The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has tallied nearly 61,000 complaints about scammers posing as law enforcement or government officials between January 2025 and July 2026, with reported losses of more than $1.6 billion over those 19 months. The figures come from a public service announcement dated Sept. 17, 2026, which updates a warning the bureau first issued in March 2022.
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Callers in these schemes claim to be police officers, federal agents or diplomats, and the details of the story change from call to call. The part that stays the same is the demand for money through a channel no real agency uses, and that detail is the quickest way for a target to recognize what is happening before any dollars move.
The complaint tally from January 2025 to July 2026
The FBI’s announcement counts complaints filed with the center, which is not the same as counting victims, and it covers American and foreign law enforcement and government impersonation together. The majority of complaints involve a crime accusation, with the caller threatening arrest or prosecution. The announcement does not break out a separate dollar figure for that largest group, so the $1.6 billion is a combined total across every variety of the scam.
Several narrower varieties are itemized. Scams aimed at medical practitioners, in which the caller threatens a professional license, produced 3,322 complaints and more than $37 million in losses. Impersonation of foreign law enforcement or diplomats, with threats of extradition or cancellation of a home-country passport, produced 1,809 complaints and more than $140 million. Warnings about an expiring passport, driver’s license or professional license generated 496 complaints and more than $348,000. A jury-duty and missed-court-date category is itemized separately in the same announcement.
Dividing the two headline totals gives a rough average loss of about $26,000 per complaint. That figure is arithmetic on the bureau’s rounded numbers and is not a statistic the FBI states, but it conveys the scale: the average complaint in this category involves a loss in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Payment demands that no agency makes
The announcement names the payment channels directly. The scammers, it says, demand money through prepaid cards, couriers, bank wires, cryptocurrency, or cash inserted into cryptocurrency kiosks. The FBI’s own rule is stated in one sentence: “Law enforcement and government authorities will never contact members of the public by telephone or text message to demand any form of payment.” Any call that ends in one of those five channels has therefore failed the test before the caller says another word.
The 2022 warning drew the same line. That earlier FBI alert listed prepaid cards, whose numbers victims read aloud or photographed and texted, wire transfers often sent overseas, mailed cash and cash fed into cryptocurrency machines, and it said “NO legitimate law enforcement or government official will request payment via prepaid cards or cryptocurrency ATM.” It contained no dollar figures at all, so the 2026 update is the first of the two alerts to attach a loss total to the scam.
The Federal Trade Commission gives the same guidance from the consumer side. Its advice on government impersonation scams says no agency will demand wire transfers, gift cards, cryptocurrency or payment apps, and that the FTC, the Social Security Administration and the IRS do not threaten arrest. On crypto, the agency’s cryptocurrency scam guide says plainly, “Only scammers demand payment in cryptocurrency,” and describes callers who stay on the phone while walking a target through feeding cash into a machine. Its gift card page adds that real agencies never ask for payment that way.
Spoofed numbers, video calls and enforced secrecy
The announcement lists the pressure tactics that accompany the payment demand. Callers spoof real phone numbers, email addresses, employee names and agency credentials, speak in an urgent and aggressive tone, and keep the target on the line for the duration of the scam. They urge the target not to tell family, friends, financial institutions or the police, and some use fake uniforms and mock government facilities to stage the encounter.
The newest element is video. The FBI says artificial intelligence tools allow scammers to “appear as law enforcement and government officials on video calls with victims,” so a face on a screen and a badge held up to a camera no longer prove anything. The bureau’s answer is procedural: ask for credentials, then verify them by contacting the agency through publicly available information and not through any contact details the caller supplies, and inspect any web address for lookalike spellings or a non-.gov ending.
Reporting and the limits of the count
Targets are told to stop all contact immediately, notify their financial institutions, file a report with local police and submit a complaint through the Internet Crime Complaint Center. The FBI asks that a complaint include the scammers’ contact information, payment details such as bank accounts, cryptocurrency addresses, amounts and methods, and copies of texts or emails, and that victims keep all financial records and communications.
Two limits apply to the $1.6 billion figure. It counts only complaints that reached the center and only through July 2026, so it is a floor on the actual harm and not a full census. And the announcement does not say which of the five payment channels accounts for the most dollars, which means the payment-method tell is a qualitative warning sign backed by the FBI’s rule and not a ranking of losses by method.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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