Crypto Scams, Hacks Pull Over $4B by 2025

Fraud losses jumped 64% year-on-year, driven by targeted phishing and impersonation campaigns targeting high-value victims.

Crypto-related scams and hacks cost users and platforms more than $4.04 billion in 2025, according to data shared by blockchain security firm PeckShield.

The statistics point to a clear shift towards targeted social engineering and single player attacks, with scams alone increasing faster than technical activity.

Scams and Centralized Attacks Cause 2025 Losses

PeckShield said total crypto losses in 2025 are up nearly 34% from 2024, with $2.67 billion tied to hacks and $1.37 billion linked to scams.

Scam losses jumped nearly 64% year over year, outpacing the growth of direct protocol exploitation. However, a major problem was the high loss per case, often related to phishing and impersonation campaigns targeting high net worth individuals.

More than 200 hacking incidents were recorded during the year, excluding scams. February counts the largest one-month loss recorded after the breach of $ 1.51 billion in Bybit, now PeckShield is considered the biggest hack in the history of crypto. The FBI later linked the attack to North Korea’s Lazarus Group, explaining its use of malware and social engineering to gain access to Bybit’s cold wallets.

According to PeckShield’s data, attackers also began to change their approach last year. Instead of targeting Decentralized Finance (DeFi), they have begun to focus more on centralized transactions with large organizations, which accounted for 75% of stolen money last year, up from 46% in 2024.

BNB Chain saw the highest number of events, while Ethereum accounted for the dollar amount lost due to major targets.

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Looking for Patterns and Recovery

The report also provided context on how the stolen funds were transported. Follow-up downloads linked to mass exploitation reached $1.49 billion by 2025, a 15% increase from the previous year, and PeckShield links the increase in the amount of money taken from individual thefts.

Good thing, about $334.9 million worth of stolen crypto was recovered or stopped by authorities and security companies last year. However, that recovery rate was lower than the $488.5 million recovered in 2024, suggesting that the scale and complexity of theft is outpacing mitigation efforts.

Recent data provide a mixed picture. A separate report from PeckShield on January 3, 2026, noted that losses from exploitation fell to $76 million in December 2025, a 60% decrease from November. However, the new year started with a major breach, as the Truebit protocol lost $26.5 million to an exploit on January 9.

This ongoing cycle of attacks is a reminder that while monthly totals may fluctuate, the underlying threats of infrastructure vulnerabilities and personal scams remain an ongoing challenge for the crypto ecosystem.

Together, the cases support PeckShield’s view that the loss of 2025 was less about random exploitation and more about precision targeting, where social engineering and access to centralized systems played an increasing role.