Cryptocurrency investment fraud is on the rise, according to the FBI.
James Martin/CNET
Online scams are lucrative for criminals, and AI is making it easier to swindle US targets, according to the FBI’s latest Internet Crime Report. Each year, the FBI publishes statistics from its Internet Crime Complaint Center, and this year’s report broke the $20 billion barrier in losses, with more than 1 million complaints reported to the agency. In 2024, it recorded $16.6 billion in losses.
The complaint center tracks internet crimes across more than two dozen categories, including identity theft and ransomware. In 2025, phishing/spoofing were the top crime types, with 191,561 complaints. Next on the list was extortion, with 89,129 complaints.
The numbers are based on complaints filed with the FBI, though many crimes go unreported. An FBI representative told CNET by email that the agency “cannot speculate on how many instances of cyber-enabled crime victimization are unreported each year.”
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