IC3: law enforcement impersonation scams cost victims $1.6 billion

According to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, scammers posing as police officers, judges, or government officials took in more than $1.6 billion between January 2025 and July 2026. Nearly 61,000 people filed complaints about it.

The FBI first warned about this pattern back in March 2022. This update shows the same mechanism still working four years later, at a larger scale, which says something about why it persists: the scam does not rely on a new trick, it relies on repetition and pressure applied faster than a victim can check the claim.

How the approach works

Contact usually starts with a phone call, though text messages and emails also appear. The caller spoofs a real phone number, a real agency name, and sometimes a real employee's credentials, including IC3's own. Once someone answers, the script depends on urgency. The caller adopts an aggressive tone, refuses to speak with anyone but the named target, and stays on the line for the length of the call. Victims are told not to mention the call to family, banks, or actual law enforcement.

The accusation varies. Most complaints involve a claim that the victim committed or is connected to a crime, with arrest or prosecution threatened unless payment is made. Two smaller but distinct patterns also show up in the data. Jury duty or missed court date scams produced 6,833 complaints and nearly $36 million in losses over the same period. Expiring passport, license, or professional credential scams produced 496 complaints and more than $348,000 in losses. Medical practitioners get a tailored version: a threat to revoke a medical license unless a fee is paid to protect it.

Payment demands are where the scam becomes checkable. No court, licensing board, or law enforcement agency asks for a fine or fee through a prepaid card, a courier, a wire transfer, cryptocurrency, or cash fed into a cryptocurrency kiosk. That list of payment methods is the same across nearly every version of the scam, whether the caller claims to be police, a judge, or a licensing office. The story changes; the settlement method does not.

The instruction to stay silent is doing specific work. It removes the one step that would end the call: a pause long enough to hang up and dial the agency directly. The scam depends on that pause never happening.

What this points to

The FBI's tally aggregates complaints by category after the fact, which shows scale but not who was targeted first or how the spoofing was set up. What the numbers do show is a payment method common to nearly every version of the scheme, which is the one detail a caller can never make legitimate no matter which agency they claim to represent. Patterns like a demand for cryptocurrency kiosk payment paired with a threat of arrest are the kind of repeatable signal that fraud-monitoring systems, including the kind Flggd tracks, are built to flag before money moves.