Callers claiming to work for the Federal Trade Commission are telling people that a phone number registered in their name was used in international criminal schemes, then steering the conversation toward a payment. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said consumers have reported getting these calls and that many of them end up losing money. The agency says the pitch is a fraud from the first sentence.
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Ferguson’s message was short: the agency does not threaten people or tell them to pull money out of their accounts, and anyone who does is a scammer.
The fake badge, the fake police transfer and the demand for cash
According to the account published by WBIW News in Bedford, Indiana, on Nov. 2, the script runs in four steps. A caller posing as an FTC agent says a mobile line in the target’s name is being used for fraud in another country. The caller then offers a badge or employee ID number and transfers the call to a supposed police or law enforcement officer so a report can be filed. That second voice collects personal details and claims money must move immediately, by wire, gift card or cash, to avoid arrest. The consumer alert from the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, posted Oct. 22 and revised Oct. 27, describes the same sequence and adds a threat to shut off the phone.
Bitdefender’s Hot for Security blog, in a Nov. 2 write-up by Alina Bizga, laid out a longer pressure ladder. A frightened target is transferred at once, while a doubtful one is told to look up a police number independently, with search terms supplied by the caller. The caller then asks for identity documents, demands secrecy, and finally claims an arrest requires travel abroad unless a “security deposit” is sent by money transfer. Bitdefender’s own verdict on the badge number is blunt: a badge number, official title, or convincing police officer on the phone is not proof that a caller is legitimate.
What genuine FTC staff never do
The agency’s list of tells is specific, and each item is a behavior that real employees do not engage in. They never ask anyone to transfer funds, buy gift cards, wire money or deposit cash into a cryptocurrency kiosk. They never connect a caller to a second person who demands payment to settle a legal problem, and they never threaten to cut off cell service. They never ask for secrecy from family, banks or police, and they never text or email a photo of a badge or ID to prove who they are. Ferguson put the whole list in one sentence: only a scammer will do those things.
The recommended response is mechanical, which is the point. Hang up. Do not press buttons, speak with an “operator,” or use any number the caller supplies to check the story, because those numbers lead back to the same operation. Instead, find the agency’s number on an official .gov website and call that. Anyone who got such a call, or who already paid, can file a report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the FTC’s portal for fraud complaints. Gift cards and crypto kiosks matter in the script because payments made that way are hard to reverse once the code or cash is handed over.
The structure of the script explains why it works on people who are not careless. Each step hands the target to a new voice with more authority than the last: a federal employee, then a police officer, then an arrest threat tied to a foreign country. By the time a payment is requested, the target has been told to keep the matter secret, which cuts off the family member, banker or local officer most likely to say it sounds wrong. The FTC’s list of tells reads as a checklist of those moves, and any single one of them is enough reason to end the call.
A $920 million category of fraud
The dollar figure attached to this alert comes from a separate FTC release. In a June 15 data release, the commission reported that government impersonation losses reached about $920 million in 2025, up from $789 million in 2024, inside a total of $3.5 billion lost to imposter scams of all kinds. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in that release that the FTC will use every tool available to combat one of the most pernicious forms of fraud. WBIW repeated the $920 million number in its Nov. 2 report on the new call script.
The $920 million covers the entire government-impersonation category, which includes callers posing as the Social Security Administration, the IRS, law enforcement and other agencies. It is not a loss figure for the international-crimes variant, and neither the FTC’s October alert nor the WBIW report publishes a call count or a dollar total for this specific script. Until the agency breaks out that number, the size of this particular wave is an open question, and the 2025 totals are the only measure on the record of how costly the broader genre has become.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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