President Donald Trump used a White House roundtable on Wednesday to spotlight his administration’s crackdown on foreign cybercriminals, saying federal authorities have prevented at least $1.6 billion in losses this year and frozen nearly $1 billion tied to overseas scammers.
The East Room event, focused on protecting Americans from online fraud and foreign scam operations, brought together much of the president’s national security and law enforcement team, including Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Todd Blanche, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, FBI Director Kash Patel, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller.
“A growing menace”
“For years, our nation has faced a growing menace of cybercrime perpetrated by fraudsters, hackers, and scammers who try to steal Americans’ money, prey on senior citizens, exploit children and young people through fraud, ransomware, impersonation schemes […] and other illegal acts,” Trump said, according to Florida’s Voice.
The president said Americans lost more than $20 billion to cybercrime in 2025 through impersonation schemes, ransomware attacks, scam centers and other methods, as reported by Cointelegraph.
The numbers the White House is touting
Trump said federal authorities “prevented $1.6B in losses, at least this year.” He added: “Federal law enforcement has also frozen nearly $1 billion of cybercurrency tied to foreign scammers, shut down more than 500 fraudulent websites, and coordinated with technology companies to disrupt millions and millions of online accounts used by foreign criminals.”
Those figures were presented by the president at the event. The roundtable followed a March executive order in which Trump directed the Justice Department to prioritize identifying and prosecuting online scammers, and a later directive for the Department of Homeland Security to work with private companies to monitor foreign criminal hacking groups, Reuters reported ahead of the event.
Miller: “America is not a pile of treasure”
Miller praised the effort in sweeping terms. “You have effectively declared cyber warfare against the cyber criminals, and that is saving the pensions, the life savings, the retirement accounts, the earnings of countless American citizens, not to mention protecting people from extortion, from child trafficking, from human trafficking,” he told the president.
“America is not a pile of treasure for other countries and other people, and other scammers all around the world to loot for themselves,” Miller said. “You’re protecting American wealth for American people and American families.”
Why it matters
Online fraud has become one of the fastest-growing crimes hitting American households. Americans filed more than a million internet-scam complaints with the FBI last year, a 17% increase from 2024, according to the bureau’s report cited by Reuters. Seniors are frequent targets of impersonation and investment schemes, many run from overseas scam compounds by transnational criminal organizations.
Officials at the roundtable described the administration’s approach as a coordinated campaign against those networks, pairing federal law enforcement with technology companies to take down fraudulent accounts and websites.
Hubbard release comes up too
During the event, Trump also addressed the release of Stephen Hubbard, a 74-year-old American who had been held in Russia. “I mentioned, ‘Could you let Stephen Hubbard out please?’ and he agreed to do it,” Trump said of his conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “He was met today in Russia, and he’s on his way back.”
After the roundtable, the president was scheduled to travel to Clemson, South Carolina, for a campaign rally ahead of the November 3 midterm elections.