White House: Trump Says Nearly $1B in Scam Crypto Is Frozen

On Wednesday 21 October 2026, in the East Room of the White House, President Donald Trump opened a roundtable on protecting American families and seniors from cybercrime with a number. "Federal law enforcement has also frozen nearly $1 billion of cyber currency... tied to foreign scammers," he said. "Cyber currency" was his word for cryptocurrency, digital money that moves between accounts over the internet without passing through a bank.

Beside him were Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Trump said federal law enforcement had warned "over 10,000 Americans targeted for victimization" and that "we prevented $1.6 billion in losses at least this year." He put Americans' reported cybercrime losses for 2025 at more than $20 billion.

The exact count is on a Justice Department web page. The Scam Center Strike Force, a unit run from the US Attorney's Office in Washington, DC, says it has restrained $938,460,156.82 (page updated 15 October). A poster at the event, described in the White House press pool report, showed the same $938 million and 503 fraudulent web domains. Before the event a White House official gave CoinDesk a third figure: about $833 million in crypto tied to overseas scams had been halted.

No speaker gave a figure for how much of that money has reached the people it was taken from, according to reports of the event, and the Justice Department has not published one.

The scam behind the money

The Strike Force's target is pig butchering, a fraud run from guarded compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos. The name translates the Chinese phrase sha zhu pan: fatten the pig before the slaughter. A stranger sends a text or a dating-app message, becomes a friend or a romantic partner over several weeks, then mentions a crypto trading platform that has been making them money. The platform is fake. It looks like an online brokerage account and shows growing profits, but every deposit goes straight to the scammers. When the victim tries to withdraw, they are told to pay a "tax" or a "fee" first, then another, until they stop paying.

Many of the people typing those messages are victims too. US prosecutors and the United Nations have described compounds staffed by workers lured with fake job adverts, stripped of their passports and beaten if they refuse to work.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 181,565 complaints involving crypto in 2025, with reported losses of $11.37 billion, up 22% on 2024. Crypto investment fraud, the category pig butchering falls into, was the largest single source of losses at $7.2 billion. All internet crime reported to the IC3 cost Americans about $20.9 billion, which matches the "more than $20 billion" Trump cited.

How the crackdown works

The Strike Force was launched in November 2025 by Jeanine Pirro, the US Attorney for the District of Columbia, with the Justice Department's Criminal Division, the FBI and the Secret Service. Crypto payments leave a public trail, so investigators follow a victim's money through wallets (accounts) and exchanges (crypto brokers) and get it locked. Much of it sits in stablecoins, digital dollars that their issuers can freeze; prosecutors have thanked Tether, the company behind the USDT stablecoin, in several cases.

On 23 April 2026 the Strike Force said it had restrained more than $701 million and taken down 503 web addresses dressed up as investment platforms. On 9 September it restrained $52 million in a single day in an action against Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language market on the messaging app Telegram that sold services to the compounds. That took its total to about $938 million.

A separate FBI and Secret Service programme, Operation Level Up, works from the other end. Since January 2024 it has used the same money trail to find Americans who are being scammed and call them before they send more. By March 2026 it had contacted 8,935 people, 77% of whom did not know they were being scammed, and estimated it had saved them $562,726,245. It referred 93 of them to an FBI victim specialist for suicide intervention.

At the roundtable Blanche pointed to April's raids, in which "the FBI and the Dubai Police announced the arrests of at least 276 individuals". Patel spoke about Operation Blackout, the FBI's name for its campaign against the compounds, and said it had demolished more than 20 of them. In an 8 October post on X he had put Blackout's totals at roughly $17 billion seized and $670 million in losses prevented.

Frozen is not refunded

"Restrained" is the first of several steps. It works like a court order freezing a brokerage account: nobody can sell or move what is in it, but the account has not changed hands. Next comes forfeiture, a court case in which the government asks a judge to make it the legal owner; anyone with a claim can object, including the people accused. Only after forfeiture can victims apply through remission, a Justice Department process in which they must prove their losses. Payouts often come years later and are often smaller than what was lost.

In March 2026, for example, the Justice Department said it would return about $470,735 to two people in Maine who had sent more than $800,000 to scammers in 2022. The largest such case is a fight over about 127,271 bitcoin that US prosecutors tie to Cambodia's Prince Group, which denies running scams. In September a federal judge in Brooklyn struck or refused the claims of nine people who said they were scam victims, because they had not shown that their money was in those coins.

Executive Order 14390, which Trump signed on 6 March 2026, told the Attorney General to recommend within 90 days a "Victims Restoration Program" to send seized and forfeited money directly to victims. By 22 October no launch of such a programme had been announced. The Strike Force's page says its seizure team is "focused on recovering stolen funds and returning them to victims."

Reuters and the Trump family's crypto ventures

On the morning of the roundtable, a Reuters preview of the event repeated the findings of a Reuters investigation published on 9 June 2026: since Trump returned to office in January 2025, he and his sons had added at least $2.3 billion to the family fortune from their main crypto ventures, while more than a million people who invested in those ventures had net losses of about $2.3 billion at the end of April 2026.

The four ventures were World Liberty Financial, a crypto company that sells WLFI tokens (digital coupons that trade like shares but give no ownership of the company); the $TRUMP meme coin, a token traded on popularity rather than on any business; American Bitcoin, a listed bitcoin-mining company; and ALT5 Sigma, a listed company that holds World Liberty tokens and was renamed AI Financial Corp in April 2026. The largest share of the family's gains came from World Liberty token sales, 75% of which go to a Trump family entity. Reuters built its figures from blockchain records and thousands of pages of company filings, and said more than a dozen accounting and crypto experts found its estimates reasonable. The investor figure includes paper losses on holdings not yet sold.

Reuters quoted White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly: "All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people." In June she told Reuters that neither the president nor his family has ever engaged, or ever will engage, in conflicts of interest. A World Liberty spokesman, David Wachsman, said its tokens are "not an investment product" and objected to mixing realised and unrealised losses. American Bitcoin said it "holds itself to rigorous standards." The Trump Organization, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. did not respond to Reuters.

The two sets of numbers count different things. The Strike Force's $938 million is money traced to criminal networks and held by the government. Reuters' $2.3 billion of investor losses is the fall in value of tokens and shares that people bought from the ventures or on the market. Both were in the news on 21 October.