For the first time in its 25-year history, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has counted scams that involved artificial intelligence as a separate line in its annual report. The 2025 report, published in April 2026 and picked up by local news stations across the US in October, gives two numbers: 22,364 complaints that mentioned AI, and reported losses of more than $893 million.
How big is that? The same report counts 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in total reported losses for 2025, so AI-related cases are a small slice — about 4% of the money. But the FBI itself warns the number is a floor, not a ceiling. Its example: investment scams with a known AI link cost victims over $632 million, while investment scams as a whole cost more than $8 billion. As the report puts it, many victims simply do not realize how much AI was involved. If you were fooled by a very convincing message, you may never know a chatbot wrote it.
What did AI actually do in these scams? The report describes it as a tool that makes old tricks more believable:
- Investment scams (over $632 million): AI-generated videos and voices of celebrities or well-known business people, and chat scripts that let a scammer hold thousands of "personal" conversations at once.
- Business email scams (over $30 million): official-sounding emails that imitate a boss, sometimes backed by a cloned voice asking for a payment.
- Romance and friendship scams (over $19 million): fake profiles and messages that read warmly and fluently. This group also includes "grandparent" or "distress" scams, where a cloned voice imitates a relative in trouble — more than $5 million in 2025.
- Job scams (almost $13 million): fake job applicants in video interviews whose voice does not quite match their lips; the FBI says the aim is usually to get into company networks.
What the FBI tells people to do. Local FBI offices repeat the advice from the "Take a Beat" campaign: pause before you act, because scammers rely on urgency. Do not click links in unexpected texts or emails. If a message says there is a problem with your bank or card, hang up or close it and call the number on the back of your card yourself. Keep notes — who contacted you, how, what you paid and where it went — in case you need to report.
Three habits that work against AI scams
- Take a beat. A real emergency can survive a two-minute pause. A scam cannot.
- Do not tap the link. Open the company's app or type its address yourself.
- Call back on a number you already trust. Not the one in the message, and not the one a caller gives you. For family emergencies, agree on a family safe word in advance.
If you have already sent money, our guide on what to do after sending money to a scammer walks through the first hours. You can report any scam, including one you only suspect involved AI, at ic3.gov. For specific tricks, see spotting AI phishing emails, fake investment platforms and the grandparent scam with a cloned voice.
Sources
- 2025 Internet Crime Report — FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center
- FBI: AI fuels surge in online scams costing Alabamians millions — FOX10 News
- FBI Flags $893 Million in AI-Driven Scams — PYMNTS
- Federal Bureau of Investigation announces 'Take a Beat' campaign to increase fraud, scam awareness — ABC11