Trump to Tout Crypto Scam Crackdown at White House Event Wednesday
President Donald Trump will highlight his administration’s crackdown on overseas crypto scam networks at a White House event Wednesday.
What the Crackdown Actually Involves
A White House official told Reuters that Trump and cabinet members, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Todd Blanche, will showcase seizures of fraudulent crypto investment websites and efforts to stop online impersonation scams.
Recent enforcement numbers back that focus up:
- Oct. 13: the Justice Department announced an international operation that led to 28 arrests in Ghana and Nigeria, removed more than 3.7 million scam-linked accounts and pages, and identified over $11 million in potentially freezable funds, with Coinbase, Binance, Meta, Google and Microsoft all taking part.
- Brooklyn prosecutors separately disrupted 241 scam domains tied to a multinational crypto scheme targeting Russian speakers, seizing 112 servers in the process
- Scam Center Strike Force: a broader effort has now restrained roughly $938 million in crypto, including $52 million restrained in a single day in September alone
The scale of the underlying problem dwarfs those recoveries. FinCEN identified $12.7 billion in suspected scam-related financial activity across more than 33,000 reports filed between September 2023 and December 2025.
The FBI separately reported Americans filed over 1 million internet crime complaints in 2025, with crypto investment fraud accounting for more than $7.2 billion of those losses.
Why Trump’s Own Crypto Ties Complicate the Message
A Reuters investigation found Trump and his sons added at least $2.3 billion to their family fortune through crypto ventures, while investors who bought in lost roughly the same amount.
World Liberty Financial (CRYPTO: WLFI) contributed the largest share, directing more than $1.4 billion in token sales to the family, while the TRUMP (CRYPTO: TRUMP) meme coin brought in about $616 million for them against more than $700 million in investor losses.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Reuters that “all actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”
Benzinga previously reported that U.S. authorities sanctioned two men tied to a World Liberty-linked resort project in East Timor during a separate crackdown on overseas scam networks. World Liberty said it had no knowledge of or relationship with either individual.
Trump also pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in October 2025, after Zhao’s company pleaded guilty to failing to maintain anti-money laundering controls.
He signed a March executive order directing the DOJ to prioritize prosecuting online scammers, then later tasked the Department of Homeland Security with working alongside private companies to track foreign hacking groups.
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