Trump to tout the crypto scam crackdown: $833 million restrained, none shown returned to victims

President Donald Trump is due to host a cybercrime roundtable at the White House on Wednesday 21 October 2026, with the crypto scam crackdown at its centre. A White House official told Reuters that Trump will highlight the seizure of fraudulent crypto investment websites run by foreign criminal networks and the push against online impersonation scams. The headline number in the preview is about $833 million in crypto restrained. No public figure shows any of that money returned to victims.

A White House official told NewsNation the roundtable would take place on Wednesday afternoon. No start time was published, and Trump is also due at a campaign rally at Clemson University in South Carolina the same day, NBC News reported. When this piece was filed, at 16:50 UTC, no outlet had reported anything said in the room, and the White House had posted no statement or fact sheet on the event. What follows is the record the roundtable draws on, not an account of it. What Trump and his officials will say, and whether they announce anything new, is not known.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche are expected to attend, according to Reuters and Bitcoin Magazine. Reuters also lists chief of staff Susie Wiles, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. Most of what is on show is already in motion: an executive order signed in March, a Justice Department strike force set up in November 2025, sanctions on scam infrastructure in Southeast Asia and the largest crypto forfeiture case the department has ever filed.

“President Trump is unleashing every available tool to stop foreign-based, organized criminal organizations that exploit Americans in cyberspace,” the White House official said, in remarks reported by iHeartRadio and NBC News.

What the White House will present on the crypto scam crackdown

The agenda covers more than crypto. Ransomware, phishing, sextortion and financial fraud are all on the list, iHeartRadio reported, with seniors, children and low-income families named as the people most often targeted. The White House puts the cost of cybercrime to American families and businesses at more than $50 billion, a figure it did not break down.

For crypto users the relevant part is the scam-centre campaign. The preview points to four results, as iHeartRadio listed them: more than 500 fraudulent crypto investment websites seized, about $833 million in crypto restrained, nearly 9,000 Americans identified and warned while they were being defrauded, and an estimated $562 million in losses avoided thanks to those warnings. CoinDesk, citing the official, puts the website count at 503 and says the seizures came under the Homeland Security Task Force.

That website number is not new. The Justice Department announced the seizure of 503 scam websites dressed up as investment platforms on 23 April 2026, along with a Telegram channel that recruited workers for a Cambodian compound.

Two things are missing from the preview. There is no amount returned to victims, and there is no new target. Crypto.news noted at 11:05 UTC that the administration had given no new seizure total and named no new criminal organizations ahead of the event. Whether Trump or his cabinet will add new sanctions, seizures or money for victims was unknown when this piece was filed.

$833 million or $938 million: two totals and no explanation

The number in the White House preview is lower than the one the Justice Department has been publishing for weeks. The Scam Center Strike Force page on justice.gov, last updated on 15 October 2026, says its crypto seizure team has restrained $938,460,156.82 from scam-centre schemes. A statement from Representative Dan Meuser on 9 September quoted the department giving the same total, about $938 million, after the Xinbi action described below.

The Strike Force total has climbed in steps. On 23 April 2026 the Justice Department reported more than $700 million restrained and 503 scam websites seized. In July, after announcing more than $25 million in seizures across five investment-scam cases, federal prosecutors put the total above $800 million, crypto.news reported. The Xinbi restraints of more than $52 million in September brought it to about $938 million.

So the $833 million in Wednesday’s preview is about $105 million below a figure the Justice Department published in September and still shows today. Neither the White House nor the department has explained the gap. One possible reading is that the two numbers count different things: the preview credits the Homeland Security Task Force, while the $938 million belongs to the Strike Force run by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. That is a reading, not a fact. Until an official document reconciles them, the event figure should be treated as unconfirmed.

How much is frozen, and how much reaches victims

“Restrained” is a legal word with a narrow meaning. The coins are frozen, usually by a court order served on an exchange or a stablecoin issuer, while prosecutors try to prove they come from crime. They do not belong to the government yet, and they do not go back to the people who lost them yet.

