$20.9 Billion and It's Not Phishing: The Scams That Actually Drained Americans in 2025

Americans reported $20.9 billion in scam and cybercrime losses to the FBI in 2025, and phishing, the fake-link email everyone warns about, made up about 1% of it. The biggest money went to investment scams and to scams built on trust: a friendly stranger, a fake technician, a fake bank officer, a fake sweetheart. Those are the findings of the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center's 2025 annual report.

Verified as of 25 September 2026 against the sources linked inline.

I have worked on login security since founding LoginRadius in 2013, a platform that grew past a billion identities. Login security is built to stop strangers from getting into your accounts. It cannot stop a scam where you log in yourself and send the money willingly. The 2025 numbers show that this second kind of scam is where most of the money went.

What happened in 2025

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, is where Americans report online fraud. In 2025 it received 1,008,597 complaints, according to its 2025 annual report. Reported losses reached $20.877 billion. That is 26% more than in 2024.

These are only the losses people chose to report. A scam that nobody reports never appears in the count.

The biggest losses were not phishing

Phishing means a fake email, text or website that tricks you into typing a password or clicking a bad link. It is the scam most people have been trained to spot. In 2025 it was also the most reported crime type, with 191,561 complaints. Yet those complaints carried $215.8 million in losses, about 1% of the total.

Investment fraud is the opposite. It drew far fewer complaints, 72,984, but carried $8.65 billion in losses. That is roughly four of every ten dollars Americans reported losing. Most of it, $7.228 billion, involved cryptocurrency investment schemes, which the FBI calls "the highest source of financial losses to Americans in 2025."

The table below shows the gap for the crime types that hit households hardest. The first two columns are FBI figures from the IC3 2025 report. The last column is my own calculation, losses divided by complaints. It is not an FBI figure.

IC3 crime type (2025)	Reported losses	Complaints	Loss per complaint (my calculation)
Investment	$8.65 billion	72,984	about $118,500
Tech and customer support	$2.13 billion	47,794	about $44,700
Confidence and romance	$929.3 million	23,159	about $40,100
Government impersonation	$797.9 million	32,424	about $24,600
Phishing and spoofing	$215.8 million	191,561	about $1,100

One large category is left out on purpose. Business email compromise, at $3.05 billion, was the second costliest crime type, but it mostly targets companies paying invoices, not families.

A note on reading these numbers

The FBI also tags complaints that involved cryptocurrency ($11.37 billion) or mentioned AI ($893.3 million). Those tags overlap the crime types above. A crypto investment loss is counted once as investment fraud and again under the crypto tag. Never add these figures together, or to the crime types, because the result counts the same money twice.

Why this matters to you and your family

The costliest scams skip the hacking entirely. Nobody steals your password. You log in, you pass every security check, and you send the money yourself, because someone spent weeks earning your trust. Your bank's fraud systems mostly look for strangers using your account, so a payment you make yourself can look normal to them.

Older relatives carry the heaviest losses

People aged 60 and over filed 201,266 complaints in 2025 and reported $7.748 billion in losses, according to the IC3 report's elder fraud section. That is up 59% from 2024. Their average reported loss was $38,500. And 12,444 people in that age group each lost more than $100,000.

The $7.748 billion is part of the $20.877 billion total, not extra money on top of it. Within it, investment fraud took $3.52 billion from older Americans and tech support scams took $1.04 billion. These are the savings people spent decades building, and often the money meant to last through retirement.

Victims often do not know they are being scammed

Under a program called Operation Level Up, the FBI contacted 3,780 victims of crypto investment fraud in 2025. According to the IC3 report, 78% of them did not know they were being scammed. That single number explains why these scams are so costly. The victim is still inside the story when the money leaves.

That is why family matters so much here. The person being scammed may defend the scammer. A calm, outside voice is often the only thing that breaks the spell.

The scammers choose payments that cannot be undone

Scammers steer people to cash, gold, gift cards, wire transfers and cryptocurrency, because those are hard to reverse. Crypto ATM and kiosk fraud cost $389 million in 2025. People aged 60 and over filed 6,188 of those complaints and lost $257.5 million of that amount. Gold courier scams, where a courier collects cash or precious metals at the door, cost $311.8 million.

After one scam, a second one often follows

People who have already lost money are targeted again by "recovery" scammers who promise to get the money back for a fee. The FBI recorded $1.4 billion in recovery scam losses in 2025, including $540.5 million from people aged 60 and over. The FBI notes these figures may include money lost in the first scam. In August 2025 it warned about fake law firms targeting crypto scam victims, and stated: "The US Government does not request payment for law enforcement services provided."

What the Scam Atlas shows

The Scam Atlas is a free library on this site that explains how scams work in plain language. It covers 70 scam types, grouped into 11 families such as investment fraud, relationship scams and government impersonation. Each type has its own page with the same five parts: how it works, red flags, what to do if you are targeted, how to prevent it, and the official loss figures for its category. It also documents 35 real cases, from arrests to sentencings.

