Cyber-driven fraud – from investment schemes to business email compromise (BEC) to confidence and romance scams – accounted for almost 85% of the losses Americans suffered through fraud crimes last year, totaling an eye-watering $17.7 billion in money stolen, according to the FBI.

It also made up 45% of all the fraud-related complaints to the FBI, the agency said in its 2025 Internet Crime Report, released this week.

For the first time in the 25 years since the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) was founded, the agency included a section in the report for AI-related scams, which accounted for 22,364 complaints and cost U.S. citizens almost $893 million.

“Phishing [and] spoofing, extortion, and investment schemes were the most frequently reported complaints,” the FBI wrote in announcing the release of the report. “Costly tactics used by scammers … include compromised corporate e-mails, tech support fraud, and personal data breaches.”

Jose Perez, operations director for the FBI’s criminal and cyber branch, wrote in the report’s introduction that “It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint, and electronic interactions. Cyber threats and cyber-enabled crime will continue to evolve as the world embraces emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.”

Record Complaints, Record Losses

According to the report, the total number of all complaints filed with the IC3 last year was more than 1 million – blowing past the 859,532 filed in 2024 – with losses totaling almost $21 billion, a 26% increase over the amount the year before.

The number of cyber-related complaints came in at 452,868. Extortion, investment, and non-payment or non-deliver scams were the top three such complaints, though it was investment scams – at more than $8.6 billion – that cost Americans the most money. BEC attacks were next, at more than $3 billion, followed by tech support scams (more than $2.1 billion), romance scams (more than $929 million), and government impersonation (almost $798 million).

Crypto Investment Scams

In its report, the FBI highlighted two kinds of cyber-enabled scams, including cryptocurrency investment, which are long-term initiatives that tend to start with scammers contacting people through text messages, social media sites, ads, or data apps, and then – after gaining the victim’s trust – moving the conversation to a messaging platform.

Romance scams are run the same way, with the same purpose – to pull trusting people into the scheme and then enticing them to send cryptocurrency to fake investment platforms or applications. When the victims try to withdraw their money, they find it’s gone and there is no more contact with the person they met online.

Many of these schemes now are run out of industrial-scale scam compounds located in border areas in Southeast Asia around such countries as Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia and controlled by organized crime gangs that use forced labor from victims of human trafficking.

According to the FBI report, such cryptocurrency schemes stole $7.2 billion from Americans last year.

Sextortion, Account Takeover

The other fraud the agency highlighted was sextortion, where people are contacted online and told by the bad actors that they have revealing or embarrassing images and ordered to produce more such images under the threat that the content will be published or of violence. Last year, the IC3 received more than 75,000 claims of sextortion.

Other fraud schemes noted were account takeover, which resulted in $359.7 million in losses in 2025, gold courier scams ($311.8 million), investment club scams ($160 million), and government impersonations ($798 million).

Ransomware and Other Cyber Threats

The IC3 report also outlined what the FBI called “spiraling” cyber threats, including hijacked networks, cryptocurrency heists, and corporate espionage.

“Every year, our adversaries become savvier and increasingly callous – attacking power grids, shutting down hospitals, and stoking geopolitical tensions,” the FBI wrote. “State-sponsored cyber actors wield every element of their national power to target the United States and its critical infrastructure. Skilled cybercriminals exploit new and longstanding vulnerabilities to steal our money and hold our data for ransom.”

Of those, data breaches (39% of such crimes) and ransomware (36%) were most prominent. Regarding ransomware, the IC3 last year received more than 3,600 complaints that resulted in more than $32 million in losses. The top ransomware variants were Akira, Qilin, INC (also known as Lynx and Sinobi), BianLian, and Play.