The FTC warns scammers are spoofing its own phone number and texting fake badge photos

The Federal Trade Commission has spent much of 2026 warning Americans about a persistent con: people pretending to be FTC employees or “agents” who spoof the agency’s real phone number and use fabricated credentials to seem legitimate. The agency’s consumer-protection office has published a string of alerts this year documenting new twists on the scheme, most recently a tactic built around a fake employee photo ID sent by text message.

How the badge-photo version works

In an alert published June 3, 2026, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection described scammers who contact people out of the blue, often through a text or a messaging app, and claim to be an FTC employee or “agent” who can help recover money the person previously lost to a different scam. To build trust, the impersonator sends a photo of what looks like an official employee ID card and badge. Both are fabricated. The FTC does not have “agents” in that sense, and the follow-through is always the same: the fake investigator asks the target to pay a fee, move money into a specified account, or hand over financial information, supposedly to help retrieve the earlier loss. It is a variant of what the agency calls a refund and recovery scam, in which people who already lost money are targeted a second time by someone posing as their rescuer.

The number on the caller ID can be faked too

Caller ID spoofing compounds the deception. Scammers can make a call or text appear to originate from the FTC’s actual phone number, so a target who looks up the number and sees it matches the real agency has no easy way to confirm who is actually on the other end. The FTC has flagged this specific tactic repeatedly through 2026, including in an alert about text messages claiming to be traffic-violation notices that route recipients toward phishing links, a pattern the agency says relies on the same spoofed-number trick to seem credible before the badge, ID or “recovery” pitch ever comes up.

A recurring cast of fake officials

The badge-photo con is only the newest entry in a longer list. Earlier in 2026 the FTC warned that scammers were impersonating Chief Privacy Officer John Krebs, and in 2025 it flagged impersonators posing as sitting FTC commissioners and even the agency’s chairman. In each case the goal is the same: borrow the credibility of a real title or a real name to convince someone that moving money or sharing account information is a reasonable, official request. The agency’s recurring message across all of these alerts is blunt — nobody who works at the FTC will ever tell a consumer to move money to “protect” it, ask them to cash out a 401(k) or savings account, or request payment in gift cards, wire transfers, cryptocurrency, or gold. The badge-photo variant itself was laid out in detail in the FTC’s June 3 consumer alert, which walks through exactly how the fabricated ID trick is used to gain a target’s trust.

Why older adults are targeted specifically

The FTC has separately noted that government and business impersonators disproportionately target older adults, who tend to hold larger retirement savings and, according to the agency’s consumer alerts, report some of the highest average dollar losses of any age group when scams succeed. A fabricated badge photo is built for exactly that audience: it looks like the kind of documentation a cautious person would reasonably ask for, and receiving one can feel like due diligence has already been satisfied. The FTC’s guidance flips that logic — a real employee, it says, will never text a photo ID to prove who they are in the first place, which means asking for one is itself a red flag rather than a reassurance.

What a genuine FTC contact looks like

The agency lays out a short list of things a real FTC employee will not do: initiate contact by text message or an app like WhatsApp, text a photo of an employee badge to “verify” identity, or offer to recover scam losses in exchange for a payment or account access. If a message claiming to be from the FTC does any of those things, the agency’s advice is to stop responding, avoid clicking any links included in the message, and independently verify the claim by contacting the FTC directly rather than through any number or link the message provided. Anyone who has already sent money or financial details to a suspected impersonator is urged to try reversing the transaction immediately through their bank, money-transfer provider, or crypto exchange, and to file a report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov so the agency can track the pattern.

The scam keeps mutating

What distinguishes 2026’s wave of FTC-impersonation alerts is the pace of new variants rather than any single high-profile case. Alerts about spoofed dealership websites, tax-debt relief cons, and unvetted social-media ads have all landed within the same few months, each sharing the same architecture of a spoofed identity plus urgency plus a request to move money quickly. The badge-photo tactic fits that pattern precisely: a fabricated piece of “proof” designed to short-circuit the moment of doubt before a target has time to check.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by an editor.

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