The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has released its 2025 Annual Report, and two threats dominate the headlines: artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. Together, crypto and AI is reshaping the fraud landscape in ways that should concern organizations and individuals alike.
According to its report, for the first time in the IC3's 25-year history, complaints of cybercrime crossed the one-million mark in 2025, with Americans defrauded of almost US $21 billion.
And it is the role that AI and cryptocurrency have taken in increasing those losses that demands particular attention.
Recognizing the dramatic impact that AI is having on everyday, the IC3 included a dedicated section in its report to AI-enabled cybercrime for the first time in the report's history: recording 22,364 complaints that account for losses totaling over US $893 million.
Scammers are cloning voices to impersonate family members and business executives, generating deepfake videos of public figures to lead unsuspecting members of the public into scams, and creating fake identity documents that can easily fool most people.
Furthermore, fake social media profiles, which used to be relatively easy to spot as obviously suspicious, are now polished enough to assist fraudsters for weeks on end as they engage in deceptive correspondence with their targets.
According to the report, AI is also lowering the skill levels needed for attackers to impersonate company bosses and vendors and engage in Business Email Compromise (BEC).
In 2025, businesses reported over $30 million in losses from BEC scams with what they claimed was a confirmed AI element. It would be a brave person who did not believe that figure would almost certainly grow as AI tools become more accessible and affordable.
One of the deepest concerns is just what AI means to the economics of fraud. Scams that once required skilled personnel - fluent in their target's language, knowledgeable about local culture, available for extended conversations - can now be perpetrated for negligible cost, at scale, in an automated fashion.
Cryptocurrency-related scams accounted for the highest reported losses among all scam categories, totaling over $11.3 billion in losses across 181,565 complaints.
The majority of these losses come from investment fraud - specifically those which follow the "romance baiting" (or as it is sometimes called - and probably shouldn't be - "pig butchering") model.
Romance baiting involves fraudsters contacting victims via text messages, social media, or dating apps, building their trust over weeks or months, and then steering them towards bogus trading platforms that claim to deliver spectacular returns on investment.
Once funds leave a victim's wallet, they are extremely unlikely to be recovered. That's not to say that nothing can be done, of course. The FBI's Operation Level Up initiative is designed to identify and notify victims of cryptocurrency investment fraud before they suffer further financial loss.
Since its inception, Operation Level Up has notified over 8,000 victims and reduced losses by more than $500 million. In 2025 alone, 78% of those contacted were entirely unaware they were being scammed.
The ingredients of AI and cryptocurrency combine to make a particularly poisonous cocktail. AI makes the scammer's initial approach much more believable, while the involvement of cryptocurrency makes the eventual theft harder to reverse.
The FBI's advice is simple: "Take a beat", and resist pressure anyone might put on you to act quickly, and treat any unsolicited investment opportunity or urgent financial request with caution.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed in this and other guest author articles are solely those of the contributor and do not necessarily reflect those of Fortra.
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