News
The California DOJ's Attorney General's office says crypto fraud losses hit $11.4 billion as scammers shift to Twitch, TikTok and Instagram.
According to the California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General, cryptocurrency scams have become the nation's costliest form of internet fraud. Attorney General Rob Bonta has released new guidance and recovery resources for Californians, after Americans lost $20.9 billion to internet-based scams in 2025, with $11.4 billion of that tied specifically to cryptocurrency.
Bonta's office is treating this as a shift in scale, not a new kind of scam. The underlying tricks are old: fake romance, fake investment opportunity, fake emergency involving a loved one. What has changed is the mechanism for extracting money. Where a gift card scam caps out at a few hundred dollars and needs a physical purchase, a cryptocurrency transfer can move life-altering sums in minutes, with no store clerk, bank teller or anyone else in a position to ask a question before the money is gone.
The attorney general's office is naming the specific channels where this is happening now. Scammers are moving onto Twitch, TikTok and Instagram, and Bonta said reports of Gen Z victims are rising sharply, alongside the more familiar pattern of older adults being targeted. The office also flagged a second wave of harm: once someone has already lost money to a crypto scam, the same networks frequently come back posing as 'blockchain recovery experts' or law enforcement, offering to retrieve the funds for a fee.
Four scam types are named specifically. Sextortion, where a scammer threatens to release explicit images or video unless paid, often without ever possessing real material. AI-driven impersonation, using voice cloning and deepfake video to pose as a relative or public figure. A 'liquidity mining' con, where a victim connects a digital wallet to a fake yield-farming or gaming platform, watches fabricated returns accumulate on a dashboard, then has the wallet drained by a malicious smart contract. And the recovery fraud that follows an initial loss.
The office's clearest piece of practical advice is also its simplest: never use a cryptocurrency ATM. That single instruction closes off one of the main pathways scammers rely on, because a crypto ATM lets someone convert cash into a scammer's wallet with no bank, no reversal and no third party positioned to intervene. Reporting matters too. Bonta's office is asking victims to come forward, both to access the recovery resources it has released and to build the record that lets California track these syndicates across platforms.
The pattern the office describes is one where speed replaces the old safeguards. A gift card scam forces a trip to a store. A crypto scam forces nothing, which is exactly why it moves faster than a victim's doubts can catch up.
