A telephone number that looks local, a voice that claims a badge, and a demand to pay before hanging up: the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has now counted what that script cost. Between January 2025 and July 2026 the center logged nearly 61,000 complaints involving scammers who pose as law enforcement or other officials, with reported losses above $1.6 billion.
Nineteen months of complaints, and why the total is a floor
The figures come from an IC3 public service announcement dated September 17, 2026. The window runs 19 months, which works out to roughly 3,200 complaints a month on the rounded count. Divided across the whole set, the reported losses average about $26,000 per complaint, a figure derived here from the two rounded totals and not stated by the FBI.
These are complaints that reached IC3, so the totals measure what victims reported, not every call placed. The alert is also broader than the headline’s police framing: it covers scammers who pose as law enforcement and as government officials, and the counts below are drawn from that combined description. A household reading the numbers should treat them as a minimum for the period. Because the FBI says “nearly” 61,000 and “more than” $1.6 billion, every average here is an approximation built on rounded inputs, useful for scale and not for precision.
Four scripts, and very different loss sizes
The alert breaks out several versions of the impersonation, each with its own complaint count and loss total. Dividing losses by complaints, as this article does, gives a rough sense of how much a typical report in each category involved.
Jury-duty and court-date threats produced 6,833 complaints and nearly $36 million in losses, or about $5,300 per complaint. Calls aimed at medical practitioners produced 3,322 complaints and $37 million, about $11,100 each. Claims that a foreign national faces extradition produced 1,809 complaints and $140 million, close to $77,400 each. License-renewal scams logged 496 complaints and over $348,000, about $700 each.
The spread is wide for a reason the alert hints at without spelling out: the script changes with the target. A short-fuse jury-duty fine asks for a modest sum, while a story about a professional license or an extradition case can justify a payment many times larger.
Payment channels that are hard to reverse
The alert lists how callers collect: “prepaid cards, couriers, bank wires, cryptocurrency, or cash inserted into cryptocurrency kiosks.” Every item on that list moves value in a way that is difficult to trace back, and the Federal Trade Commission says the same thing in plainer terms. In its guidance on government impersonation scams, the FTC warns that scammers “insist you can only pay these ways” because “it’s hard to track that money, and just as hard to get it back.”
For a household budget, the practical point is that a payment demand tied to a legal threat is the signal, not the particular agency name used. The alert makes the same point from the other direction in its advice, quoted below.
A call engineered to keep the victim from checking
The FBI describes the tactics in a short list: spoofed phone numbers and credentials, an urgent tone, a refusal to speak with anyone but the victim, an insistence on keeping the victim on the line, and discouragement from telling anyone else. Each of those closes off a natural check. A spoofed number defeats caller ID. Urgency removes time to think. Isolation removes the second opinion of a spouse, a neighbor or a bank teller.
The alert does not say how the callers obtained phone numbers or personal details for any of these schemes, and it makes no link to data brokers or any other source of contact information. Where personal information comes from is a separate question that applies to scam calls in general.
What the FBI says to do, and where to report
The alert’s central rule is a flat statement: “Law enforcement and government authorities will never contact members of the public by telephone or text message to demand any form of payment or to request personal or sensitive information.” It advises verifying a caller’s identity independently, using official, publicly available contact information and not details the caller supplies. The FTC gives the same instruction, to hang up and call the agency at a number found independently.
Victims are directed to contact local law enforcement, notify their financial institutions and file a complaint with IC3 at ic3.gov, including contact information, financial details and any communications evidence. The FTC takes reports at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and points to IdentityTheft.gov for those who shared personal information. Other FBI alerts are listed on the IC3 public service announcement page.
The FBI’s September 17 alert remains the controlling source for each count above: nearly 61,000 complaints, more than $1.6 billion in reported losses, 6,833 jury-duty complaints and the payment methods named.
Where scam callers find a name and a number
A scam call needs a phone number and often a name before the script begins, and personal details listed on data broker and people-search sites are one of the ways such information circulates. Incogni asks data brokers and people-search sites to remove personal information, sends those removal requests on a customer’s behalf and keeps re-sending them, and shows the status of each request in the account. Less personal data on broker lists can mean fewer scam calls, texts and emails, though it does not stop scams from being attempted.
See how Incogni sends and tracks removal requests to data brokers → We may earn a commission if you buy through this link.
This article was written with AI assistance and its figures were checked against the FBI alert linked above.
