About $920 million. That is what people reported losing to government impersonators during 2025, according to data the Federal Trade Commission published on June 15 of this year, up from roughly $789 million the year before. The figure sits inside a larger one: $3.5 billion reported lost last year to imposter scams of every kind, which the agency describes as the most-reported fraud category in its files.
The $920 million inside a $3.5 billion category
Impersonation splits into two buckets in the FTC’s accounting, and both grew. Government impersonators accounted for about $920 million in reported losses in 2025. Business impersonators accounted for nearly $1 billion, up from roughly $866 million a year earlier, with the heaviest losses attributed to people posing as banks. Together they made imposter scams the subject of nearly one in three fraud reports the agency received, and reported losses in the category have risen close to threefold since 2020.
Every number in that paragraph is a reported number rather than an audited one. It reflects what people told the FTC, its state and local partners, and the other organizations that feed the agency’s complaint database. The release carrying these figures covers calendar year 2025 and was issued in the middle of this year, so it describes last year’s losses and not a running total for the year now underway.
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Sixteen billion dollars, and the direction of the line
The impersonation total belongs to a bigger movement. Roughly $16 billion was reported lost to fraud of all types during 2025, which the FTC calls the highest figure on record and an increase of about 25 percent over 2024. Imposter scams were the single largest contributor to that record by report volume.
The shape of the trend matters more than any one year’s total. A category whose reported losses have risen close to threefold in five years is not drifting, and the FTC’s description of the delivery channels explains part of why: these approaches arrive by text, phone, email, social media and search-engine results, which are cheap to send at volume and easy to dress up as official.
The fake bank alert, and the instruction to move money
The costliest version of this fraud rarely opens with a demand. According to the FTC, some of the most expensive impersonation scams begin with a fake security alert, frequently one that appears to come from a bank. Once a target believes an account is under attack, the instruction that follows is to move money in order to protect it, and the agency notes that losses in these cases are often limited only by how much money a person can reach.
Because that opening is a warning rather than a request, the familiar advice about refusing to send money to strangers never gets triggered. The target believes the transfer is a rescue. What does apply is the agency’s own standing line, which appears at the bottom of every FTC press release: “The FTC will never demand money, make threats, tell you to transfer money, or promise you a prize.” A federal agency instructing anyone to relocate savings for safekeeping is not a variation on procedure. It is the tell.
The Impersonation Rule and $70 million in redress
The FTC finalized its Impersonation Rule in 2024, giving the agency authority to bring federal court cases seeking money back for injured consumers and civil penalties against violators. Since then it has brought a dozen enforcement actions under the rule and obtained more than $70 million in redress for consumers.
The 2025 docket shows what the categories look like in practice. One case targeted a tax-relief operation the agency describes as an IRS imposter scheme. Another involved a government imposter scheme used to sell health insurance. A third halted a debt-relief operation the FTC says impersonated both businesses and the government and specifically targeted older adults. The pattern continued this year: in April the agency sued a health-care operation, alleging its operators impersonated the government and large insurance carriers to sell supposedly comprehensive PPO plans that did not provide the coverage buyers were seeking.
Never Ever, and where a report actually goes
Alongside the data release, the FTC joined the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services and other members of the Elder Justice Coordinating Council in a public education effort called Never Ever, which ran from June 15 to June 26 in conjunction with World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. The campaign’s premise is narrow by design: rather than cataloguing scams, it publicizes the short list of actions that government agencies and legitimate businesses will never take. Private participants included the American Bankers Association, USTelecom, Google and Microsoft.
Reports themselves go to ReportFraud.ftc.gov, and they are what produce the figures above; the agency also publishes government-impersonation data through its public dashboards. Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, tied the enforcement work to the numbers in the announcement itself: the FTC, he said, “will use every tool available to combat one of the most pernicious forms of fraud—government and business impersonation—and to protect the integrity of the digital economy.” Anyone contacted by someone claiming to be a federal agency can file that report directly at the FTC’s fraud reporting site.
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.
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