State of scams, Q3 2026

Headline numbers from the 2026 national reports

The FBI IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025 reporting losses of about $20.9 billion (IC3 annual report, April 2026). The FTC recorded $15.9 billion in reported fraud losses for 2025 (March 2026). UK Finance counted £576.4 million in authorised push payment fraud losses in 2025 (June 2026), and Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre reported A$2.18 billion in scam losses (March 2026). Investment scams are the largest category figure recorded here from the IC3 ($8.65 billion), the FTC ($7.9 billion), and the ACCC (A$837.7 million), and accounted for £221.5 million of UK authorised push payment losses. Each agency collects data differently, so these totals are not comparable across countries and are never added together.

Published during the quarter

The one dataset in the atlas published between July and September 2026 is the 2025 BBB Scam Tracker Risk Report (August 2026), which drew on more than 146,000 scam reports published by BBB Scam Tracker in the US and Canada in 2025.

Notable cases

No case in the atlas is dated between 1 July and 30 September 2026. Cases are dated by incident, disclosure, charge, or sentencing, and are added once they are sourced, so this section will fill as the quarter's cases are added. Two existing atlas cases had developments during the quarter. On 6 July 2026 Chinese authorities formally arrested Chen Zhi, the Prince Group chairman charged in the US over Cambodian scam compounds, the South China Morning Post reported, citing Caixin; the US charges remain pending and are allegations. On 16 July 2026 Thalha Jubair and a co-defendant were each sentenced to five years and six months in prison over the 2024 attack on Transport for London; The Register reported that the court heard the attackers socially engineered a TfL helpdesk worker into resetting a password.

• 2025-10 · US · Charged · $15B seized

  Prince Group chairman Chen Zhi charged over Cambodian scam compounds, 2025

• 2024-08 · GB · Sentenced · £29M impact

  Transport for London hacked after a help desk password reset, 2024

Techniques: what the data shows and what it does not

The atlas holds no FBI IC3 public service announcement and no case from the quarter, so this report names no technique as rising. What the 2025 IC3 report does measure: phishing and spoofing was the most reported crime type, with 191,561 complaints, and complaints mentioning AI reported $893.3 million in losses. That AI figure overlaps the crime-type figures and is never added to them. Separately, APWG observed 971,181 phishing attacks in the first quarter of 2026.