FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report: $20.9 Billion in Cybercrime Losses and What It Means for Victims

In April 2026, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center Annual Report — and the numbers it contained were, by any measure, the most alarming in the history of the document. Americans reported losing $20.877 billion to cybercrime in 2025. That figure represents a 26 percent increase on the previous year, and it marks the first time in the IC3’s history that annual complaints exceeded one million.

These are not abstract statistics. Behind every billion dollars in that report is a collection of individuals who trusted the wrong platform, the wrong person, or the wrong investment opportunity. They are victims of crypto investment fraud, romance scams, fake trading platforms, employment schemes, and the growing category of artificial intelligence-enabled fraud that the FBI introduced as a crime descriptor for the first time in this report.

At ICAR, we work with fraud victims across the United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia. We trace stolen assets, build forensic evidence packages, coordinate with exchanges and law enforcement, and pursue every legal avenue available to the people who come to us. We read the IC3 report not as an academic exercise but as a professional briefing — a map of the threat landscape we operate within every day.

This article breaks down the key findings of the FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report, explains what they mean for fraud victims, and provides the context that turns statistics into understanding.

The Headline Number: $20.877 Billion

The total loss figure of $20.877 billion across 1,008,597 complaints is significant for several reasons beyond the sheer scale of the number.

First, it represents the first year ever that the IC3 received more than one million complaints. The milestone matters because it reflects not only the growth of cybercrime but also, potentially, an increase in reporting — which has historically captured only a fraction of actual fraud. Researchers consistently estimate that fewer than 20 percent of fraud victims report to official channels. If that ratio holds, the true scale of cybercrime loss in the United States alone in 2025 could exceed $100 billion.

Second, the 26 percent year-on-year increase is not an aberration. It continues a multi-year trajectory. In 2024, the IC3 reported $16.6 billion in losses. In 2023, it was $12.5 billion. The curve is not flattening.

Third, the average loss per complaint — $20,699 — tells a story about who is being targeted. These are not low-value scams. The fraudsters operating at scale today are patient, organized, and targeting individuals with meaningful savings and assets.

Cryptocurrency: The Dominant Loss Category

Of the $20.877 billion in total losses, cryptocurrency-related fraud accounted for $11.366 billion — nearly 55 percent of all reported losses — across 181,565 complaints. This represents a 22 percent increase in cryptocurrency losses year on year.

Within that cryptocurrency total, investment fraud dominated. The IC3 recorded $7.2 billion in losses attributed specifically to cryptocurrency investment fraud — a category that encompasses the schemes known variously as pig butchering, romance baiting, and fake crypto trading platforms.

The mechanics of these schemes are well documented. A victim is contacted — typically through a dating application, social media platform, or a seemingly misdirected text message — by someone who gradually builds a relationship over days or weeks. The conversation eventually turns to investment, and the victim is introduced to what appears to be a sophisticated and profitable cryptocurrency trading platform. Initial deposits show impressive returns. The victim deposits more. Family members are sometimes encouraged to invest. When the victim attempts to withdraw funds, they discover that the platform was fraudulent from the first transaction.

What makes these schemes particularly devastating is their psychological architecture. They are not primarily technical frauds — they are relationship frauds that happen to use cryptocurrency as their instrument. The average individual loss in pig butchering schemes is estimated at approximately $177,000, according to data from the Global Anti-Scam Organization. The FBI’s Operation Level Up, which proactively identifies and contacts active pig butchering victims, notified 3,780 people in 2025 alone — 78 percent of whom had no idea they were currently being scammed. Thirty-eight of those individuals were referred for suicide intervention.

Investment Fraud: The Single Largest Loss Category

Investment fraud as a whole — including but not limited to cryptocurrency investment fraud — was the largest loss category in the IC3 2025 report at $8.649 billion. This represents approximately 49 percent of all scam-related losses.

The overlap between cryptocurrency and investment fraud is substantial. The majority of high-value investment fraud cases reported to the IC3 involve fake cryptocurrency platforms, fake trading accounts showing fabricated returns, and the particular cruelty of withdrawal fees — where victims who attempt to access their funds are told they must pay additional sums to release their money. Those additional sums are also stolen.