How it was built

Every number in the atlas links to the agency that published it, such as the FBI, the FTC or UK Finance. Survey-based figures are labelled "estimated", so they are never confused with reported losses. Overlapping figures, like the crypto and AI tags above, are marked "never summed". Every real case needs a primary source, such as a court record or a law enforcement announcement, and private victims are never named. The full rules are on the Scam Atlas methodology page.

All the IC3 figures in this post, with notes on which ones sit inside others, are on the Scam Atlas statistics page. Three findings stand out when you read the consumer scam pages side by side.

Finding 1: the costliest scams follow the same four steps

The pig butchering page lays out the pattern most clearly. It starts with an innocent contact, such as a wrong-number text or a dating app match. The stranger becomes a friend over days or weeks, then offers to teach you crypto trading on a website that looks real. The fake account shows big profits until you try to withdraw, when you are told to pay "taxes" or "fees" first.

The romance scam page shows the same shape with a different story. Trust comes first, then a crisis or an opportunity that needs money. The requests continue for as long as the victim keeps paying.

Finding 2: some scams hand you from one fake helper to the next

The FBI named one version the "phantom hacker" scam in a 2023 warning. The phantom hacker page breaks it into stages. A fake technician says your computer is hacked. A fake bank employee then says your savings are at risk. Finally a fake government official insists you move the money to a "safe" account, which the scammers control.

Each new caller makes the story feel more official. That is the trick. It often begins with a tech support pop-up that locks the screen and shows a phone number to call.

Finding 3: "keep it secret" appears again and again

Across the consumer pages, one red flag keeps coming back: you are told not to tell anyone. It appears in pig butchering, in the phantom hacker scam, in bank "safe account" scams and in the family emergency and grandparent scam. In that last one, a caller poses as a grandchild in trouble, and scammers can now use AI to copy a relative's voice from a short clip. I wrote more about how AI changed these scams in what happens when scammers get their hands on AI.

Secrecy is the scammer's best protection. It cuts the victim off from the one person who might say "wait, this sounds wrong."

How to use the Scam Atlas

You do not need to read the whole atlas. Use it when a message, call or pop-up feels off, or when you want to prepare an older relative. Here is a simple routine.

1. Match what happened to a scam type. A friendly wrong-number text points to pig butchering. A pop-up with a phone number points to tech support. A relative in a panic asking for money points to the grandparent scam. Being told to feed cash into a machine points to the crypto ATM scam.
2. Read the red flags list on that page. If even one matches your situation, stop before any money moves.
3. Follow the "If you are targeted" steps. Each page lists them in order: stop contact, call your bank, save the evidence, report it.
4. Report it. The report a scam page lists where to go in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, India and the EU. In the US, that means your bank first, then ic3.gov and ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
5. Watch for the second scam. Read the asset recovery scam page before anyone offers to get your money back for a fee.

What to do next

Speed matters when money has already moved. The FBI's Financial Fraud Kill Chain works with banks to freeze fraudulent transfers. In 2025 it handled 3,900 incidents involving $1.16 billion in attempted theft and froze $679 million, according to the IC3 report. Most people can prevent the loss in the first place with a few simple habits.

• Agree on one family rule this week. No money moves to crypto, gold, a cash courier or a "safe account" because of a call, text or pop-up, until you have called a family member first.
• Keep the bank's real number handy. Use the number printed on the back of the card, not a number from a text, email or caller.
• Never give remote access to someone who contacted you first. Real companies do not call you to fix your computer.
• Treat investing tips from online friends as the warning sign. If you never met them in person, do not let them near your savings.
• Never pay to get your own money. A "tax" or "fee" before a withdrawal, refund or prize means the balance on screen is fake.
• If money has moved, call the bank at once, then report at ic3.gov, and save every chat, number and receipt.
• Talk about it without shame. The people who lost the most in 2025 were not careless. They were persuaded by professionals.

Phishing still deserves attention, because a stolen login can open the door to bigger losses. My older guide on how to identify and avoid phishing scams covers the link and sender checks. But the 2025 numbers are plain: most of the money was lost after trust was built, not at the first click.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much money did Americans lose to scams in 2025?

Americans reported $20.877 billion in losses to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center in 2025, from 1,008,597 complaints. That was 26% more than in 2024. The real figure is likely higher, because many scams are never reported.

What scam costs Americans the most money?

Investment fraud, with $8.65 billion reported to the FBI in 2025. Crypto investment scams, including pig butchering, made up $7.228 billion of that. These scams usually start with a friendly stranger online, not with a suspicious link.

Is phishing still the biggest scam threat?

Phishing was the most reported crime type in 2025, with 191,561 complaints. But it accounted for only $215.8 million in losses, about 1% of the total. It matters mainly as a first step toward account takeover, while trust scams take far more money.

How can I protect an older parent from scams?

Agree on a simple rule: no money moves because of a call, text or pop-up without first calling a family member. Explain that banks and government agencies never ask anyone to move savings to a "safe account". Show them the Scam Atlas page for the scam type that worries you most.

Can I get my money back after a scam?

Sometimes, if you act fast. Call your bank at once and ask it to stop or recall the payment, then report at ic3.gov. Be very wary of anyone who offers to recover the money for a fee, because recovery scams cost Americans $1.4 billion in 2025.