(TNS) — Last year, a grand jury found a former Kalispell man guilty of playing a role in a sprawling money laundering scheme that took in over $2 million from fraudulent listings posted online, like fake dating accounts and bogus real estate offers.
A federal judge sentenced Randall V. Rule to 10 years in prison for assisting in taking in those illicit funds and covering their origin by transferring them into cryptocurrency. The losses from Rule and his co-conspirators’ scheme were just an inkling of the billions lost nationwide to fraud enabled by the digital age. In the past decade, losses to cyber crimes like sham crypto investments have exploded, going from $1 billion in 2015 to nearly $20 billion last year.
Montanans lost a record-setting $53 million in 2025, according to the FBI’s latest data.
“Cryptocurrency-related investment and fraud is what we’re seeing such a drastic increase and change in,” said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Jeff Collins, who oversees the bureau’s Cyber Task Force in Salt Lake City. “These criminals are convincing people to invest with cryptocurrency and people are dumping a lot of money in those schemes, not realizing it’s fraudulent, and losing staggering amounts.”
The latest report compiled and published through the Internet Crime and Complaint Center, the FBI’s main hub for fielding Internet-enabled crimes, echoed the warnings coming from law enforcement and financial regulators for years: that scammers are wielding the sophistication and anonymity of online platforms to bilk Americans out of billions. Although phishing reports were the most common complaint submitted to the IC3 last year, with about 191,500 cases, cryptocurrency fraud amounted to more than $11 billion in losses in 2025.
In Montana, losses to cyber crimes have quintupled since 2021. Last year, losses skyrocketed compared to 2024, going from $31.6 million to nearly $53.2 million. Investment scams accounted for about a fifth of all losses for Montanans in 2025, according to data from the Federal Trade Commission.
The trends in losses in Montana, Collins said, remain consistent with the rest of the country in that cryptocurrency and romance scams are the costliest, and the most vulnerable to those scams are those ages 60 and older. Last month, the Montana Department of Justice held a summit highlighting the fact that investment losses for Montanans to fraud in 2024 eclipsed $11 million, with the state’s older residents being the prime targets for fraudulent actors.
“They have funds,” Collins said, referring to retirees. “They’ve saved funds. They have their retirement, their pension, and they (fraudsters) know they have a lot of money. And they’re going to employ tactics to defraud them.”
The Montana State Auditor Office received 25 fraud complaints in the first quarter of 2026, according to a statement published earlier this month from the Commissioner of Securities and Insurance James Brown. This figure is up from 11 in the first quarter of 2025 and totals $3,338,869.59 in reported losses.
In February 2025, CSI received a complaint from a Montana man in his 60s. The man got a message on X, formally known as Twitter, from a user with the handle @ElonMusk0416. The user, according to CSI documents, presented as though he was Elon Musk, the South African billionaire and CEO of X since 2022. The messages between the two escalated to them speaking over the phone and via email, with the X user convincing the Montana man to invest in a cryptocurrency mining operation called “Token X.” In the span of a month, he transferred more than $150,000 in cryptocurrency to the user.
The tactic the fraudster used, known as “pig butchering,” entails an impostor engaging with someone for weeks or months on end, fostering trust before bilking them for money under the guise of a return on their investment.
“I would say as far as losses go, that’s the one that’s costing American citizens the most,” Collins said.
Of note, the real Elon Musk was recently found liable in a high-profile civil suit for driving down then-Twitter’s stock prices prior to his taking over the platform in 2022. A federal jury ruled the world’s richest man and former adviser to President Donald Trump misled Twitter’s shareholders through tweets he made suggesting that Twitter had more bots and spam accounts than what had been disclosed in regulatory filings, according to reporting from the Associated Press.
Data compiled by the cybersecurity company Surfshark showed the overwhelming scale of bots and scam accounts permeating social media, with Facebook alone deleting about 4.5 billion such accounts on an annual basis. Although the FBI’s IC3 did not specify which social media platforms were the most used by fraudsters, the Federal Trade Commission has named Facebook as the most common social media site from which phony sales listings and romance scams originate. A 2025 analysis from Reuters alleged that Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, earned about $16 billion in revenue from fraudulent advertisers.
Earlier this year, identical bills were introduced to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives that would challenge the broad legal immunity for social media companies hosting users carrying out fraud. The bills, both titled the Safeguarding Consumers from Advertising Misconduct Act, would require social media platforms to verify the identities of those placing ads on their sites. The legislation would also criminalize social media sites taking money from users advertising scams and compel those sites to more thoroughly respond to fraud reports. The Senate bill has been referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, of which Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy is a member.
Although those ages 60 and older saw the most losses due to fraud last year, younger generations are more frequently targeted by sextortion rackets, by which an adult connects with teens via an online platform and coerces them into creating what amounts to child sex abuse material. Those images and videos are then used as blackmail to extort teens out of money or pressure them into producing more child sex abuse material.
There is still a nexus of crypto in sextortion scams, Collins said, as perpetrators are increasingly demanding payment in cryptocurrency to make it harder for law enforcement to track.
Also on the rise in recent years are ransomware attacks, corporate and public networks hijacked and drained of data used as leverage for blackmail. In the U.S., the healthcare sector was the most common target of ransomware attacks aimed at critical infrastructure. In 2024, Planned Parenthood of Montana was one of hundreds of organizations attacked by the ransomware-as-a-service group RansomHub. The attack resulted in some 57,000 people having their protected health information stolen. Last year, a cyber attack cost Lee Enterprises, the Billings Gazette’s parent company, $2 million.
Outside of maintaining a healthy suspicion of fraudulent actors online, Collins said the most effective means of cyber crimes is reporting them when they occur. Citing a case that he assisted in investigating, Collins said the FBI reviewed a business email compromise scam, wherein someone gets ahold of compromising information by impersonating a known source in an email. The FBI managed to link a scammer to about dozen victims who reported the crime, Collins said, and the feds tracked the cyber actor to Atlanta. He was eventually extradited to Utah and sentenced to nearly 9 years in prison.
“It wouldn’t have been successful for us at all if just one person had reported they were a victim of a crime,” Collins said. “That’s why it’s so important for the public to report whenever they’re the victim of a cyber crime.”
©2026 the Billings Gazette, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
