The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has included artificial intelligence (AI) assisted offending for the first time in its annual report on online crime, tallying up US$893 million (A$1.42 billion) in losses for 2025.
In its 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Centre (IC3) report, the FBI said it had received over 22,000 notifications that referenced AI.
The number of complaints and losses attributable to AI could in fact be understated, the bureau said.
Of the total losses attributed to investment scams – US$8.6 billion, just US$632 million was confirmed to be AI-assisted fraud, suggesting that the majority of victims are unable to recognise the technology’s role in the commission of crime.
“AI-enabled synthetic content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make,” the IC3 report said.
Criminal actors can now run fraud operations against individuals, businesses, and financial institutions at a scale previously impossible, the FBI warned.
AI also enables new takes on existing crimes such as business email compromise (BEC) schemes.
The FBI attributed BEC attacks with AI generated emails, and voice cloning, as costing businesses more than US$30 million in 2025.
AI powered chatbots can produce convincing impersonations of executives, and the FBI said voice cloning is being used to authorise fraudulent money transfers by phone.
Romance and confidence scams with an AI nexus generated more than US$19 million in losses, FBI said.
A growing subcategory of “distress scams” using AI cloned voices of family members fleeced victims more than US$5 million separately.
Cryptocurrency scams have also received an AI boost, with the FBI finding that over 7600 complaints were adjacent to the technology.
Enterprises were targeted in job seeker scams as well, with the FBI describing the use of AI generated voice deepfakes for employment interviews, as part of a strategy to place threat actors inside corporate networks so as to gain access to internal systems.
Record losses and complaints last year
The FBI’s tally of losses surpassed US$20 billion for the first time in IC3’s 25 year history, and just over a million complaints were logged in a single year, another record.
The total losses were up by 26 percent over 2024, when different types of scams robbed people of US$16.6 billion.
Investment fraud is now the largest category at US$8.65 billion, having risen by 89 percent over the past two years.
Specific cryptocurrency investment fraud, a form of long-term scam that the FBI said is sophisticated and employs psychological manipulation, led to Americans losing US$7.2 billion in 2025.
Such cryptocurrency investment frauds are mostly perpetrated by organised criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia which use victims of human trafficking as forced labour for their operations.
Victims are targeted through a range of methods, including text messages, social media, advertisements, or dating platforms.
Once contact is established, the scammers move conversations with victms to a messaging platform where they are introduced to investment groups that make out they are knowledgeable insiders, who offer guidance on cryptocurrency trading, or gold.
Victims are persuaded to send cryptocurrency to fake investment platforms or apps, and are then shown bogus profits; they are also offered loans to be used for even larger investments.
Attempts at withdrawing their money results in victims being charged fees and taxes, with the criminals eventually disappearing with all the funds they have scammed out of people.
An extension of the investment scamming has criminals targeting victims who have lost money with help to recover the stolen funds.
The FBI said the such investment scams are “often devastating because they can leave victims with significant financial loss and emotional distress.”
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