Are stablecoins safe?

That question splits in two, and this page owns only half. Product checks like reserves and redemption live on this site's stablecoin risks page. Scam avoidance lives here. A sound stablecoin can still be stolen from you by a fake support desk. A fraudulent scheme can be built on top of any token.

Should I put my savings in USDC?

This site does not advise on allocations. What the sources do say, unanimously, is that guaranteed returns do not exist. Any pitch that treats savings as a safe multiplier is showing the most universal marker regulators publish.

How can I tell if an investment is a fraud?

The hallmarks are consistent across regulators. Guaranteed high returns with little or no risk. Pressure to buy right now. Unlicensed sellers. Withdrawal fees or taxes demanded before you can access profits. The joint SEC and CFTC alert calls these the hallmarks of a fraud.

A 2017 virtual organization that raised funds by selling tokens for Ether. The SEC investigated and reported that the tokens were securities, while deciding not to bring charges. The report fixed the principle that registration law applies regardless of the issuing organization's form.

Someone from an exchange asked for my seed phrase. What do I do?

Treat it as the scam it almost certainly is. No legitimate business needs your recovery phrase for any support task. The FTC's rule is blunt: only scammers demand payment or credentials through unexpected messages. Reach the exchange only through channels you navigated to yourself.

Can I get my money back from a crypto scam?

Blockchain transfers are designed to be irreversible, which is why prevention carries all the weight. The recovery pitch that follows a loss is often a second scam. The CFTC's rule: do not pay more money out-of-pocket to get your profits or principal back. Report to the IC3 and your regulator regardless.

How to Avoid Crypto Scams: Regulator-Sourced Warning Signs

Q: Is it safe to keep USDT on an exchange?

Custody risk is a product question with its own page. The scam-pattern answer is that exchange impersonation is a documented fraud type. No legitimate business or government will message you asking for money or credentials. Verify through the official app or site you reached yourself, never through a link someone sent you.

Q: What is pig butchering?

The organizers' own term, per the CFTC, for long-running scams that build a relationship over weeks before the ask. The FBI's 2025 report describes them as sophisticated long-term scams using psychological manipulation, run largely by organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. Victims are shown fake profits, then charged fees as a final step.

The rules that repeat across regulators

Read the consumer material from five regulators side by side. The overlap is the finding. The United States Federal Trade Commission. The United Kingdom’s Financial Conduct Authority. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The joint SEC and CFTC alert. The European supervisory authorities. The same core rules appear in each.

Only scammers demand payment in crypto ^[1]. Only scammers will guarantee profits or big returns ^[1]. No legitimate business or government will ever email, text, or message you on social media to ask for money. That is the FTC’s rule ^[1]. Never mix online dating and investment advice ^[1].

The FCA poses its warning signs as questions. Is it unexpected? Do you feel pressured to act quickly? Does the offer sound too good to be true? Is the offer exclusively for you? Are they trying to flatter you? ^[2]. The emotional questions complement the transactional rules.

The joint alert from the SEC and CFTC lists the hallmarks in formal language. Fraudsters promise high guaranteed returns, for example 20 to 50 percent, with little or no risk ^[4]. Risk-free, zero risk, absolutely safe, guaranteed profit. Each phrase is named as a hallmark of a fraud. Unlicensed sellers and pressure to buy right now complete the list ^[4].

The European tier adds the protection framing. Crypto-assets can be risky, and legal protection, if any, may be limited ^[7]. The three European supervisory authorities issued the warning jointly in October 2025. It also flags aggressive promotion on social media by finfluencers ^[7].

The scam types, from the source material

The FTC’s taxonomy is long. Investment scams with fake investment managers. Celebrity impersonation. Guaranteed returns. Business imposters. Fraudulent tokens issued by imposters. Government and law enforcement impersonation. Fake crypto jobs. Blackmail ^[1].

The CFTC’s material explains the mechanics behind the categories. Trading platform fraud: sites offer discretionary or pooled accounts with huge guaranteed returns. The CFTC’s own words: there is no such thing as a risk-free transaction or a guaranteed money-making opportunity. No real trading occurs. Withdrawals get blocked by fake fees and taxes ^[3].

Pump and dump: hyped tokens go to the moon, then the scammers sell off the worthless tokens ^[3]. Ponzi structure: the trader uses money from new investors to pay fake returns to prior investors. These often target groups by church membership, race, or other affiliation ^[3].

The long con

Pig butchering is the organizers’ own term, per the CFTC ^[3]. The shape is patient. A wrong-number text. A friendly stranger. Weeks of conversation. A move to another messaging app. Crypto millionaire posts with sports cars and yachts. Then the investment. Fake profits on screen. Exorbitant withdrawal fees. A loss insurance offer after the losses ^[3].