To return money, the department has to win forfeiture in court, then trace each coin to an identified victim, then run a remission process in which victims file claims. Each step can take months, and large cases take years. The Strike Force page says its crypto team is “focused on recovering stolen funds and returning them to victims” but gives no process, timeline or amount returned so far. We found no public figure for money actually paid back to scam victims under this campaign.

The March executive order does not change that. It asks the Attorney General to recommend a Victims Restoration Program that would return seized and forfeited funds, according to the White House fact sheet of 6 March 2026. The order gave the Attorney General 90 days, until early June, to send that recommendation to the President. We found no public report that it was sent or of what it proposed. A recommendation is not a programme, and the order itself says it creates no enforceable rights.

The 127,271 bitcoin are a separate case

The biggest pot of scam-linked crypto in US hands is not in either total. On 14 October 2025 the Justice Department unsealed an indictment in the Eastern District of New York against Chen Zhi, chairman of Cambodia’s Prince Holding Group, for wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy tied to forced-labour scam compounds running “pig butchering” schemes. Alongside it came a civil forfeiture complaint for about 127,271 bitcoin, worth about $15 billion at the time, which the department called “the largest forfeiture action in the history of the Department of Justice”. The coins are in US custody.

We found no source confirming a final forfeiture order. Reports on Chen Zhi’s whereabouts conflict: one says he was arrested in Cambodia and sent to China in January 2026, another that China formally arrested him in July 2026. The US charges are pending. The 127,271 bitcoin are not part of the $833 million or $938 million totals: they were valued at about $15 billion when the complaint was filed, many times either figure.

The record behind the event: an executive order and a strike force

Trump signed Executive Order 14390, “Combating Cybercrime, Fraud, and Predatory Schemes Against American Citizens”, on 6 March 2026; it was published in the Federal Register on 11 March. It tells the Attorney General to put cyber-enabled fraud and scam cases first, sets up an operational cell in the National Coordination Center, has the Department of Homeland Security train state and local police, and asks the State Department to press foreign governments that host scam centres, with sanctions, visa restrictions and aid limits among the tools. Under the order’s text, agencies had 60 days to review their tools and 120 days to deliver an action plan. The order is addressed to federal agencies: it puts no direct obligation on banks, exchanges or other private firms, and mentions commercial cybersecurity firms only as partners to draw on “as appropriate”.

In August a presidential memorandum created a programme in which vetted American companies can help federal agencies watch and disrupt foreign criminal groups, with Justice Department and Homeland Security officials approving their activities, crypto.news reported on 21 October. Bitcoin Magazine describes it as a DHS memo. We have not read the memorandum itself.

The Scam Center Strike Force predates the order. It was launched in November 2025 by Jeanine Pirro, US Attorney for the District of Columbia, and pulls in the FBI, the Secret Service, IRS Criminal Investigation, the Postal Inspection Service, the DEA and several Justice Department sections, with the State Department, Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and Commerce as partners. Its targets are the compounds in Burma, Cambodia and Laos where trafficked workers are forced to run investment scams aimed at Americans.

Xinbi Guarantee: the case that brought Tether in

The most recent big action came on 9 September 2026. The Justice Department seized Telegram channels belonging to Xinbi Guarantee, a Chinese-language marketplace that sold scam centres fake investment sites, laundering and recruitment services, after a federal judge in Washington authorised it on 7 September. It also seized two wallets holding about $12 million and sought restraints on 47 more, for more than $52 million restrained in total. The department credited Tether for its help.

The same day, OFAC designated Xinbi a significant transnational criminal organization and sanctioned two companies tied to it: SafeW Technology in Singapore and Anwen Technology in Cambodia, which developed XinbiPay, a wallet and payment app also called NewPay. Treasury said Xinbi had processed more than $24 billion since about 2022. Ari Redbord of TRM Labs puts the figure above $36 billion. The two estimates have not been reconciled.

