GoKawiilCryptocurrency 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."
See also: Here's how to tell if a link is actually a scam.
Crypto and AI take bigger roles in scams
According to the report, the over-60 demographic remains most vulnerable to online scams, with "elder fraud" accounting for 201,266 complaints and $7.75 billion in reported losses. That's an increase of 37% from 2024, with an average loss of $38,500. Of those, 12,444 people lost more than $100,000 due to scams.
The FBI also received 181,565 cryptocurrency-related complaints, with investment scams accounting for the largest share of losses for US citizens, totaling more than $11 billion.
"These scams are largely perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labor to run the scam operations," the report reads.
The rise of higher-quality AI systems is making it harder to spot scams, with 22,364 AI-related complaints costing people $893 million last year. That includes confidence/romance scams, where fake profiles and scripts that sound like believable human speech entice, and grandparent scams, or "distress" scams, where AI voice cloning mimics a relative in danger.
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