A real FTC employee will never text you a photo of their ID, the agency says

A real employee of the Federal Trade Commission will never text a photo of an agency identification badge to prove who they are, the FTC says. The agency listed that habit among the clearest signs of an impostor in a June consumer alert describing scammers who pose as FTC staff, reach victims by text message, and then offer to recover money lost in an earlier scam for a fee. Government-impersonation losses climbed to $920 million for the year, the agency said separately, up from $789 million in 2024.

Three tells the agency lists for spotting an impostor

The alert breaks the warning into three specific behaviors a caller or texter should never show. Real FTC staff, the agency says, do not reach out over text messages or apps such as WhatsApp, do not send photos of employee identification to establish credibility, and do not offer to help recover money lost to an earlier scam in exchange for payment. Complaints describing all three behaviors together prompted the agency to publish the warning as its own alert rather than folding it into general impersonation guidance.

The agency’s own wording is direct: “A real FTC employee won’t text [consumers] a photo of their employee ID to ‘verify’ their identity,” it wrote in its June alert, adding that the same rule applies to any staff photo sent unprompted to prove a caller works for the government. A separate page cataloging agency impersonators goes further, stating that “nobody who works at the FTC will ever, EVER tell [people] to move [their] money to protect it,” language the FTC’s impersonator page uses to rule out any caller who pushes for a wire transfer, gift cards, or cryptocurrency under the banner of account security.

The June alert did not appear in isolation. Four months earlier, the FTC had already warned that scammers were impersonating agency officials by name, including FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson, to lend a fabricated recovery pitch more weight. The photo-ID tactic described in June reads as a refinement of that earlier approach: instead of merely naming a real official, callers now send an image meant to look like proof of employment.

A recovery pitch built on an earlier scam

The pitch works because it targets people already rattled by one loss. A caller claiming FTC credentials offers to retrieve money sent to a previous scammer, then asks for a processing fee, a gift card number, or remote access to a bank account to “confirm” the refund. Anyone who pays is scammed twice through the same setup: once by the original fraud, and again by the fake recovery offer layered on top of it.

That layering fits a pattern the FTC quantified when it released its 2025 fraud totals. People reported losing $3.5 billion to imposter scams of every kind that year, the largest single category the agency tracks, and government impersonators alone accounted for $920 million of it. “Fraud undermines that foundation, impeding the market process and preventing markets from operating efficiently,” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in releasing the year’s loss figures.

The contact methods that give scammers an opening

Text messages and encrypted apps are the entry point the FTC flags most often, since a message can arrive from a spoofed or rented number without the sender ever having to speak. Pairing that message with a lookalike ID photo, whether copied from a real badge design or built with editing software, gives an otherwise generic text enough polish to stall a skeptical recipient for the few minutes a scammer needs to push toward payment.

Reporting an impostor to the agency it claims to represent

Consumers who receive a text claiming FTC credentials, complete with a badge photo or a recovery-fee pitch, are directed to file a report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov rather than reply to the sender. The agency treats those reports as its main way of tracking which phone numbers, scripts, and ID templates are circulating at a given time.

A broader FTC guide on avoiding government impersonation adds that legitimate federal agencies do not demand payment by gift card, wire transfer, or cryptocurrency, and do not threaten arrest for failing to pay during the call. Consumers who have already sent money to someone claiming to work for the FTC are told in the agency’s government-impersonation guide to contact their bank, payment app, or money-transfer service immediately, since the odds of reversing a payment fall sharply once a wire clears or a gift card is redeemed.

The FTC has not said how many of 2025’s impersonation reports specifically described the photo-ID tactic, only that the pattern showed up often enough to justify its own alert alongside the broader loss figures. Its guidance still reduces to one test a recipient can apply mid-conversation: a real FTC employee never needs to send a picture to prove who they are.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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