Online scams just had their biggest year ever - and the tools making them work are getting cheaper and smarter.
The FBI says Americans lost nearly $21 billion to cyber crimes in 2025, a 26% jump from $16.6 billion the year before, as the agency received more than one million complaints for the first time in the report's 25-year history.
Crypto fraud led the way by a wide margin, with more than 181,000 complaints totaling over $11 billion in losses. Investment scams using fake crypto platforms were the single most common type, luring victims with promises of guaranteed returns through professional-looking websites and social media ads before draining their wallets.
A new category this year: For the first time, the FBI added a section on AI-powered scams, which racked up 22,364 complaints and nearly $893 million in losses. Scammers are using AI to build fake voices, deepfake videos, and phishing messages that look real at a scale that did not exist two years ago.
The FBI said one common scheme uses AI-generated voice clones to impersonate family members in distress, tricking people into wiring money for fake emergencies.
Business email compromise - where scammers impersonate executives or vendors to trick employees into wiring money - remained the second costliest category at $3.4 billion in reported losses. Ransomware attacks also ticked up, with 5,043 complaints reported compared to 4,506 the year before.
Romance scams cost victims another $672 million, while tech support fraud - where scammers pretend to be from a company like Microsoft or Apple - generated $1.46 billion in losses, hitting older adults the hardest.
People over 60 filed more complaints than any other age group - 201,266 in total - losing $7.7 billion, which is up 59% from 2024. The average loss per victim in this age group topped $38,000.
The average loss per complaint across all age groups came in at $20,699, with the FBI handling more than one million reports in a single year for the first time ever. Younger victims filed fewer complaints but lost money at a growing rate too, with the 30-to-39 age group seeing a 34% jump in total losses as crypto-related scams spread across social media platforms.
The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center - known as IC3 - has been tracking these numbers since 2000. In its first full year, the center received about 50,000 complaints.
Twenty-five years later, that number crossed one million for the first time, showing how fast online fraud has scaled alongside the growth of digital payments and social media.
One bright spot in the report was the FBI's recovery efforts. The agency said its Recovery Asset Team successfully froze more than $561 million in fraudulent wire transfers, recovering funds before they left the country.
But that amount is a fraction of the $20.7 billion in total losses.
The growth rate is the real story here. Losses jumped 26% in one year, and the AI fraud category is brand new and already closing in on $1 billion.
As the tools get cheaper and easier to use, the FBI expects AI-powered scams to grow faster than any other category in 2026. For investors in cybersecurity companies, the demand side of that market has never looked stronger - every dollar lost to fraud is a dollar that companies and consumers are willing to spend on protection.
