The one government office built to take fraud reports has itself become a costume scammers wear. Federal investigators say con artists are posing as the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the very portal people are told to use after losing money to a scam, and using that borrowed credibility to extract a second round of payments from the same victims.
A Warning Reissued as Losses Climb
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, reissued a public service announcement on September 17, 2026 reiterating its warning about scammers posing as law enforcement and government officials, an alert that itself updates guidance the bureau first published in March 2022. Between January 2025 and July 2026 alone, IC3 logged nearly 61,000 complaints tied to law-enforcement or government impersonation scams, with reported losses exceeding $1.6 billion. The new PSA is explicit that IC3’s own name and credentials are among those being spoofed, a detail that turns the fraud-reporting system itself into part of the con it exists to fight.
The Recovery Scam That Targets Fraud Victims a Second Time
A more detailed IC3 public service announcement issued July 20, 2026 lays out how the IC3-specific version of this scheme works. Almost every complainant in that alert reported the scammer claiming to have already recovered the victim’s lost funds, or offering to help recover them, a promise investigators describe as a ruse to revictimize people who have already been defrauded once. The pattern preys on a specific emotional state: someone who just lost money to an initial scam is primed to grab at anything that looks like a path to getting it back, which is precisely the vulnerability the follow-up impersonator is built to exploit.
Deepfake Videos and Spoofed Complaint Portals
The July PSA documents two specific tactics beyond a simple phone call. In one, scammers create fraudulent social media profiles impersonating FBI personnel and contact a fraud victim through Facebook Messenger or Telegram after the victim mentions planning to file an IC3 report, sending a link that either carries malicious code or harvests additional financial details. In the other, scammers use AI-generated “deepfake” videos of a senior FBI official on social media to promote a spoofed website built to look like the real IC3 portal. That fake site, the PSA notes, only accepts a single-step complaint form asking for a name, phone number, email, scam type, and estimated loss, then returns a fabricated reference number, a much thinner intake process than the real IC3 system uses.
How Scammers Spoof the Real Complaint Center
Both PSAs stress that IC3 does not operate any social media presence and never initiates contact with a complainant by phone, email, social media, chat app, or public forum; if IC3 needs more information, contact comes from an FBI field office or another law enforcement officer, not from the complaint portal itself. The September PSA broadens that same lesson across government impersonation generally: legitimate law enforcement and government agencies never demand payment by phone or text, and never request payment through prepaid cards, cryptocurrency, or a courier, regardless of which specific agency name is attached to the threat.
The September PSA also breaks out how large specific sub-categories of this fraud have grown. Impersonators posing as court officials over a missed jury summons or a supposed arrest warrant generated 6,833 complaints and nearly $36 million in reported losses between January 2025 and July 2026. A separate variant, in which callers claim a target’s passport, driver’s license, or professional license is about to be revoked unless a fee is paid, accounted for 3,322 complaints and more than $37 million in losses over the same period, with medical practitioners singled out as frequent targets. Scammers posing as foreign law enforcement or diplomatic officials, often threatening extradition or cancellation of a home-country passport, drove 1,809 complaints and more than $140 million in losses, the highest per-complaint average of any category the PSA breaks out, and investigators note some of those schemes have gone as far as staging fake uniforms and mock government offices to sell the impersonation in person.
Filing a Report Without Getting Scammed Twice
The tell that most reliably separates a genuine complaint process from an impersonator is the web address itself. IC3 recommends typing www.ic3.gov directly into a browser rather than clicking a search-engine result or a link sent in a message, since sponsored search results and copycat domains are common ways scammers redirect traffic to spoofed portals. Anyone contacted by someone claiming to represent IC3 through social media, a messaging app, or an unsolicited call should treat that contact itself as the fraud attempt, cease communication, and file a report only through the verified .gov address, including as much detail as possible about the impersonator’s contact information and any payment already requested or sent. Victims aged 60 or older who need help filing a complaint can also reach the Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Hotline for direct assistance rather than relying on any number provided by the person who contacted them first.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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