Scammers impersonating law enforcement or government officials have cost victims more than $1.6 billion since January 2025, the FBI reports.
Scale and scope: the numbers behind the surge
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received close to 61,000 complaints of law-enforcement or government-impersonation scams between January 2025 and July 2026. That puts the average reported loss at more than $26,000 per complaint. The IC3’s wider 2025 report, released in April, recorded total internet-crime losses of $20.87 billion for all types of cybercrime—the first year the bureau’s annual figure exceeded $20 billion.
Modus operandi: “pay to remove charges” and jury-duty threats
The most common scheme, according to the IC3, involves unsolicited phone calls in which scammers tell targets they have committed or are connected to a crime and then demand payment to avoid arrest or prison. A distinct variant targets alleged missed jury duty or a missed court date: about 11 percent of the complaints fall into this category. Of the 6,833 jury-duty–style reports, scammers caused losses amounting to nearly $36 million.
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End the scrambleProfessionally tailored fraud and document-renewal scams
IC3 data show a more targeted, higher-effort approach that yields larger payouts. Scammers will establish basic facts about a target—such as their profession—and then craft messages specific to that role. The bureau cited cases in which medical practitioners were told their medical license was expiring or had been used in a crime; payment was demanded either to “renew” the license or as an extortion payment to protect the practitioner’s reputation. Victims reported 3,322 instances of such profession-focused scams, with total losses exceeding $37 million.
A less common tactic involved claiming documents like driver’s licenses or passports had expired and demanding payment to renew them. Though it accounted for only 496 of the complaints, criminals still netted $348,000 from that variant during the reporting period.
Targeting foreign nationals and ethnic communities with video-call impersonations
The IC3 identified an especially elaborate and profitable set of scams aimed at Americans from different ethnic communities, foreign nationals, and international students in the United States. Scammers impersonated foreign law enforcement or US-based foreign diplomatic officials and threatened to cancel the victim’s home-country passport or seek extradition. These operations sometimes used video calls; criminals have been known to wear a country’s law-enforcement uniform or use movie-style sets made to resemble government facilities.
The IC3 received 1,809 complaints of this targeted, video-enabled type of scam during the 19-month reporting period, with losses exceeding $140 million. That single variant produced nearly 10 percent of the overall losses despite representing less than 3 percent of the complaints—an outsized return relative to its prevalence.
In-person impersonation in the Netherlands and public-awareness responses
Law-enforcement impersonation is not limited to phone or video contact. In the Netherlands, police received more than 7,200 reports of fake police officer scams in the first half of 2026. Those cases typically involved fraudsters approaching victims at home—often the elderly—offering to safeguard valuables while posing as trusted authorities, then stealing jewelry, money, bank cards, and other items. The IC3’s report notes the trend has surged and that aspiring crooks as young as 14 have participated, prompting police to invest more in public-awareness campaigns.
Practical guidance: the FBI’s reminder to citizens
The FBI emphasized a basic verification rule: “neither it nor any other law enforcement agency will call an individual and demand payment or request personal or sensitive information.” The bureau advised citizens to ask for credentials and to independently verify a caller’s identity by calling the relevant office using publicly available contact details and by asking for the caller by name.
These figures show a multi‑modal, adaptive fraud landscape: phone threats, profession-tailored extortion, document-renewal ruses, and sophisticated video impersonations have all produced substantial losses. The IC3’s data make clear which variants are most numerous and which are most profitable—information that law enforcement and the public can use to prioritize verification and awareness efforts.
