We’ve all gotten those sketchy texts from someone claiming to be your bank, a suspicious call from "Social Security," or a too-good-to-be-true investment tip from a new online friend. While many are obvious scams, advancements in techniques and technology are making many harder to detect. And according to a recent FBI report, the people behind those messages are becoming more successful and richer by the day.
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) released its 2025 annual report [PDF] this week, and the data in it tell a very troubling story. Americans reported losing a record $20.877 billion to internet-enabled crime last year – a 26% increase from 2024 and more than double the losses from just three years ago. And the volume of complaints behind those losses is surging just as fast. The IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025, averaging nearly 3,000 reports every single day and crossing the million-complaint threshold for the first time in its 25-year history.
Investment fraud leads in damages
The single biggest loss category was investment fraud, which cost victims $8.6 billion – nearly half of all reported losses. It was also the fourth-most-reported crime type by volume, with nearly 73,000 complaints, up 52% from 2024.
Most of that damage is tied to cryptocurrency investment scams, known as "pig butchering," where fraudsters build trust with potential targets through social media, dating apps, or seemingly misdirected text messages before steering them toward fake investment platforms. Those who take the hook watch their fake account balances grow, sometimes for months, before attempting to withdraw. At that point, they're hit with bogus taxes and fees – a final attempt to extract even more funds – before the scammers vanish with everything. The FBI reported $7.2 billion in crypto investment fraud losses in 2025, with complaint volume jumping 48% from the prior year.
Business email compromise ranked second in losses at $3 billion across nearly 25,000 complaints, while tech support scams generated $2.1 billion in losses from almost 48,000 reports. Phishing and spoofing – a catch-all category for deceptive emails, texts, and calls – remained the most common complaint type by far at 191,561 reports. Direct losses in that category were comparatively modest at $215 million, but accounts lost to phishing can later be used for identity theft and to perpetuate other types of financial fraud.
Read more: How to Tell if an Email Has Been Spoofed
Older Americans bear the heaviest burden
Adults 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints in 2025 – a 37% increase from the prior year – and reported $7.7 billion in losses, a 59% jump. That works out to an average loss of over $38,000 per victim. The specific crimes hitting this group hardest financially are investment fraud ($3.5 billion), tech support scams ($1 billion), and confidence and romance fraud ($584 million).
What makes these numbers particularly grim is the complaint growth rate. Phishing complaints from this group nearly doubled year-over-year, jumping from about 23,000 to 48,000. Investment fraud complaints among seniors rose 79%, from roughly 9,400 to nearly 17,000. While government impersonation complaints – where criminals pose as Social Security or Medicare officials – almost doubled as well.
AI is making scams harder to spot
Not surprisingly, AI makes a big splash for the first time in this year’s report. In 2025 – the first year IC3 tracked AI as a complaint descriptor – the agency logged more than 22,000 AI-related complaints, resulting in $893 million in losses.
The FBI notes that, “AI-enabled synthetic content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make, which allows criminal actors to potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against individuals, businesses, and financial institutions.” Historical tells for detecting scam content, such as bad grammar, awkward phrasing, or obvious visual cues in images and videos, are disappearing. As a result, the technology is showing up across nearly every major fraud category.
Voice cloning has supercharged the grandparent scam, with criminals generating audio that sounds exactly like a family member in distress – same voice, same cadence – to demand emergency cash. Victims lost more than $5 million to these distress scams in 2025, and the FBI warns the tactic is expanding to mimic friends and other relatives across a growing range of fake emergencies.
In investment fraud, deepfake videos of celebrities and financial experts are being used to fake endorsements on social media and in video calls. Business email compromise attacks are getting sharper, too. AI-generated text now produces polished executive impersonations that are increasingly hard to distinguish from the real thing, with businesses reporting more than $30 million in confirmed AI-assisted losses. Even job interviews aren't safe: the report flags a rise in AI-generated video used during remote hiring, where fraudulent "interviewers" are attempting to use information gained from hopeful candidates to infiltrate corporate networks.
Sextortion is exploding in volume
Extortion complaints reached 89,129 in 2025, nearly double the 48,223 reported in 2023 and the second-highest complaint category overall. Much of that growth is driven by sextortion – cases where criminals threaten to publish intimate images of a victim unless paid.
The FBI says sextortion often begins when people believe they are communicating with someone who is interested in a relationship, a process known as catfishing. If they are convinced to send nude images or videos, the scammer threatens to release them unless demands for more images or money are met. In other cases, the initial threats are bluffs by the scammer based on claims of evidence of porn use. In all, the FBI received more than 75,000 sextortion-related submissions in 2025, with 11,000 of those complaints coming from people under 20. But that figure almost certainly undercounts the true damage, with the FBI noting that shame and fear keep many victims from reporting at all.
FBI shows success in stopping some fraud
When a victim reports a fraudulent wire transfer quickly enough, the FBI's IC3 Recovery Asset Team (RAT) can trigger a process called the Financial Fraud Kill Chain – a rapid coordination effort with banking partners designed to freeze funds before they move beyond reach. In 2025, the RAT processed nearly 3,900 incidents involving $1.16 billion in attempted theft and froze $679 million, a 58% success rate.
Launched in January 2024, Operation Level Up takes a different approach – contacting people who are actively being victimized by cryptocurrency investment fraud before they lose everything. In 2025, the operation notified 3,780 victims of active scams, with estimated savings totaling $225 million. Strikingly, 78% had no idea they were being scammed at the time of contact.
Beyond the raw numbers are the human stories of the damage being prevented. The FBI reports that Operation Level Up stopped one victim from cashing out $750,000 from his 401(k), another from selling her house to invest $500,000, and a third from taking out a loan to send $400,000 to scammers. Perhaps most sobering: 38 victims were referred to FBI Victim Specialists for suicide intervention.
What you can do
The FBI's core advice hasn't changed much, but with the rise of AI, the urgency of it has. Be deeply skeptical of any unsolicited contact – by text, phone, email, or social media – that involves money, investment opportunities, or requests for personal information. If someone you've never met in person is asking you to send cryptocurrency, buy gift cards, or wire funds anywhere, those are all major red flags.
If you or someone you know has been targeted, report it at ic3.gov immediately and include as much transaction detail as possible. In fraud cases involving wire transfers, every minute counts.
[Image credit: Suzanne Kantra/Techlicious via ChatGPT]
