Between January 2025 and July 2026, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received 6,833 complaints about scammers who threatened victims with fines or arrest warrants over missed jury duty or a skipped court date, with reported losses of nearly $36 million. The figures sit inside a much larger count of nearly 61,000 impersonation complaints over the same period. The bureau published the numbers on 17 September 2026 in a public service announcement about criminals posing as law enforcement and government officials.
Jury duty and missed court dates in the FBI’s tally
The alert, numbered PSA260917, reiterates a warning the bureau first issued in March 2022 and updates it with new complaint data.
According to the FBI IC3 announcement of 17 September 2026, the jury-duty and missed-court-date version produced 6,833 complaints and losses totaling nearly $36 million. In that scheme the victim is told that a fine or an arrest warrant is waiting unless payment is made, a threat that works because it borrows the authority of the courts and a civic obligation most adults recognise. The announcement says the larger family of schemes, in which callers pose as United States or foreign law enforcement or government officials, drew nearly 61,000 complaints and more than $1.6 billion in losses between January 2025 and July 2026. The jury-duty subset is therefore one slice of that total, and by simple division it works out to roughly $5,200 lost per complaint, a figure calculated here rather than reported by the bureau.
The same announcement names the most common version of the fraud as an accusation of a crime. In that script the victim is told they are connected to an offence and will be arrested or prosecuted unless they pay or help to catch the real criminals.
Medical licences, expiring credentials and foreign officials
The bureau reports several other subsets, and some of them cost victims more. Scammers aimed at medical practitioners claim a licence is expiring or was used in a crime, then pressure the doctor to pay for renewal or to protect a reputation. For that variant the announcement counts 3,322 complaints and losses of more than $37 million, which exceeds the jury-duty total even though it drew fewer than half as many complaints. Dividing the two gives roughly $11,100 per complaint, again a calculation and not a bureau statistic. A third subset covers expiring credentials such as a passport, driver’s license or professional license, where the caller says renewal requires an immediate payment. The bureau counts 496 complaints and more than $348,000 in losses for it, the smallest of the groups it reports.
A fourth targets particular communities. Scammers who pose as foreign law enforcement or diplomatic officials threaten extradition or cancellation of a home-country passport, and the bureau says they aim at ethnic communities, foreign nationals and international students. Some wear fake police uniforms or stage government-style sets, and the announcement reports 1,809 complaints with losses above $140 million. It also says scammers now use artificial intelligence, including on video calls, to look like officials.
Spoofed numbers, payment channels and pressure
Contact usually begins with an unsolicited phone call, although texts and emails also appear. The FBI says the callers spoof legitimate phone numbers, email addresses, employee names and credentials of government and law enforcement agencies, and that this includes the IC3 itself, so a caller ID that appears to match an agency is not proof of anything.
The announcement lists the pressure tactics in plain terms. Callers adopt an urgent, aggressive tone, refuse to speak to anyone but the target, keep the victim on the line throughout, and give “Instructions not to tell family, friends, banks, or police.” Isolation of that kind is what keeps a victim from the one conversation that might break the spell, and it appears in the bureau’s list of red flags alongside the threats of severe consequences.
Payment is demanded through prepaid cards, couriers, bank wires, cryptocurrency, or cash fed into crypto kiosks. The bureau states flatly: “Law enforcement and government officials will never request payment via prepaid cards, cryptocurrency, or courier.” It adds that agencies do not contact the public by phone or text to demand any payment or to request personal or sensitive information, which makes the demand itself the clearest sign of fraud.
Verifying a caller and reporting a loss
The FBI advises people not to share personal information until the caller’s identity has been verified. The recommended method is to ask for credentials and then contact the agency through publicly available information, never through numbers or addresses the caller supplied. The announcement also warns against clicking links without checking that the domain matches the official agency, and it points to look-alike addresses, slight spelling changes and wrong endings such as .com in place of .gov.
Anyone who has paid should stop all contact with the scammers and notify their financial institutions, then report to local law enforcement and file a complaint at the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The bureau asks for scammer phone numbers and emails, payment details such as bank accounts or crypto addresses, and copies of texts or emails, and it says to keep all financial records and communications. Its earlier guidance on reporting cryptocurrency transactions covers the crypto-specific steps, and the 2022 alert that this notice updates remains available as alert PSA220307.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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