The FTC says a fake payment problem or invoice is the oldest phishing trick and it still works every day

The Federal Trade Commission has been describing the same con for years: a message claims there is a problem with an account or a payment, attaches a fake invoice or a link to “fix” it, and counts on panic to override caution. It is, by the FTC’s own account, one of the oldest phishing scripts in circulation, and one of the few that never needed an update to keep working.

Nothing about the trick requires sophistication. A convincing logo, a plausible dollar amount and a deadline are usually enough, which is why the same script now shows up as an email invoice, a text about a toll, and a voicemail about a suspended card, all built around the identical false premise. The FTC’s guidance groups these under a single umbrella term, phishing, regardless of whether the delivery channel is email, text or a phone call, because the underlying manipulation is the same in every format: manufacture a problem that does not exist, then offer a link or a callback number that supposedly fixes it.

The oldest version still targets email inboxes directly, often mimicking a bank, a retailer or a shipping carrier closely enough that a distracted reader never checks the sender address before clicking.

The fake problem behind every version of this scam

The FTC’s own consumer guidance on phishing lists the false payment or account problem as one of the most common openings scammers use, alongside fake refunds, bogus coupons and messages posing as a delivery notice. The agency is blunt about how often the approach gets tried: “scammers launch thousands of phishing attacks like these every day,” it states, “and they’re often successful” because the message looks routine rather than alarming at first glance.

Success does not require every recipient to fall for it. A campaign that reaches thousands of inboxes only needs a small fraction to click a link or reply with account details before the trick pays for itself, which is the economic logic that keeps the fake-invoice version of phishing in circulation decades after email scams first appeared.

The toll notices and delivery texts running the same trick

The same false-problem structure moved onto phones once texting became the faster channel. A Federal Trade Commission report on 2024 text scams put total reported losses at $470 million, a fivefold increase from 2020, with fake package-delivery alerts, bogus bank fraud warnings and fake unpaid-toll notices ranking among the categories consumers reported most.

Each of those formats is the payment-problem script wearing a different disguise. A toll notice claims an unpaid balance; a bank alert claims a suspicious purchase; a delivery text claims a stalled package needs a fee. All three exist to manufacture the same sense of an account or payment already in trouble, the exact framing the FTC’s phishing guidance flags as the tell. Wrong-number texts round out the list the FTC tracked for 2024, opening with an innocuous misdirected message before steering the conversation toward a relationship and, eventually, a request for money or an investment.

The 2024 total marked a fivefold jump from four years earlier even as the raw number of text-scam reports fell, meaning fewer messages were doing more damage per attempt by the time the FTC compiled the figures.

The billions imposter scams added in a single year

Regulators now track how far that framing spreads. The FTC’s latest imposter-scam report found consumers reported losing $3.5 billion to impersonation scams in 2025, nearly triple the 2020 total, with fake bank and government impersonators accounting for close to $2 billion of that figure combined. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said fraud “undermines that foundation, impeding the market process and preventing markets from operating efficiently,” framing the losses as an economic problem rather than a series of isolated incidents.

The FBI’s own tally, compiled separately through its Internet Crime Complaint Center, ranked phishing and spoofing as the most frequently reported crime category in its 2024 annual report, a year in which total reported losses topped $16 billion. “Reporting is one of the first and most important steps in fighting crime so law enforcement can use this information to combat a variety of frauds and scams,” then-FBI Director Kash Patel said when that report was released.

By the time the bureau published its 2025 report the following year, total losses had climbed to nearly $21 billion, with compromised corporate email accounts and invoice fraud named among the costliest tactics behind that increase. The false payment problem the FTC first described as a simple phishing script has become one line item inside a fraud economy now measured in the tens of billions, one that keeps expanding even as consumer agencies publish the same recognition tips year after year.

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

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