Cybercrimes in the U.S. have gone completely rampant

Cybercrime in America has been promoted from being a nuisance in the inbox into a menace to the U.S. economy. Last year more 1,008,597 million cybercrime complaints were logged by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, up from just 288,012 in 2015. Followed by reported losses which reached a staggering $20.8 billion, marking a 26% jump in a single year, and all this means the average victim now loses more than $20,000.

It’s not just about phishing emails anymore, cyber-enabled fraud accounted for nearly 85% of all financial losses last year, and investment scams resulted in over $8 billion.  
 
And the list goes on: business email compromise scams added another $3 billion, while more than $2.1 billion was siphoned off through tech-support fraud. In all of this, the common denominator was Cryptocurrency, which was tied to more than $11.3 billion in reported losses.

Cybercriminals are elevating online extortion to whole new darker methods. As per the FBI, reports which were labelled as “threats of violence” took a big leap from 1,360 in 2024 to 4,826 in 2025. And as many as 40% of ransomware attacks which took place in the world transpired with hackers threatening to physically harm employees who refused to pay.

In order to perpetuate “a really strong level of intimidation” some attackers are really going below the belt by calling up hospital workers at home, divulging their addresses and Social Security numbers while others are outsourcing violence entirely. In fact, criminal networks are outsourcing the unthinkable, and the FBI have already sounded the alarm on how these syndicates are offering “violence-as-a-service”. To no surprise these are often tied to crypto related crime rings, and intimidation methods include a range from vandalism to kidnappings. 

Meanwhile, AI is just adding salt to wounds: more than 22,000 complaints tied to AI-enabled cybercrime in 2025 were received by the FBI, which translates to $893 million in losses. Meanwhile, the ubiquity of Deepfake voices, AI-generated investment gurus, and cloned executives are making scams cheaper to run and harder to detect.