The IC3 2025 data confirms what ICAR’s own casework reflects: investment fraud is no longer primarily targeting elderly or financially unsophisticated victims. The 30-to-49 age cohort is now among the most heavily affected demographic, and victims frequently include educated professionals, business owners, and individuals with prior financial market experience. Scammers have adapted their targeting accordingly — constructing elaborate professional personas, generating fake trading credentials, and building platforms that mimic the user experience of legitimate exchanges with sophisticated technical precision.

AI-Related Fraud: A New Category for a New Era

For the first time in its history, the FBI IC3 introduced ‘AI-related’ as a formal crime descriptor in its 2025 report. This is not a minor administrative development — it represents the FBI’s formal acknowledgement that artificial intelligence has become a material enabler of cybercrime.

The AI-related crime category recorded 22,364 complaints and $893,346,472 in losses. Within that total, AI-enabled investment fraud accounted for $632 million — confirming that AI is being deployed most aggressively in the same space that has driven the overall growth in cybercrime losses.

The mechanisms are varied and evolving rapidly. Deepfake video technology allows scammers to create convincing video content featuring the faces and voices of celebrities, government officials, and business leaders, endorsing fictitious investment opportunities. According to data from Surfshark, deepfake investment fraud using celebrity likenesses caused $1.13 billion in damages globally in 2025 — 52 percent of all deepfake-related fraud losses.

Voice cloning technology enables a different category of fraud: the family emergency scam, in which a victim receives a phone call from what sounds exactly like a relative in distress — a grandchild, a child, a spouse — requesting urgent financial assistance. These scams require as little as three seconds of source audio to generate a convincing voice clone.

At the operational level, AI allows fraud operations to scale their personal communications in ways previously impossible. A single criminal enterprise can simultaneously conduct thousands of apparently individual conversations with prospective victims, each conversation appearing personalised and genuine. This industrialisation of deception has fundamentally changed the economics of fraud.

Victims Over 60: The Most Financially Impacted Group

The IC3 2025 report identifies individuals aged 60 and over as the most financially impacted group in its data, with losses totalling approximately $7.7 billion across 201,266 complaints. This demographic historically reports more consistently than younger age groups — making their figures more reliable as a data point — but the concentration of losses in this cohort reflects both targeting choices by fraudsters and the longer-term savings that this demographic has accumulated.

It is important to note, however, that the narrative that fraud primarily affects the elderly is increasingly inaccurate. The pig butchering data tells a different story, and the growth in employment scams and task scams — which disproportionately target younger adults seeking additional income — confirms that no demographic is immune.

Recovery Scams: The Second Fraud

One of the most important findings in the IC3 2025 report — and one that ICAR considers essential knowledge for every fraud victim — is the scale of recovery scams. The IC3 recorded more than 10,500 recovery scam complaints in 2025, with losses of approximately $1.4 billion.

Recovery scams target individuals who have already lost money to fraud. The scammer — who may pose as a law enforcement officer, a government official, a blockchain analyst, or a recovery specialist — contacts the victim and claims to be able to retrieve their stolen funds. They cannot. They are there to steal again.

The FBI received more than 100 reports between December 2023 and February 2025 of fraudsters specifically impersonating the IC3 itself. The agency subsequently seized the domains of several fraudulent recovery firms — including MyChargeBack, Payback LTD, and Claim Justice — that were operating as recovery scams.

No legitimate fraud recovery process requires upfront payment to receive money you are owed. No legitimate recovery firm contacts victims unsolicited. If someone has reached out to offer to recover your funds, treat that contact with extreme caution.

ICAR’s position on this is unequivocal: we welcome scrutiny of our credentials, we explain our methodology, and we never guarantee recovery outcomes. Any firm that guarantees recovery is either misinformed or dishonest.

