The numbers in the new FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2025 Annual Report, released April 2026, are the worst in the agency’s 25-year history. The IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints last year, the first time the threshold crossed one million, with reported losses of $20.877 billion — up 26% from 2024 [1].
To put that in perspective: in 2015, total reported internet-crime losses were roughly $1 billion. Ten years later they have grown more than twentyfold. The average loss per complaint now stands at $20,699, although that figure is pushed up by a handful of high-dollar categories.
And the FBI itself flags an important caveat. Many victims never file a report — out of embarrassment, confusion, or the belief that nothing can be done — so the official totals are best read as a floor, not a ceiling.
Investment fraud is now the single biggest source of losses
Investment fraud remained the costliest crime category by a wide margin in 2025. Victims reported $8.648 billion in losses tied to investment scams, more than 40% of all losses tracked by IC3. Most of that — roughly $7.2 billion — came from crypto-based schemes built around fake trading platforms, fabricated returns, and slow-burn social engineering.
The pattern is now well documented and depressingly consistent. Scammers approach victims on social media, dating apps, or even random text messages, then move the conversation to a private channel like WhatsApp or Telegram. They walk the target through a “tutorial” on a fake platform that shows immediate paper gains. The victim invests more — often borrowing or tapping retirement savings — until they try to withdraw and are hit with fake “taxes” or “compliance fees” that quietly drain the account.
The FBI explicitly links many of these schemes to industrialized scam compounds in Southeast Asia, in countries like Cambodia, Laos, and Burma. This is not lone-hacker territory anymore; it is organized crime at industrial scale.
We have already covered the WhatsApp side of this playbook in detail: see our explainer on WhatsApp investment scams using BlackRock and Morgan Stanley as bait, and the breakdown of the most common Telegram scams targeting crypto users and retail investors.
Crypto is where the money disappears — fastest
Cryptocurrency-linked complaints reached 181,565 in 2025, up 21% year over year, with associated losses of $11.366 billion, a 22% jump. The average loss in a crypto-flavored complaint is $62,604 — roughly three times the overall IC3 average.
The reason is structural. Crypto transactions settle in minutes, are difficult to reverse, and are much harder for victims to trace once the funds move past the first wallet. Americans aged italico60 and older/italico bore the worst of it: seniors accounted for $4.43 billion in crypto-related losses in 2025, the highest of any age group.
A grim secondary market has also exploded around the original scams. So-called recovery scams — criminals contacting prior victims and promising to “help recover” the stolen funds for an advance fee — generated 10,516 complaints and $1.4 billion in losses in 2025 alone. Some impersonate law firms; some even impersonate the FBI’s own IC3 portal.
The practical takeaway: if you have already been scammed, assume any new “recovery” outreach is a second scam aimed at the same wound.
AI has officially entered the scam economy
For the first time, the IC3 report dedicates a major section to artificial intelligence. The bureau received more than 22,000 complaints with an AI-related nexus in 2025, with adjusted losses topping $893 million. AI-linked investment fraud alone accounted for $632 million, AI-assisted business email compromise (BEC) for more than $30 million, and AI-driven romance scams for $19 million.
The FBI lists four practical ways criminals are now using AI on Americans:
- Voice cloning of relatives, executives, or government officials — typically built from a few seconds of audio scraped from social media.
- AI-generated phishing that mimics tone, writing style, and even prior email threads.
- Deepfake video purporting to show celebrity or executive endorsements of a fake investment platform.
- Synthetic identities that let criminals run entire fake social-media personas and “investment communities.”
The bureau is candid that the $893 million figure is almost certainly an undercount: many victims simply have no way to know whether AI helped fabricate the messages, voices, or videos that fooled them.
The headline category for AI-flavored fraud is also where it intersects with corporate America. BEC losses overall hit $3.046 billion in 2025 from 24,768 complaints — the second costliest crime category in the report — and increasingly involve voice deepfakes of senior executives to push wire-transfer requests through finance teams.
For consumers, the same logic applies on a smaller scale. The classic text-message phishing scams (“smishing”) that pretend to be your bank now arrive better-written, better-timed, and sometimes paired with a follow-up call in a cloned voice.
Who is getting hit hardest
Two demographic findings in the report deserve special attention.
Older adults are bearing a disproportionate share of the damage. Americans aged 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints in 2025, up 37% year over year. Their reported losses reached $7.748 billion, a 59% jump from 2024 — and the average loss per senior was $38,500, nearly double the overall average. A total of 12,444 seniors each lost more than $100,000 last year.
Government impersonation is the fastest-growing pressure tactic. Complaints in this category nearly doubled, from 17,367 in 2024 to 32,424 in 2025. Seniors filed 8,628 of those complaints and lost $413 million — fake IRS agents, fake Social Security inspectors, fake Medicare reviewers, increasingly with AI-cloned voices behind the calls.
What actually works in May 2026
The FBI’s data points to a handful of habits that, boring as they sound, still cut your risk dramatically:
- Slow down on anything that creates urgency. Urgency is the single most reliable scam signal across every category in the report — investment, BEC, government impersonation, romance, tech support.
- Verify out-of-band, always. If your “boss,” “bank,” or “child” calls or texts asking for money or credentials, hang up and call back on a number you already know — not the one they gave you.
- Treat any unsolicited investment pitch on WhatsApp, Telegram, or a dating app as a scam by default. The legitimate version of that conversation effectively does not exist anymore.
- Lock down two-factor authentication on email, bank, brokerage, and crypto accounts — and prefer authenticator apps over SMS codes, which can be intercepted.
- Report quickly to IC3.gov. The FBI’s “Operation Level Up” notified 3,780 cryptocurrency-fraud victims in 2025 — 78% of whom did not know they were being scammed — and estimates the program saved them $225 million in additional losses.
The bottom line
The IC3 report is, in the end, a directional signal. It shows where criminals are putting their effort, which victims are under the most pressure, and which tactics are paying off. Investment scams, crypto, and AI-enhanced impersonation are the three lines moving the most aggressively in 2025 — and there is no sign of any of them reversing in 2026.
If you take one habit from the report, make it this: when an interaction online makes you feel hurried, flattered, or scared, stop and verify before you act. That single pause is the cheapest fraud insurance available.
italicoSources: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2025 Annual Report, April 2026; FBI press release, “Cryptocurrency and AI Scams Bilk Americans of Billions,” April 2026./italico
