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FBI: Americans lost a record $21 billion to cybercrime last year

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Why This Matters

The FBI's report highlights a record $21 billion loss to cybercrime in the U.S. last year, emphasizing the escalating scale and sophistication of cyber threats, including AI-driven scams. This trend underscores the urgent need for enhanced cybersecurity measures and consumer awareness to protect individuals and critical infrastructure from increasingly complex cyberattacks.

Key Takeaways

U.S. victims lost nearly $21 billion to cyber-enabled crimes last year, driven primarily by investment scams, business email compromise, tech support fraud, and data breaches, the Federal Bureau of Investigation says.

The figure continues the year-over-year record trend as it is up 26% compared to 2024, when Americans lost $16.6 billion to cybercrime.

A similar uptick was recorded in the number of complaints the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received, which surpassed 1 million last year, up from 859,000 the year before.

Number of complaints (top) and losses (bottom) per year

Source: FBI

The most frequent complaints received last year referred to phishing attacks (191,000), extortion (89,000), and investment scams (72,000), which continued to drive massive losses.

Although smaller in absolute numbers, there were still a significant number of reports for serious attack types such as business email compromise (24,700 cases), data breaches (3,900), ransomware attacks (3,600), and SIM swapping (971).

Investment fraud accounted for 49% of all scam-related incidents recorded last year and resulted in losses of $8.6 billion. However, cybercrime targeting cryptocurrency caused the largest loss, exceeding $11 billion across 181,565 cases.

Cyber-enabled fraud was present in 453,000 complaints and accounted for $17.7 billion of the total losses submitted to the IC3 in 2025.

According to the IC3, Americans over the age of 60 were hit the hardest, with reported losses of $7.7 billion, a 37% increase compared to the previous year.

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