The FBI Recovery Asset Team: What Rapid Reporting Can Achieve

The IC3 2025 report also documents the work of the FBI’s Recovery Asset Team — a unit that works to freeze fraudulently transferred funds through what it calls the Financial Fraud Kill Chain. In 2025, the RAT initiated 3,900 FFKC actions against $1.164 billion in attempted theft, successfully freezing $679 million — a 58 percent success rate.

The critical variable is time. The FFKC is most effective when fraud is reported within hours rather than days. Once stolen funds leave a domestic financial institution and enter the cryptocurrency ecosystem or an overseas account, the window for rapid freeze narrows considerably. This is why ICAR consistently advises fraud victims that the first 24 hours after discovering a fraud are the most important in determining what can be recovered.

The UK Parallel: £1.28 Billion and a Converging Threat

While the IC3 2025 report focuses on US-reported losses, the threat landscape it describes is global. UK Finance’s 2025 Fraud Report — covering the same period — recorded £1.28 billion in fraud losses across UK financial institutions, with investment fraud representing the largest single category of authorised push payment fraud at £221.5 million, a 40 percent year-on-year increase.

The mechanics of these frauds — the fake trading platforms, the romance baiting, the sophisticated impersonation — are identical across jurisdictions. The criminal networks operating in Southeast Asia’s scam compounds, which the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime estimates hold more than 200,000 trafficked workers, do not discriminate by nationality. ICAR’s client base spans the UK, Europe, and Asia precisely because these schemes target globally.

What the Numbers Mean for Fraud Victims

Statistics communicate scale. They do not communicate the individual experience of realising that savings accumulated over decades have been stolen, or of the shame that prevents many victims from telling family members what has happened, or of the confusion about where to turn and who to trust when recovery firms may themselves be fraudulent.

The IC3 2025 report confirms several things that ICAR believes are important for every potential or actual fraud victim to understand:

Crypto fraud is traceable. Every transaction on a public blockchain is permanently recorded. The growth in crypto-related fraud does not mean that crypto assets are beyond investigation. It means that investigation requires specialist expertise.

Speed determines outcomes. The FBI’s 58 percent freeze success rate exists because rapid reporting enables rapid action. Delayed reporting significantly reduces recovery options.

Recovery scams are the second wave. The $1.4 billion in recovery scam losses confirms that fraud victims are being specifically targeted again after their initial loss. Victims must verify the credentials of any recovery service with extreme care.

No demographic is immune. The data confirms that education, professional experience, and financial sophistication do not protect against fraud. The scams documented in the IC3 report are designed by people who understand psychology as well as technology.

Action Steps for Fraud Victims and Potential Victims

If you have already been defrauded:

• Report immediately to Action Fraud (UK: 0300 123 2040) or the IC3 (US: ic3.gov) — do not delay.
• Contact your bank or the sending financial institution immediately and request a freeze.
• Preserve all evidence: screenshots of conversations, transaction records, platform URLs, wallet addresses, and any communications from the scammer.
• Do not make any further deposits, including to ‘release’ funds or pay ‘taxes’ on profits.
• Be extremely cautious of any unsolicited contact from individuals claiming to be able to recover your funds.
• Engage a qualified forensic investigator to document the blockchain trail before addresses are moved or cleaned.

If you have not yet been defrauded:

• Verify any investment platform’s registration with the FCA (fca.org.uk/register) before depositing funds.
• Be suspicious of any investment opportunity introduced through a social media contact or dating application.
• Understand that no legitimate investment platform blocks withdrawals or requires payment to release returns.
• If a trading platform’s returns seem consistently exceptional, they are almost certainly fabricated.

The FBI IC3 2025 report is a document about scale. But scale is made up of individuals — and each individual case is recoverable to some degree if the right steps are taken at the right time. ICAR exists to help fraud victims take those steps.

About ICAR: International Cyber Asset Recovery (ICAR) is a UK-based forensic investigation and asset recovery firm specialising in cryptocurrency fraud, investment scams, romance fraud, and cyber-enabled financial crime. ICAR’s investigators hold certifications including CFE, CAMS, CBA, CCI, CBIP, and CCE. To submit a case or request a confidential consultation, complete Case Form  or message ICAR on WhatsApp.