Fake police and court calls drained more than $1.6 billion from Americans in 19 months

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, reports that callers posing as police officers, court officials and other government figures drained more than $1.6 billion from Americans between January 2025 and July 2026, a span of 19 months. In that window IC3 received nearly 61,000 complaints. The losses come from a family of scripts that all pull the same lever, which is the fear of being arrested.

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The IC3 complaint count behind the $1.6 billion

Every figure here is a total of complaints that victims chose to file with the bureau, so the count reflects reported cases only. The nearly 61,000 complaints cover impersonation of law enforcement and other government officials across the whole country, and the more than $1.6 billion is the total of the losses those complainants reported over the 19 months. The bureau’s alert breaks out several named variants with their own counts, but it says the largest group is simpler than any of them: a caller who claims the victim is connected to a crime and must pay to clear the charges or assist an investigation. That group makes up the majority of complaints, though no separate count is given.

The numbers come from the FBI’s public service announcement PSA260917, published on September 17, 2026, and the agency that issued both the $1.6 billion and the 19-month window is IC3. The bureau has been sounding this alarm for years; an earlier March 2022 warning about impersonation of law enforcement and government officials described the same basic con, and a 2025 notice addressed scammers spoofing IC3 itself.

The call script: accusation, isolation, payment

According to the FBI’s description, the contact begins unprompted, by phone, text or email, with spoofed numbers, names, addresses and agency credentials that make it look official. The caller then supplies a reason for alarm, such as a crime, a missed court date or an expiring license, and sets an urgent, aggressive tone with threats of arrest or prosecution. Victims are pressed to stay on the line, are refused permission to speak with anyone else or to leave a message, and are told to keep the matter secret from family, friends, banks and police. The bureau adds that some scammers now use video calls with AI to look official, and that they send links with slight domain variations or endings other than .gov.

Then comes payment, and the method is the giveaway. The bureau lists demands for prepaid cards, couriers who collect cash, wire transfers, cryptocurrency, and cash deposited into crypto kiosks. The FBI states that law enforcement and government officials will never request payment via prepaid cards, cryptocurrency or courier, which is why a caller who asks for one of those methods is a red flag by itself.

Jury duty, expiring licenses, medical boards and foreign officials

The announcement gives counts for four named variants. Jury duty or missed-court-date threats, in which the caller warns of a fine or an arrest warrant, produced 6,833 complaints and nearly $36 million in losses. Calls claiming that a passport, driver’s license or professional license is expiring and requires a renewal fee drew 496 complaints and more than $348,000 in losses, the smallest of the group.

Medical practitioners were targeted with claims that a license is expiring or was used in a crime, backed by the threat of revocation; the bureau recorded 3,322 complaints and more than $37 million lost. The costliest named variant involved impersonation of foreign police or diplomatic officials who threaten extradition or passport cancellation, sometimes in fake uniforms and mock government facilities: 1,809 complaints and more than $140 million. Dividing the reported totals by the complaint counts, a rough calculation rather than a figure from the bureau, puts the average foreign-official loss near $77,000 per complaint against roughly $5,300 for jury duty calls, so the high-stakes extradition script is a different kind of loss from the court-date fine. Combined, the four named variants cover only a fraction of the nearly 61,000 complaints, which leaves the accusation-of-crime script as the majority of complaints, as the bureau states.

Verifying a caller and reporting a loss

The FBI’s core advice is to verify any caller using contact details from official, publicly available sources, never the number or link supplied by the person who made contact, and to hand over no personal information until identity and credentials are confirmed. Anyone who has been targeted is told to stop contact, notify financial institutions, report to local police, and file a complaint at the IC3 complaint portal with the scammer’s contact details, payment details including cryptocurrency addresses, and copies of communications. The bureau’s 2023 notice on cryptocurrency complaint details explains what information makes such reports useful.

A separate federal tally gives a sense of the wider field. The Federal Trade Commission reported in June 2026 that people reported losing $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, a broader category drawn from a different complaint system, so the two totals should not be added together or compared line by line.

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

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