Police’s cybercrime unit, said organized crime is operating at a “pace and scale” unlike anything seen before—but emphasized that international cooperation is starting to pay off.
“Through specialist capabilities and the effective use of digital intelligence,” Lyne told me, “we’re in a much stronger position to identify criminal networks, seize illicit assets, and disrupt activity that harms our communities.”
Still, data from 2025 shows the challenge is growing. As AI becomes a widely used tool for fraud, it’s increasingly difficult to tell the difference between legitimate online services and sophisticated criminal traps.
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