Every year, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center releases its annual report on cybercrime in America. Every year, the numbers are worse than the year before.

The 2025 report is no exception — and in several respects, it marks a turning point that security professionals and consumer advocates have been warning about for years.

Total reported losses: $20.9 billion. That is a 26 percent increase over 2024 and the first time in the IC3’s history that reported losses have crossed the $20 billion threshold. The IC3 also received more than one million complaints for the first time ever — 1,038,000 reports in 2025, up from roughly 859,000 in 2024.

These numbers, already alarming, reflect only what was reported. The FBI consistently notes that the vast majority of cybercrime incidents are never filed with law enforcement. The true scale of losses is believed to be a multiple of what appears in IC3 data.

What Drove the Numbers Up: Investment Fraud Dominates

Of all the crime types tracked by the IC3, investment fraud inflicted the greatest financial damage in 2025 at $8.6 billion in losses — accounting for more than 40 percent of total reported losses across all categories.

Investment fraud in IC3 terminology encompasses a broad set of schemes, but the dominant mechanism in 2025 was cryptocurrency investment fraud, often called pig butchering. In these schemes, victims are cultivated through social media, dating apps, or messaging platforms by individuals who build a relationship over weeks or months before steering the victim toward a fraudulent investment platform. The victim deposits money, watches fabricated profits grow on a fake dashboard, and then finds the platform inaccessible when they attempt to withdraw — at which point the entire operation disappears.

The pig butchering model has become industrial in scale. Operating out of compound facilities in Southeast Asia — Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and now expanding into South Asia — criminal networks employ or traffic thousands of workers to run simultaneous fraud operations targeting victims worldwide.

Cryptocurrency: $11.36 Billion in Losses

The IC3 breaks out cryptocurrency-related fraud separately, and the figure is staggering: $11.36 billion in losses across 181,565 complaints in 2025. That is a 22 percent increase from 2024, which itself was a record year.

To put this in context: cryptocurrency fraud alone in the United States in 2025 exceeded the GDP of more than 30 countries.

The IC3’s cryptocurrency fraud data captures several categories:

  • Investment fraud platforms (fake exchanges and trading apps)
  • Pig butchering and romance-to-investment schemes
  • Cryptocurrency ATM scams targeting seniors
  • Sextortion and ransomware paid in cryptocurrency
  • Fake cryptocurrency recovery services targeting prior victims

That last category — recovery scams — is a growing secondary fraud that specifically targets people who have already lost money to crypto schemes. Fraudulent law firms or fake government recovery agencies contact prior victims, promise to retrieve their lost funds for an upfront fee, and then steal that fee as well. The IC3 saw a significant rise in recovery scam complaints in 2025.

AI Fraud Gets Its Own Category — And It’s Already at $893 Million

For the first time in IC3 history, the 2025 report includes a dedicated section on AI-facilitated crime.

The IC3 received 22,364 complaints referencing artificial intelligence as a component of the fraud in 2025. Reported losses in this category totaled $893 million.

The most common AI applications in reported fraud were:

Deepfake video fraud: Scammers used AI-generated video to impersonate executives, family members, or celebrities in video calls or recorded messages, directing victims to send money or share credentials.

Voice cloning: With as little as ten seconds of audio from a victim’s social media, criminals generated convincing voice replicas of family members calling with emergency requests for money.

AI-written phishing: Large language models enabled the mass production of personalized, grammatically correct phishing emails and texts that no longer contain the spelling errors and awkward phrasing that once served as warning signs.

AI-powered romance scams: A single operator using AI tools can now maintain emotionally credible conversations with dozens of victims simultaneously, dramatically scaling the throughput of pig butchering and romance scam operations.

The IC3’s tracking of AI fraud as a separate category is significant because it establishes a baseline. The 2025 figures will almost certainly look modest compared to what AI-facilitated fraud produces in 2026 and beyond — as the tools become cheaper, more capable, and more accessible to criminal networks.

Business Email Compromise: $3 Billion

After investment fraud, Business Email Compromise (BEC) was the second-largest category by financial loss at $3 billion across 21,442 complaints.

BEC involves criminals compromising or spoofing corporate email accounts to redirect payments, steal credentials, or impersonate executives to authorize fraudulent wire transfers. Despite being one of the most documented and widely covered fraud types in cybersecurity, BEC losses continue to rise year over year.

The average loss per BEC complaint in 2025 was approximately $140,000, reflecting that these attacks target organizations rather than individuals and aim for larger single transactions.

Seniors Lost $7.7 Billion

The IC3’s age-based breakdown carries some of the report’s most disturbing numbers.

Victims 60 and older filed 20 percent of all complaints — but those complaints accounted for $7.7 billion in losses, or roughly 37 percent of total reported losses. The median loss per complaint in this age group was more than double the overall median.

The FBI notes that senior victims are disproportionately targeted by tech support fraud, government impersonation, and investment fraud schemes — all of which are calibrated to exploit higher trust in authority, less familiarity with fraud patterns, and the larger asset bases that come with decades of savings.

The IC3 also flagged cryptocurrency ATM fraud targeting seniors as a fast-growing concern, with reports of elderly victims physically driven to ATM kiosks by scammers posing as government officials or bank fraud departments.

Account Takeover: A New Entrant in the Top Categories

For the first time, the IC3 2025 report called out account takeover as a distinct and growing threat, receiving 4,700 complaints and $359.7 million in losses.

Account takeover involves criminals gaining unauthorized access to existing bank, brokerage, email, or other accounts — typically through stolen credentials, SIM swapping, or social engineering of customer service representatives. Unlike fraud that requires a victim to actively send money, account takeover can drain accounts without any action from the victim.

The relatively lower number of complaints compared to losses ($359.7M across only 4,700 reports) suggests large individual losses per incident — and significant underreporting, as victims may not realize their account was compromised until significant damage has occurred.

The IC3 Received Over 3,000 Complaints Per Day in 2025

Perhaps the most telling statistic in the 2025 report is the complaint volume: at 1,038,000 submissions across 365 days, the IC3 received an average of 2,843 complaints per day in 2025.

That is not a surge. It is a sustained industrial-scale assault on American consumers and businesses that shows no sign of decelerating.

What the Report Means for 2026

The FBI’s 2025 IC3 report is a backward-looking document — it tells us what happened last year. But its trajectory points clearly at what to expect this year:

  • AI-facilitated fraud will grow significantly as the tools that produced $893 million in losses in 2025 become more capable, cheaper, and more widely used by criminal networks.
  • Cryptocurrency investment fraud will remain the highest-loss category as long as the compound operations in Southeast Asia continue operating and expanding.
  • BEC will continue to escalate as generative AI makes sophisticated spear-phishing emails faster to produce.
  • Recovery scams will grow as the population of prior fraud victims expands and becomes a new target demographic for secondary fraud.

The IC3 allows anyone in the United States to file a cybercrime complaint at ic3.gov. Filing a report even when no financial loss occurred contributes to the data that lets the FBI identify emerging patterns and coordinate with international law enforcement.

The full 2025 IC3 Annual Report is available at ic3.gov/annualreport/reports.