US cybercrime losses top $20B as AI helps crooks scale classic scams

Record year, broken records

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says 2025 was a brutal one: reported losses hit $20.87 billion and complaints topped one million for the first time — a 17 percent jump from 2024. That's a big number. People losing life savings. Families shaken. And it's not just noisy headlines; the totals are real and rising.

Where the money went

Phishing led the complaint count with 191,561 reports, but the big bucks were in investment scams, which accounted for about $8.6 billion in losses. Business email compromise and tech‑support scams followed. Cyber‑enabled fraud — classic cons using the internet as a megaphone — made up 45 percent of complaints but a staggering 85 percent of financial losses. So yes, the old tricks are still the most damaging. They’ve just been turbocharged.

AI as a force multiplier

It has been reported that 22,364 complaints mentioned AI, tied to roughly $893 million in losses, and that Interpol found AI‑assisted fraud can be multiple times more profitable than traditional schemes. The IC3 even added a dedicated AI section this year. Voice clones, fake social profiles, forged IDs and believable deepfake videos are now in the criminal toolkit — impersonation as a service, allegedly available for the price of a streaming subscription. Chilling? Absolutely.

What this means

The emotional punch is obvious: victims are being fooled by hyper‑real lies that look and sound like the people they trust. Law enforcement and industry are scrambling to catch up, but technology that democratizes deception is a stubborn problem. Expect more reports, more nuance in investigations, and harder questions about how to police a tool that helps good and bad actors alike. Who wins that race? For now, the crooks have found a powerful new lever.

Sources: The Register