Pig-Butchering Scams Cost Americans $7.2 Billion in 2025. Regulators Opened 229 Cases.

In 2025, Americans told the FBI they lost $11.37 billion to cryptocurrency fraud — a record, and 22% more than the year before, according to the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) Annual Report.▸ One category inside that number did the heaviest damage on its own: "pig-butchering," the long-con investment scam that grooms a stranger for weeks before routing their savings into a fake trading platform, cost victims $7.23 billion, up 25% in a single year. The apparatus built to police investment fraud did not grow to match it. In the most recent full year for which data exists, the fifty-state network of securities regulators whose entire job is catching schemes like this one opened 229 pig-butchering investigations, combined, according to the North American Securities Administrators Association (NASAA).

IC3 breaks out cryptocurrency losses by the complainant's age, and the pattern is stark: victims 60 and older lost $4.43 billion in 2025 — 39% of all reported crypto losses — more than any other age bracket, from 44,555 complaints.▸ That is nearly double what the next-largest bracket, ages 50–59, reported losing. The FBI's Elder Fraud section of the same report shows elder losses across all fraud types, not just crypto, rose 59% year over year — the fastest-growing victim population the agency tracks, targeted with a scam that specifically exploits patience and trust.

The FBI does run a proactive countermeasure.▸ Launched in January 2024 with agents from the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, Operation Level Up mines IC3 complaint data to identify people who are currently being pig-butchered — before they've lost everything — and calls them directly. It works: in 2025 the operation notified 3,780 victims, 78% of whom didn't yet know they were being scammed, for an estimated $225.9 million in prevented losses. Thirty-eight of those calls ended with a victim referred to an FBI Victim Specialist for suicide intervention. Since its January 2024 launch, the program has notified more than 8,000 victims and saved them more than $500 million, combined.

Set those 3,780 people against the 61,559 who filed a pig-butchering complaint with IC3 that same year, and the reach comes out to about one in sixteen.▸ Set the $225.9 million saved against the $7.23 billion lost, and Operation Level Up recovered roughly three cents for every dollar the scam took.

State securities regulators are, in NASAA's own words, the local "cops on the beat" for investment fraud — the licensing and enforcement bodies with jurisdiction to investigate exactly this kind of scheme.▸ Across 49 U.S. states and territories that reported data, they opened 8,833 investigations of every kind in 2024 and secured more than $190 million in restitution. Of those, 463 involved digital assets broadly, and — in the first year NASAA's survey asked the question specifically — 229 involved pig-butchering by name, producing 19 enforcement actions. NASAA does not publish 2025 figures yet; its next enforcement report, due this fall, will be the first full year of data collected since pig-butchering losses nearly doubled.

Independent blockchain analysis suggests even IC3's record numbers understate the problem: Chainalysis's 2026 Crypto Crime Report, which traces scam proceeds on-chain rather than relying on victims to self-report, estimated $17 billion in global crypto scam losses for 2025 — a different measure, a global rather than U.S.-only scope, and a number Chainalysis itself expects to revise upward as it identifies more illicit wallets.▸ The gap between what regulators can measure and what they can prosecute runs in the same direction from every angle.

IC3 figures are self-reported complaints to a single federal portal and are widely understood to undercount actual losses; NASAA's 229-case figure covers calendar year 2024, the most recent year for which that survey has been published, and is not directly comparable year-over-year to IC3's 2025 numbers — it is cited here as the best available measure of enforcement capacity, not a same-year ratio.