The FBI’s Recovery Asset Team has denied more than $1 billion in attempted cyber theft since January 2025, a 16 percent increase over the same period under the previous administration, the bureau told Breitbart News on Thursday.
FBI Director Kash Patel credited the total to what the bureau described as a full rebuild of its cyber operations. “This is the latest success in this FBI’s total overhaul in our ability to crush cyber criminals,” Patel said in figures provided to Breitbart News. “Our Recovery Asset Team’s $1 billion in denied theft since January 2025 – a 16% increase since the same period under the previous administration – shows we are built for the mission.”
Patel said the bureau is “cutting off the criminal actors early, blowing up almost $20 billion worth of scam compounds overseas with our work through Operation Blackout, and completely modernizing our capability to stay on top of a constantly changing threat landscape.” He added, “This is no longer an FBI that waits to act – this FBI is moving quickly, efficiently, and decisively in ways never seen before.”
The Recovery Asset Team runs the bureau’s Financial Fraud Kill Chain, which works with banks to freeze fraudulent wire transfers before the money disappears. In 2025, the team launched roughly 3,900 such actions against more than $1.1 billion in attempted theft and froze $679 million of it, a 58 percent success rate, according to the FBI’s most recent Internet Crime Complaint Center report.
Overseas Scam Compounds Targeted
Ben Williamson, an assistant director in the FBI Office of Public Affairs, linked the recovery numbers to Operation Blackout, the bureau’s campaign against scam compounds operating overseas. Williamson said the operation has seized roughly $17 billion, led to hundreds of arrests, freed thousands of trafficked workers, warned more than 10,000 Americans before they lost money, and prevented an estimated $660 million in losses.
Patel has described the compounds the FBI is targeting as something closer to fortified settlements than call centers. “These are towns, these are cities,” Patel told Fox News Digital. “These are actual villages with structures where they force people into forced labor.”
Patel said older Americans make up most of the victims. The bureau has referred 99 victims for suicide intervention, seized 584 scam websites, and sent 7,670 fraudulent accounts to private companies for action, according to Fox News Digital.
In May, the bureau reported what was then a record $8 billion cryptocurrency seizure and 275 arrests in Dubai, where officials said nine raided compounds each generated roughly $6 million a year in fraud. In August, an FBI-linked raid at Cambodia’s roughly 200-acre O’Smach Resort compound involved searches of 28 buildings over three days.
A Growing National Problem
The latest figures follow other cyber actions Patel has detailed in weekly updates. In June, the bureau said FBI Cleveland disrupted a Chinese phishing platform tied to nearly $1.9 billion in losses worldwide under what officials called Operation Riptide. In April, the FBI and the Justice Department announced a scam-center takedown that charged two Chinese nationals, restrained about $700 million in cryptocurrency, and seized 503 websites.
Americans filed more than one million cybercrime complaints in 2025 for the first time in the history of the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, reporting $20.9 billion in losses. Adults 60 and older accounted for $7.7 billion of that total.
The FBI did not provide a state-by-state breakdown of the recovered funds, so it is not clear how much of the $1 billion figure reflects cases in Ohio or other individual states. The scale of the national numbers, however, points to a threat that touches households in every state, particularly older residents who are most often targeted by these schemes.