The FBI’s 2025 annual report describes the machinery underneath. The report’s own words: sophisticated long-term scams using psychological manipulation, the appearance of legitimacy, and exploitation of cryptocurrencies. They are run largely by organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The report states they use victims of human trafficking as forced labor ^[5]. Victims are shown fake profits and offered loans. Taxes and fees come as a final attempt to extract money before the scammers disappear ^[5].

That trafficking sentence belongs on an education page because it is the report’s own framing. It corrects the folklore version. These are not lone opportunists. The FBI’s Operation Level Up, launched January 2024, notified 3,780 victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud. One case stopped a victim from selling her house to invest $500,000 ^[5].

What the reported numbers say

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025. Reported losses were $20.877 billion, 26 percent above 2024 ^[5]. Crypto accounted for 181,565 complaints and $11,366,669,732 in reported losses. It was the top reported transaction type ^[5]. Crypto investment fraud alone was the top source of financial losses to Americans in 2025, with $7.2 billion reported ^[5]. The confidence and romance category, where most pig-butchering losses land, carried $929,287,469 ^[5].

Every figure above is from one named government report, for one report year, as printed. Reported losses undercount reality, since victims report unevenly. The numbers measure the shape of the problem, not a personal risk score.

The ICO era, as history

The 2017 initial coin offering boom produced the enforcement record that still anchors United States token law. On 25 July 2017, the SEC issued an investigative report. It concluded that DAO tokens, a digital asset, were securities ^[6]. The tokens had been offered by a virtual organization in exchange for Ether ^[6].

Notably, the SEC decided not to bring charges in that instance, or make findings of violations. It issued the report instead to caution the industry and market participants ^[6]. The principles it fixed still matter. The securities analysis depends on the facts and circumstances. That includes the economic reality of the transaction. Issuers must register offers and sales of securities. A valid exemption can replace registration. Exchanges trading these securities must register unless exempt. The laws apply whatever form the issuer takes, company or decentralized autonomous organization. Payment in dollars or virtual currency makes no difference ^[6].

The lesson for scam-spotting is narrower than the securities law. Anything can be tokenized. Tokenization changes neither the securities analysis nor the fraud patterns. The guaranteed-return hallmarks predate crypto and attach to it unchanged.

Three myths, corrected from the source rules

You are guaranteed to make money. No. Only scammers will guarantee profits or big returns, per the FTC ^[1]. Guaranteed profit is a named hallmark of fraud per the joint alert ^[4].

This celebrity or company endorses it. Assume not until verified on the entity’s own channels. Impersonation is the product. Celebrity impersonation and business impersonators are documented FTC scam types ^[1]. Imposter profiles carrying crypto millionaire posts are a documented CFTC marker ^[3].

Legitimate organizations ask for crypto payments. They do not. Only scammers demand payment in cryptocurrency. No legitimate business or government will message you asking for money ^[1].

Verification habits that generalize

Check registration with federal and state authorities before investing. Use the regulator’s own tools: Investor.gov, the CFTC’s RED List, state securities regulators, the SEC’s SALI tool ^[4] ^[3]. Then keep the CFTC’s caveat attached to the habit. Relying on registration alone will not protect you from fraud, but most scams involve unregistered entities ^[3].

Look up the domain registration age. Compare it with the site’s claimed history. Search the headquarters address. Treat a request to move the chat to another app as the marker it is ^[3].

This page does not evaluate stablecoin products. Reserve checks, attestation programs, redemption terms, and issuer licensing are product diligence. They live on the stablecoin risks page. The split is deliberate. A scam page that wanders into product evaluation stops being scannable. A product page that wanders into fraud patterns duplicates this one.

How this page was checked

Seven sources, six of them government or regulator material read directly. The FTC consumer advice, dated May 2022. The FCA page, whose January 2026 update removed its old ScamSmart branding, which this page follows. The CFTC frauds hub. The joint SEC and CFTC alert. The ESAs joint warning of October 2025. The SEC’s 2017 DAO press release. The FBI IC3 2025 annual report, with every figure quoted from the report itself, dated. One honest negative: the FTC page carries no statistics. That is why all loss figures here come from the IC3 report instead. No press coverage. No analytics firms. No forums. No venue is named as a scam anywhere. None of these sources names one. This site does not either.

What would change the answer

The patterns move slower than the numbers. The regulator rules above have held stable for years. The re-check cadence for this page is the regulator update cycle. That cycle is slow. The IC3 figures move annually with each report, and the next report will supersede them. The ICO history is fixed. If a regulator revises a rule quoted here, the page changes with the regulator’s own text.

Where this page sits

The stablecoin risks page carries the product-diligence half of the safety question. The depeg record documents what happens when a stablecoin’s peg breaks, which is market history rather than fraud. The wallet definition explains what a seed phrase is, which is the thing fake support desks ask for. The cryptocurrency introduction defines the assets. The cryptocurrency hub frames the cluster.