The FBI Just Confirmed That Crypto and AI Scams Drove Billions in Losses in 2025 , The 2026 Numbers Will Be Worse

On April 7, 2026, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center released its 2025 Annual Report. The headline figure carried enough weight to make you pause. In 2025, internet-enabled crime cost Americans about $20.88 billion. Compared to the $16.6 billion reported in 2024—which at the time was the largest in the IC3’s 24-year history—the amount reflects a 26% rise.

Compared to what cybercrime cost Americans ten years ago, the new figure is an order of magnitude more. The IC3 total losses in 2015 came to about $1 billion. In 2025, the amount of money lost to online fraud and scams was almost twenty times higher than it was ten years earlier. The two-decade arc illustrates a particular aspect of the development of fraud technology.

The tale revolves around the Bitcoin element. In 2025, IC3 received 181,565 complaints about cryptocurrencies, a 21% rise from the previous year. The total losses came to $11.366 billion, which is more than half of the entire harm caused by online crime that year. The average loss associated with cryptocurrencies was roughly $62,604.

A subset of 18,589 victims claimed to have lost over $100,000 apiece. The “pig butchering” relationship-and-investment scams that have taken over the category of cryptocurrency investment fraud alone resulted in $7.2 billion in damages among 61,559 complaints. Losses in that subcategory increased by 25%, while complaint volume increased by 48% from 2024. Compared to the overall fraud trend, the growth is more rapid. The trend indicates that the technology used in these frauds has been increasing, rather than decreasing, its ability to create victims.

The AI category, which IC3 introduced as a stand-alone descriptor for the first time in the 25-year history of the report, encapsulates the technical change that the FBI has been monitoring during the latter part of 2024 and throughout 2025. With adjusted losses of $893 million, the government received 22,364 complaints pertaining to AI.

Of that total, $632 million came from investment frauds, while bitcoin was involved in about $658.7 million of AI-flagged losses, indicating significant overlap between the two categories. “Many victims do not realize the extent AI may be involved in scams,” the agency admitted in its own framing that the official AI statistics most likely underestimate the technology’s true involvement. The majority of victims just fail to identify the AI fingerprint on the scam that drained their accounts, whether it be through voice clones, deepfake video calls, or flawlessly localized phishing communications.

The component that should be most difficult to look past is the demographic concentration of the harm. In 2025, 201,266 complaints with alleged damages of almost $7.75 billion were submitted by Americans 60 and older, a 60% increase over the previous year. In addition to reporting $4.4 billion in losses from cryptocurrency scams alone, the 60+ cohort filed 44,555 cryptocurrency complaints, which is almost 56% more than what they lost in 2024.

A total of 12,444 complainants who were 60 years of age or older claimed to have lost more than $100,000. The whole picture shows that lifelong financial buffers, home equity withdrawals, and retirement assets are being depleted at a rate that traditional fraud-prevention techniques are obviously unable to handle. The crypto kiosk component, which accounts for $389 million in losses across 13,460 complaints (a 58% increase), highlights a particular delivery mechanism that has generated enough state-level concern to lead to licensing measures in West Virginia and Connecticut.

The actual source of the deception is the structural question that lies beneath the statistics. Once more, the FBI blamed organized crime in Southeast Asia for the majority of bitcoin investment frauds, especially the scam compounds that use trafficking labor in Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar. The portion that doesn’t fit cleanly into the typical “older Americans got scammed” story is the intersection of financial fraud with humanitarian hardship.

In Tampa, Phoenix, and Portland, the chat windows that emptied retirement funds were frequently staffed by people who weren’t there freely either. Since its establishment in November, the U.S. Attorney’s Office District of Columbia Scam Center Strike Force has frozen or confiscated almost $580 million in digital assets associated with Chinese transnational organized crime. The amount is noteworthy and a small portion of the $11.4 billion that vanished within the same time frame.

Reading the IC3 report gives me the impression that 2026 is really on track to provide worse figures than 2025. The fact that scam compound operations are growing their capacity, AI-generated content is becoming more difficult to identify, and the older population is still the major target indicates that the increasing trajectory hasn’t peaked.

The IC3 Recovery Asset Team froze $679 million for a 58% success rate on Financial Fraud Kill Chain operations, while Operation Level Up contacted 3,780 victims in 2025 with an estimated $225.9 million in avoided losses. These are actual interventions that are yielding actual outcomes. They face a $20.88 billion loss that increases at a rate of about 25% to 30% every year.

Recovery rates are largely dependent on how quickly the government infrastructure can step in, so anyone who thinks they, a friend, or a family member may have fallen victim to a scam should file a complaint at IC3.gov as soon as possible. Early in 2027, the 2026 figures will be released. They won’t be smaller based on the last three years’ trajectory.