The message arrived on a Tuesday evening, while Daniel was making dinner. A woman he’d matched with on a dating app weeks earlier — patient, funny, never pushy — mentioned almost in passing that her cousin worked in crypto and had shown her a trading platform with steady, modest returns. She sent a screenshot of her own balance. It looked real because it was designed to. Over the next two months Daniel moved $38,000 into that platform in small transfers, each one “confirmed” by a dashboard that showed his money growing. The dashboard was a web page. The balance was typed in by the people who stole from him. When he tried to withdraw, a “tax fee” appeared. Then the account went silent.
Daniel — a composite of real victim reports, not one person — walked into the single most expensive scam category in America. Ask what the top 5 scams are and most people guess by what lands in their inbox most often: the fake delivery text, the dodgy shopping ad. But frequency and damage are different things. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) counted $15.9 billion in reported consumer fraud losses for 2025, up from $12.5 billion in 2024, across 3 million fraud reports, while the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) logged $20.9 billion across 1,008,597 complaints. Ranked by the money actually lost, the list of top 5 scams looks quite different from your spam folder.
The short answer: ranked by reported losses in the FTC’s and FBI IC3’s 2025 data, the top 5 scams are (1) investment scams, (2) imposter scams, including government and business impersonation, (3) business email compromise, (4) tech support scams, and (5) romance scams. The five below are ranked by reported losses within each agency’s own dataset. The FTC and the IC3 count fraud differently and their figures overlap, so their numbers are never added together — and “reported” is the floor, not the ceiling, because most victims never file a report at all.
1. Investment scams — the top 5 scams start here, and it isn’t close
Investment fraud took $7.9 billion from consumers in 2025 according to the FTC — roughly half of all reported fraud losses that year, with an average loss above $10,000 per victim. The FBI’s IC3 put investment fraud even higher, at $8.65 billion in 2025. No other scam type comes within billions of it.
How it works: the approach usually starts on social media, a dating app, or an unsolicited message — sometimes a “wrong number” text that turns friendly. The scammer builds trust first, then introduces an opportunity: crypto trading, forex, a private placement. Victims are directed to a slick app or website where small test deposits appear to grow. Early withdrawals sometimes even work, deliberately, to encourage a bigger deposit. Then the exit closes: withdrawal “fees,” frozen accounts, silence. Cryptocurrency is the rail of choice — the Kansas City Fed’s analysis of FTC data found crypto was the payment method in 40% of investment scam reports — because crypto transfers can’t be reversed.
Red flags: guaranteed or unusually steady returns, pressure to move from a chat app to a trading platform, a mentor who discourages you from telling your bank what the money is for, and any fee demanded before you can withdraw your own funds. A real investment firm never needs you to pay a tax bill to a separate wallet before releasing your money.
2. Imposter scams — the most reported fraud in America
Imposter scams were the most frequently reported fraud category to the FTC in 2025 — over 1 million reports — and the second costliest, at more than $3.5 billion in reported losses. That total covers criminals posing as government agencies and as businesses — the two flavors of the same trick. Government impersonation alone cost victims $789 million in 2024, up $171 million from the year before, per the FTC.
How it works: a call, text, or email claims to be from the IRS, Social Security, your bank’s fraud department, a delivery company, or a big retailer. There’s a problem only they can fix — a suspended benefit, a frozen account, a warrant, a fraudulent charge — and it must be fixed now, on this call, with this payment. Caller ID is spoofed to show the real agency or bank number. The script runs on two fuels: fear and urgency. Business imposters add a third: a fake security alert that walks you through “protecting” your account by moving money straight to the scammer.
Red flags: any demand for immediate payment by gift card, wire, payment app, or crypto; threats of arrest or deportation; instructions to keep the call secret from your bank; and the phrase “don’t hang up.” Hang up. Then call the institution back on the number printed on your card or statement — never the number that called you.
3. Business email compromise — the quiet $3.05 billion heist
Business email compromise (BEC) cost victims $3.05 billion in 2025 according to the FBI’s IC3, making it one of the most damaging fraud types in the dataset despite targeting far fewer people than consumer scams. One successful email can empty a company’s operating account.
How it works: criminals compromise or convincingly spoof a real business email account — a CEO, a supplier, a real estate attorney — then send a message that fits an existing workflow. A finance employee gets a plausible request to update a vendor’s bank details. A homebuyer gets wiring instructions for closing day that differ from the real ones by one account number. The messages are short, boring, and timed to land when the genuine sender is travelling or the office is busy. There’s no malware to detect and no link to avoid; the fraud is the request itself.
Red flags: any change to payment details requested by email, secrecy around a routine transaction (“the CEO asked me to handle this quietly”), and pressure to skip the usual approval steps. The countermeasure is unglamorous and it works: verify every bank-detail change with a phone call to a number you already have, not one supplied in the email.
