Crypto Scams and Senior Fraud Drive $21 Billion in 2025 Cyber Theft, FBI Reports
Cryptocurrency investment fraud is on the rise, according to the FBI.
Online scams are lucrative for criminals, and AI is making it easier to defraud U.S. targets, according to the FBI’s latest Internet Crime Report. Every year, the FBI releases statistics from its Internet Crime Complaint Center, and this year’s report crossed the $20 billion mark in losses, with more than a million complaints reported to the agency. In 2024, it recorded losses of $16.6 billion.
The complaint center tracks internet crimes in more than two dozen categories, including identity theft and ransomware. In 2025, phishing and identity theft were the top crime types, with 191,561 complaints. Extortion cases come next, with 89,129 complaints.
The figures are based on complaints filed with the FBI, although many crimes go unreported. An FBI representative told CNET via email that the agency “cannot speculate on the number of cybercrime cases that go unreported each year.”
See also: Here’s how to know if a the link is actually a scam.
Crypto and AI play a bigger role in scams
According to the report, over-60s remain the most vulnerable to online scams, with “elderly fraud” accounting for 201,266 complaints and $7.75 billion in reported losses. This represents a 37% increase from 2024, with an average loss of $38,500. Of these, 12,444 people lost more than $100,000 to scams.
The FBI also received 181,565 cryptocurrency-related complaints, with investment scams accounting for the largest share of losses for U.S. citizens, totaling more than $11 billion.
“These scams are largely perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia, who use human trafficking victims as forced labor to run their fraudulent operations,” the report said.
The rise of better AI systems makes it harder to spot scams, with 22,364 AI-related complaints costing $893 million last year. This includes trust/romance scams, where fake profiles and scripts that resemble believable human language lure, and grandparent scams, or “distress” scams, where AI voice cloning imitates a parent in danger.
The National Consumer League published a recent report showing that AI has more than doubled average financial losses year over year.
Fight against cybercrime
In addition to detailing the different types of cyber scams, the 66-page report highlights the work of the FBI’s IC3 Recovery Asset Team, including a “financial fraud kill chain.” Out of 3,900 reported incidents, the team froze $679 million in assets on $1.2 billion in theft attempts, a success rate of 58 percent.
The FBI has also formed a new Scam Center strike force to combat cryptocurrency investment fraud by identifying the Southeast Asian compounds and executives behind these scams.
Other programs include Operation Level Up, which uncovers scams and notifies victims (78% of whom were unaware of the scam) and places a special emphasis on combating call center fraud, ransomware and data breaches.
