Americans reported losing $20.9 billion to internet-enabled crime in 2025. That’s the headline figure in the FBI’s newly released 2025 Internet Crime Report, published this month by the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center — a 26 percent jump from the $16.6 billion reported for 2024, and the first time the annual tally has crossed $20 billion.
The report is built from complaints that real people filed at ic3.gov — more than one million of them last year, up from roughly 859,000 the year before. That makes it the closest thing the country has to a map of where scam money actually goes, who loses it, and which cons are growing. If you read one government report this year to protect your household’s money, make it this one. Here’s what it says, in plain terms.
Where the money went
The biggest single drain, by far, was investment fraud: more than $8.6 billion in reported losses, much of it from cryptocurrency schemes in which victims are coached — often over weeks or months — into “investing” through fake platforms that show phantom gains right up until the withdrawal request. The FBI’s announcement accompanying the report singled out crypto-related fraud as a dominant driver of the year’s losses.
Business email compromise — criminals impersonating a boss, vendor, or title company to redirect a legitimate payment — cost about $3 billion. Tech support and customer support impostor scams took roughly $2.1 billion, and personal data breaches accounted for about $1.3 billion more.
New in this year’s report: a section on fraud that uses artificial intelligence — cloned voices, deepfaked video calls, AI-written phishing. Those complaints numbered more than 22,000, with losses approaching $900 million. That’s still a small slice of the total, but it’s the first year the FBI has counted it at all, which tells you where investigators think this is heading.
Older Americans lost the most — again, and by more
The most sobering numbers in the report belong to people 60 and over. That group filed 201,266 complaints and reported about $7.7 billion in losses — more than a third of all money lost, and an increase of nearly 60 percent from 2024. Thousands of older victims individually reported losing more than $100,000; for many, that’s a retirement account, a home’s equity, or both.
The categories hitting older adults hardest mirror the overall list with one twist: investment fraud (about $3.5 billion of the 60-plus losses), tech support scams (over $1 billion), and romance or “confidence” scams. What these have in common is patience — the criminal builds trust first, over phone calls, texts, or a supposed friendship, and the money moves later, voluntarily, which makes it brutally hard to claw back.
If you have an older parent or neighbor, the single most useful thing you can do with this report is share one sentence from it: no legitimate business, government agency, or bank will ever tell you to move your money to a “safe account,” buy gold, or feed cash into a bitcoin ATM. That script, in all its variations, is the through-line of the costliest scams in the FBI’s data.
Why the real number is even bigger
Remember what this report can and can’t count. It only includes losses that victims reported — and shame, confusion, and not knowing where to report all keep people silent. Fraud researchers inside and outside government have long treated reported losses as a floor, not a ceiling. The true 2025 figure is unknowable, but it is safely higher than $20.9 billion.
That’s also why filing a complaint matters even when the money seems gone. Complaints are how the FBI spots patterns, links cases across states, and — in the best cases — freezes transfers. The bureau’s Recovery Asset Team exists specifically to chase recently wired funds, and speed is everything: the sooner a fraudulent wire is reported, the better the odds of a freeze before the money is layered through mule accounts and offshore exchanges.
What to do tonight, and what to do if it happens
Three habits cover a remarkable share of the cases in this report. First, treat every unexpected contact about money — call, text, email, pop-up — as unverified until you independently look up the real number and call back yourself. Second, be slowest exactly when you’re being rushed; urgency is the scammer’s load-bearing wall. Third, talk about money moves with someone you trust before you make them; the report’s costliest scams all depend on isolating the victim.
If you or a family member loses money to an online scam, act in this order: call your bank immediately and ask them to attempt a recall or freeze; then file a complaint at ic3.gov with every detail you have — account numbers, wallet addresses, phone numbers, screenshots. Past years’ reports, and the trends across them, are archived on the IC3 annual reports page if you want to see how your state stacks up.
The $20.9 billion isn’t an abstraction. It’s a million-plus households, each with a story that usually started with a message that looked ordinary. The report’s real lesson is that the crime is now industrial — and the defense is still personal.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