4. Tech support scams — the pop-up that empties savings accounts
Tech support scams took $2.13 billion in 2025 according to the FBI’s IC3. Victims aged 60 and over were hit hardest, reporting roughly $1.04 billion of that total to IC3.
How it works: a full-screen pop-up freezes the browser and blares a warning — your computer is infected, your accounts are compromised, call this number now. Or the call comes first, from someone claiming to be from a major tech company or your bank’s security team. The “technician” gets remote access, shows the victim frightening-looking but harmless system screens, and then escalates: the problem has reached your bank account, so your money must be moved to a “safe” account, withdrawn as cash for a courier, or converted at a Bitcoin ATM. What begins as a $300 fake repair bill ends, in the worst cases, as a six-figure loss.
Red flags: a pop-up with a phone number (real security software never does this), any request for remote access from an unsolicited caller, and any instruction to withdraw cash, buy gift cards, or move money to protect it. Shut the browser down — force-quit if you have to — and the “emergency” evaporates with it.
5. Romance scams — where the long game pays the criminal
Romance scams close out the top 5 scams, and their true cost is the hardest to pin down. The FBI’s IC3 recorded $929 million in confidence and romance fraud losses for 2025, up 38% from $672 million in 2024. Analysts at the Kansas City Fed, working from FTC data, rank romance scams among the five costliest categories every year from 2020 through 2024. The real figure is certainly higher: romance fraud is chronically under-reported, and its most damaging modern variant — where a fake partner steers the victim into a fake investment — often gets counted under investment fraud instead. That overlap, known as pig butchering, is part of why the investment category has ballooned.
How it works: a profile appears on a dating app or social platform — attractive photos (stolen), a plausible job that explains constant travel, a reason they can never video call or meet. The relationship deepens over weeks of daily messages. Then comes the first small ask: money for a plane ticket, a medical bill, a customs fee — or, increasingly, an invitation to invest together. Requests grow. So does the emotional cost of walking away, which is precisely the leverage the scam is built on.
Red flags: a partner who can’t ever meet in person, a relationship that accelerates unusually fast, any request for money or gift cards, and any attempt to move you into investing. Reverse-image-search the profile photos. It takes two minutes and it ends a surprising number of these stories early.
The top 5 scams side by side
| Scam type | How it contacts you | What it asks for | Biggest red flag |
|---|---|---|---|
| Investment scams | Social media, dating apps, unsolicited messages, online ads | Deposits into a “trading” platform, usually in crypto | A fee demanded before you can withdraw your own money |
| Imposter scams | Phone calls, texts and emails spoofing agencies and brands | Immediate payment to fix an invented problem | Urgency plus secrecy — “pay now, don’t tell your bank” |
| Business email compromise | A spoofed or hacked work email inside a real workflow | A wire sent to new or changed bank details | Payment details changed by email and never verified by phone |
| Tech support scams | Browser pop-ups and unsolicited “security” calls | Remote access, then cash, gift cards or crypto “to protect your money” | A pop-up or caller telling you to move money to a safe account |
| Romance scams | Dating apps and social media profiles | Money for emergencies — or an invitation to invest together | They can never meet, but the financial requests keep growing |
How to protect yourself
Different costumes, same machinery. Every scam in this list depends on rushing you past the moment where you’d normally stop and check. Slow the moment down. Verify any request for money through a channel you chose — the number on your bank card, the official app, a call to a colleague whose voice you know. Treat any demand for payment by gift card, wire transfer, payment app, or cryptocurrency as a near-certain fraud signal; legitimate organisations simply don’t collect money that way. And set up friction on purpose: transaction alerts, a second pair of eyes for any transfer over a set amount, a standing family rule that big money moves get a phone call first.
For the full defensive playbook, read our guide on how to beware of scams in everyday life — it walks through the habits that make you a hard target across all five categories. And if the worst has already happened, minutes matter more than pride: follow our step-by-step plan for what to do in the first 24 hours after a scam, then report the fraud to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and to the FBI’s IC3 at ic3.gov. Reports feel thankless, but every figure in this article exists because someone filed one.
Sources
- Federal Trade Commission, FTC Consumer Sentinel 2025 figures: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/03/new-ftc-data-show-big-jump-reported-losses-fraud-125-billion-2024
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), 2025 Internet Crime Report: https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2024_IC3Report.pdf
- Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, “Contact and Payment Methods Used for the Top Five Categories of Scams” (Payments System Research Briefing, based on FTC data): https://www.kansascityfed.org/research/payments-system-research-briefings/contact-and-payment-methods-used-for-the-top-five-categories-of-scams/
- Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, “The Future of Financial Fraud: The Sophistication of Common Scams”: https://www.kansascityfed.org/ten/the-future-of-financial-fraud-the-sophistication-of-common-scams/
- FBI, “FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Complaint Center Report Released” (April 2025): https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/columbia/news/fbis-2024-internet-crime-complaint-center-report-released
Last reviewed: November 2026
This article is for education only and is not financial or legal advice.