Inside AMLBot’s 2025 Crypto Crime Report

TLDR

• As the teams and tech behind protocols and blockchains improve, scammers have to resort to more interesting tactics to steal funds.
• While hackers, especially Lazarus Group, get away with the biggest hauls, many smaller heists are frozen before scammers who are less tech-savvy can move them offchain.
• The biggest threat to your funds is falling for a scam in your email box, making an unfortunate mistake via a download, or handing over your seed phrase to a bad actor.

Many new crypto users come to us with the same question — Is my money actually safe?

A new crypto crime report from AMLBot has been released. They analyzed more than 2,500 real-world investigations from 2024 and 2025 to understand how crypto theft occurs.

The big takeaway? It’s usually not some hooded hacker typing furiously in a dark room who steals your funds. It’s usually a smooth talker tricking you into opening the front door. We’ll discuss what it says and add our two cents. Time to get after it. 

The Reality of Crypto Crime in 2025

When we think of crypto crime, we tend to imagine complex code exploits or massive breaches of exchange firewalls. While those do happen, the AMLBot report shows a different reality.

Approximately 60–65% of all cases investigated were driven directly by social engineering.

Translation? The biggest vulnerability in the blockchain isn’t the code — it’s human beings. Attackers have realized it’s much harder to compromise a secure blockchain than to simply trick a person into sending them money.

The report also highlighted a crucial difference between frequency and impact.

• High Frequency: Investment scams and phishing attacks happen constantly. They are the mosquito bites of the industry. Obnoxious. Frequent. And painful.
• High Impact: Breaches of Centralized Exchanges (CEX) happen rarely, but when they do, the financial loss is massive (possibly millions or even billions of dollars at once).

For you, the everyday investor, the risk isn’t likely to be a massive exchange collapse. It’s a direct message from a stranger.

The Top 3 Ways People Lost Money

AMLBot categorized the attacks into 15 different types, but three specific vectors stood out as the most common traps for regular users.

1. Investment Scams and Pig Butchering

This was the number one category by case count. These scams are nasty because they play on your trust and your desire to make a profit.

Here is how they usually work: You meet someone on a social app or dating site. They don’t ask for money immediately. Instead, they spend weeks or even months building a friendship (or romance). Eventually, they mention a “foolproof” crypto investment platform they use.

They might even let you withdraw a small amount of profit at first to gain your trust. But once you deposit a larger sum? Poof. The platform deletes your account, and your new homie ghosts you faster than the cute blonde on Tinder. This long con is often called pig butchering because it fattens up the victim (financially) before the slaughter.

It’s also something we’ve been warning users about for two years.

2. Phishing and Impersonation

Phishing has evolved. It’s no longer just a dodgy email with a misspelled link. In 2025, Chat and Voice-Based Impersonation became huge.

Attackers arenow posing as support staff from major exchanges, compliance teams, or even law enforcement. They create a sense of urgency to pressure you into making a mistake.

3. Device Compromise

Here is where things get a bit more technical, but the root cause is usually human error. A device, usually a cell phone or PC, happens when you accidentally download malware from a fake software update, a compromised installer, or a shady link.

Once the malware is on your device, attackers can access your private keys or password managers. The report notes that these cases often result in the highest median losses because once the attacker is in, they drain everything instantly.

The Address Poisoning Trap

One of the scarier, sneakier tactics mentioned in the report is Address Poisoning.

We’ve all been there: copying and pasting a wallet address because it’s too long to type out. Attackers know you do this. They generate a wallet address that is almost identical to the one you use regularly (matching the first and last few characters).

They send you a tiny amount of crypto (dust) so their address appears in your transaction history. The next time you go to send money to your usual contact, you might accidentally copy the attacker’s address from your history instead of the legitimate one.

A quick fix is to use the whitelisting features in your address book. But most of the most popular wallets, such as MetaMask and Rabby, are pretty good about filtering shady stuff like this. However, it’s something all users should be aware of.

Is It Possible to Recover Stolen Crypto?

The million-dollar question: If you get scammed, is the money gone forever?

Not necessarily, but speed is everything.

The report found that freezing actions are successful in 75% of cases when the stolen funds are still in the attacker’s wallet at the start of the investigation.

However, once the money starts moving, being laundered through mixers or swapped across different blockchains, recovery becomes much harder.

Interestingly, the report noted double-digit recovery rates for scams involving:

• Device compromise
• Impersonation
• OTC (Over-the-Counter) scams

Because these scams often interact with centralized exchanges (such as Coinbase or Binance), which can freeze funds if law enforcement or investigators intervene quickly enough.

How to Protect Your Portfolio From Crypto Crime

You don’t need to be a cybersecurity expert to stay safe from crypto crime. You just need to be skeptical. Based on the findings from the investigations, here is your cheat sheet for crypto safety:

1. Trust No One in the DMs: If a stranger messages you about an investment opportunity, block them. If “support” messages you first, it’s a scam. Genuine support teams will never ask for your private keys or ask you to move funds, nor will they contact you. You have to contact them first.
2. Verify, Don’t Trust: If you get an email or call claiming to be from your exchange, hang up and contact them directly through their official website.
3. Hardware Wallets are King: For long-term storage, keep your crypto offline in a hardware wallet (cold storage). It’s much harder for malware to drain a wallet that isn’t connected to the internet.
4. Don’t rely on Transaction History: When sending crypto, never just copy an address from your history. Always verify the address with the recipient directly.
5. Speed Kills (Scammers): If you suspect you’ve been compromised, don’t wait. Contact the exchange or a professional investigation service immediately. The first few hours are critical for freezing funds.

What Does It All Mean?

As the report’s data shows, the biggest threat to your crypto isn’t a super-hacker — it’s a convincing story from a stranger or an unfortunate user error. Dypto Crypto’s two pennies? We think it says a lot about the technology and the industry’s maturation. 

We’re getting faster and shutting down crypto crime. Hacking a protocol is no longer something that’s “easy” for a hacker to do. Most of the issues the industry is facing right now are the same ones we see in other financial sectors. We believe crypto is safer than ever.

So stay curious, stay excited about the tech, but keep your guard up. If an opportunity sounds too good to be true, assume it’s a scam. Don’t be a victim. Don’t be a statistic. Be an investor. Due diligence is key to everything.