President Donald Trump said on Oct. 21 that his administration had “frozen nearly $1B of cybercurrency tied to foreign scammers,” using a White House roundtable on cybercrime to promote its push against overseas fraud rings that target Americans.
Trump also claimed the government had prevented at least $1.6 billion in losses this year and had “shut down 500+ fraudulent websites,” according to a post from the White House’s Rapid Response account. At the event, he said federal agents had been able to warn “over 10,000 Americans targeted for victimization,” Reuters reported. FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau had dismantled 20 scam compounds around the world, according to the same report.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said the Justice Department is no longer leaving these cases to individual U.S. Attorneys’ offices. “Because of the magnitude of this issue, it demands a nationwide response,” he said in remarks the department shared on X. He described a “newly established cyber-enabled scam initiative,” run by the Criminal Division, that “deploys dozens of prosecutors” across all 94 of those offices.
The White House post did not say where its “nearly $1B” figure came from. The Justice Department’s Scam Center Strike Force lists $938,460,156.82 in cryptocurrency restrained, on a page last updated Oct. 15. That number counts crypto held back by authorities, which is not the same as money paid back to victims. The strike force was set up in 2025 by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., together with the Criminal Division, the FBI and the Secret Service, with a focus on crypto fraud run out of Southeast Asia.
The roundtable came less than two weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections, with early voting already open in many states.
Trump’s Executive Order 14390, signed March 6, told the attorney general to “continue to prioritize prosecutions” of people engaged in cyber-enabled fraud, including scam centers. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said at the roundtable that Trump had “effectively declared cyber warfare against the cyber criminals.”
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 1 million internet-crime complaints in 2025, up about 17% from the 859,532 it logged in 2024.
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