Crypto scam losses: what the FBI counted for 2025

The scale of the problem is why the event is happening. Americans filed 1,008,597 complaints with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025, up about 17% from 859,532 in 2024, according to the IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report, figures confirmed by The Block. Reported losses reached about $20.9 billion, up 26% from $16.6 billion, The Block reported, and more than half were linked to crypto.

Crypto investment fraud alone cost $7.2 billion. That is the pig-butchering category the scam compounds specialise in. Older Americans took the heaviest blow, with $4.43 billion lost by people aged 60 and over. Crypto ATM losses rose 58% to $389 million, Bitcoin Magazine reported from the same report, and recovery scams, in which fraudsters promise to get lost money back for a fee, cost victims $1.4 billion.

Against those numbers the $833 million or $938 million restrained is small: well under a tenth of the crypto losses reported for 2025 alone, and those are only the losses victims chose to report.

How a pig-butchering scam works, and how to report one

The name comes from the scammers’ own slang: the victim is fattened before the slaughter. Contact starts with a wrong-number text, a dating app or a social network. Weeks of friendly messages follow before money is mentioned. Then the new friend shows off profits from a crypto platform and helps the victim open an account there.

The platform is fake, often one of the websites the government says it has seized. Early deposits show large gains on screen, and small withdrawals may even work, to build trust. When the victim puts in more, withdrawals stop and a “tax” or “fee” is demanded to release the funds. The money left long before, often swapped into a stablecoin such as USDT and moved through a chain of wallets to offshore exchanges.

If it happens to you, the Justice Department asks victims of Southeast Asian scam centres to report at ic3.gov. Contact the exchange you sent money from straight away, with transaction IDs, the receiving addresses and screenshots: a freeze is only possible while the coins still sit somewhere a company controls. Expect a long wait, and ignore anyone who offers to recover the money for a fee, since that is the recovery scam the FBI counts separately. Our guide to crypto scams, their red flags and where to report them lists the warning signs and the reporting channels.

What it means for exchanges and stablecoin issuers

The freezes behind the totals depend on private companies. Most scam proceeds pass through a stablecoin, and an issuer that can freeze an address on request is the fastest brake law enforcement has. The Justice Department thanked Tether in the Xinbi case. Coindaro reported on 20 October that Senate staff say Tether waited nine months to freeze 34 Hezbollah-linked wallets, while the company says it often acts weeks before sanctions are announced. Speed is the point of dispute, and it matters for scam victims too.

Exchanges are the other choke point. Coinbase took part in a joint operation in London from 6 to 9 October with the Justice Department and the UK’s National Crime Agency and private investigators against West African fraud networks, tracing transactions and sharing intelligence, and disclosed it on 13 October, crypto.news reported.

None of this creates a new legal duty yet. The March order binds agencies, not companies. What it changes in practice is volume: more freeze requests to issuers like Tether, the issuer of USDT, more subpoenas to exchanges, and, under the August memorandum, vetted firms working inside federal operations. For ordinary users of a regulated exchange the visible effect is more questions about where funds come from and, now and then, a frozen deposit that turns out to be linked to a scam wallet.

The political backdrop

The event comes about two weeks before the midterm elections, CoinDesk noted, and at a time when Trump’s own crypto interests are under fire. A Reuters investigation found that Trump and his sons added at least $2.3 billion to the family’s wealth through crypto ventures while investors in those ventures lost about $2.3 billion. Reuters also recalled Trump’s pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao in October 2025. White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly told Reuters: “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.” Congressional Democrats accuse the family of using the presidency to enrich itself, Bitcoin Magazine reported, a charge the White House rejects.

What to watch after the roundtable

Four questions decide whether Wednesday is more than a recap. Will the administration publish one official restrained total and explain why it differs from the Justice Department’s $938 million? Will it name new criminal organisations, new sanctions or new seizures? Will the Victims Restoration Program recommended in March become an actual process, with a figure for money paid back? And what happens to the 127,271 bitcoin claimed from the Prince Group, which would dwarf every other total if forfeiture succeeds?

None of those answers was public at 16:50 UTC. Nor was any transcript, video or written statement from the roundtable itself.