FBI Flags $893 Million in AI-Driven Scams

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received 22,364 internet crime complaints that contained references to artificial intelligence (AI) in 2025.

These AI-related complaints reported losses of $893 million, the agency said.

The FBI included this data in its 2025 Internet Crime Report, marking the first time in the 25-year history of the report that it broke out AI-related complaints as a separate category, the agency said in a Monday (April 6) press release.

AI is used in cybercrime to create social media profiles, personalized conversations and other synthetic content. The technology helps make this content convincing and generates it at scale. It is used in several forms of fraud, including business email compromise (BEC), confidence/romance scams, employment scams and investment scams, per the report.

“People have manipulated video and audio similarly for decades, but the widespread availability of this developing technology makes it possible to create high-quality content,” the report said. “AI-enabled synthetic content is becoming increasingly difficult to detect and easier to make, which allows criminal actors to potentially conduct successful fraud schemes against individuals, businesses and financial institutions.”

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Is That Content Generated by AI or Humans? Hard to Tell” found that content produced by AI can deceive humans and AI systems alike. This has led to businesses and regulators racing to implement strategies to address the growing threat, the report said.

Another PYMNTS Intelligence report, “2025 State of Fraud and Financial Crime in the United States” found that financial institutions are investing more aggressively in AI, behavioral analytics and cloud infrastructure to combat increasingly sophisticated forms of fraud.

Overall, across all categories of internet crime, IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints that reported $20.9 billion in losses in 2025, according to the report released Monday. Those figures were up from 859,532 and $16.6 billion, respectively, in 2024.

The most frequently reported complaints involved phishing/spoofing, extortion and investment scams, per the release.

Cyber-enabled fraud accounted for 452,868 complaints and $17.7 billion in losses. The FBI defines this form of fraud as that in which criminals use the internet or other technology, according to the report.

Complaints involving cryptocurrency accounted for 181,565 complaints and $11.4 billion in losses in 2025, per the report.