FBI: cybercrime losses in the US rose to $21 billion, AI schemes counted separately

The FBI estimated the damage from cybercrime in the USA for 2025 at nearly $21 billion — a new all-time high in the history of IC3 reports. For the first time, crimes involving AI tools used by perpetrators were highlighted as a separate category in the document.

Record Damage to the USA

According to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, in 2025 Americans filed 1,008,597 complaints about internet crimes compared to 859,532 the previous year. The total confirmed damage reached $20.877 billion, growing approximately 26% year over year. The highest number of complaints came from phishing and sender spoofing, extortion, and investment schemes. For the FBI, this is no longer just statistics: the agency receives almost 3,000 complaints per day, and online fraud has long become a massive economy.

For the first time, the report featured a separate section on crimes involving AI. In 2025, IC3 received 22,364 such complaints, with total damage from them reaching $893.3 million. This is an important shift: until recently, AI in cybercrime was described as an amplifying factor, but now it is considered an independent dimension of risk. This is not about one type of attack, but a set of techniques that make old schemes more convincing, cheaper, and faster to launch.

Who Lost More

Perpetrators extracted the most money from cryptocurrency schemes. According to the FBI, cryptocurrency-related complaints resulted in over $11 billion in losses across 181,565 complaints. Investment fraud overall remained the main driver of damage: it accounted for over $8 billion, nearly half of all losses from online fraud. To combat this, the FBI is promoting Operation Level Up: by December 2025, the initiative had helped notify 8,103 potential victims, with 77% of them unaware they were already caught in a scheme.

• Cryptocurrency schemes — 181,565 complaints and over $11 billion in losses
• Investment fraud — over $8 billion, nearly half of all losses from online fraud
• People over 60 — $7.748 billion in losses and 201,266 complaints
• Phishing and sender spoofing — the most massive category, approximately 191,000 complaints
• Extortion — approximately 89,000 complaints, followed by investment schemes and business email compromise

Notably, the 60+ age group stands out: its members reported $7.748 billion in losses, the worst result among all civilian groups. In critical infrastructure, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, IT, and government organizations suffered most often. At the level of consequences, this means that attacks hit not just private wallets, but sectors where digital failure quickly turns into an operational and reputational crisis.

How AI Helps Scammers

In the new AI category, the FBI lists quite straightforward scenarios. These include voice clones for calls impersonating relatives or supervisors, fake social media profiles, counterfeit documents, and deepfake videos featuring public figures. Generative models help write convincing letters for business email compromise schemes, conduct thousands of slightly different dialogues with potential victims, and automate the part of social engineering that previously required extensive manual labor.

The most expensive AI subcategory turned out to be investment schemes: complaints with signs of AI use resulted in over $632 million in losses. Next comes business email compromise with losses exceeding $30 million, tech support fraud with $19.5 million, romance scams with $19 million, and employment fraud at nearly $13 million. Essentially, AI did not create a new genre of fraud, but rather made producing trust cheaper: now scammers can more easily fake a voice, assemble a plausible backstory, and scale an attack without a large team.

What This Means

The main conclusion from the FBI report is simple: AI has definitively entered the standard toolset of scammers, rather than remaining a rare novelty. For users, this means mandatory identity and payment request verification outside of chats or calls, and for companies — a review of processes for approving transfers, hiring, and managing corporate email.