Treasury Found $12.7 Billion of Scam-Center Money in 33,904 Bank Reports. Annual Victim Losses Went From $907 Million to $7.2 Billion.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network published an alert on September 3 putting a number on a fraud category that has been growing for five years. Analysing 33,904 Bank Secrecy Act reports filed between September 8, 2023 and December 31, 2025, FinCEN identified roughly $12.7 billion in financial activity it links to suspected digital asset investment scams operated by scam centers based overseas.

The alert is numbered FIN-2026-Alert005. It is guidance to financial institutions, not a regulation. It does not create a new filing duty. What it does is tell banks, money services businesses and digital asset firms what the pattern looks like and how to label it when they see it.

The loss curve

FinCEN's own figures show reported victim losses from digital asset investment scams rising from $907 million in 2021 to $7.2 billion in 2025. That is roughly an eightfold increase in four years. The alert separately estimates the annual revenue of Southeast Asian scam centers in the tens of billions of dollars.

Digital asset investment scams pose one of the most significant fraud threats facing Americans today. The transnational criminal organizations behind these scams exploit both emerging technologies and human vulnerabilities, resulting in devastating financial losses for innocent American victims.

What the schemes are called, and what they are

FinCEN uses three terms interchangeably for the core scheme: cryptocurrency confidence scams, relationship investment scams, and pig butchering. The mechanics are the same. A stranger makes contact, builds a relationship over weeks or months, then introduces an investment platform that shows steady gains. Withdrawals work at first, in small amounts. They stop working when the balance is large.

The alert also covers romance scams, government impersonation schemes, and recovery scams - a second approach to people who have already lost money, offering to get it back for a fee.

The warning signs FinCEN lists

The alert groups its red flags into four categories: victim payments to scam centers, involvement of the online marketplaces where scam operations trade services, laundering techniques, and characteristics of the service providers involved. Several of them describe things a customer would notice in their own account, not just things a compliance officer would see:

• A customer being directed to buy digital assets by someone claiming to be a government official
• Transactions involving stablecoins marketed to holders as unfreezable
• Account activity resembling that of an over-the-counter broker in a customer who is not one
• Payments routed through the online guarantee marketplaces where scam operations advertise

Where the money went

One subset of the data covers ACH transfers connected to cyber scams between October 2024 and June 2026, totalling $751.6 million. FinCEN breaks the destinations down by region: $385.9 million to the Asia-Pacific, $145.7 million to Europe, $113.2 million to the Americas, $101.7 million to the Middle East and North Africa, and $5.1 million to Sub-Saharan Africa.

The alert also cites earlier analysis of the Huione Group, which it associates with roughly $4 billion in laundering between August 2021 and January 2025, of which about $300 million came from cyber scams.

What banks are being asked to do

Institutions filing a suspicious activity report on this activity are told to enter the key term FIN-2026-SCAMCENTERS in field 2, select Fraud-Other in field 34(z) with the description Scam Centers, and include technical indicators such as wallet addresses and details of the service providers involved. FinCEN also encourages voluntary information sharing between institutions under Section 314(b) of the USA PATRIOT Act.

The key term matters more than it looks. It is how FinCEN separates this activity from general fraud reporting in its own database, and it is what will make the next version of this number comparable to this one.

The consumer-facing part

Two of FinCEN's red flags translate directly. No government agency directs a member of the public to move money into digital assets - not the IRS, not a federal marshal, not a bank regulator. And a second party offering, for a fee, to recover money lost in an earlier scam is itself one of the schemes in the alert.