FBI: Americans lost a record $21 billion to cybercrime last year
BleepingComputer • • business
Key Points:
- U.S. victims lost nearly $21 billion to cyber-enabled crimes in 2025, a 26% increase from 2024, with investment scams, business email compromise, tech support fraud, and data breaches as primary drivers.
- The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 1 million complaints in 2025, up from 859,000 the previous year, with phishing, extortion, and investment scams being the most frequent.
- Investment fraud caused $8.6 billion in losses, while cryptocurrency-related cybercrime led to the largest financial impact, exceeding $11 billion across 181,565 cases.
- For the first time, AI-related scams were included in the FBI report, accounting for 22,300 complaints and $893 million in losses, involving tactics like voice cloning and deepfake videos.
- The FBI enhanced its response efforts by freezing $679 million of $1.16 billion targeted in fraudulent transactions and launched initiatives like Operation Level Up to proactively alert victims, emphasizing caution and reporting to ic3.gov.
