Every so often the official record catches up with what people have been feeling, and it is worth writing down plainly, with the source attached, before the number gets spun. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published its 2025 report this spring. Here is what it actually says.
Two things stand out. Crypto is now more than half of the total dollars, because it moves fast and is hard to claw back. And older adults are carrying the heaviest share and the fastest-growing one, which is not a coincidence, it is targeting.
The number is bigger, but the machine did not change. What changed is that the tools got cheaper and better, so the same old cons, the loved one in trouble, the guaranteed return, the urgent official, now arrive in a cloned voice or a fabricated video, at a scale one person could never have reached before. AI is why the line went up. It is not a new kind of scam. It is the old kinds, automated.
That is actually good news for your defense, because it means the things that worked still work. You do not have to out-detect a fake. You have to verify the request another way, refuse to pay under pressure, and treat any guaranteed return as a lie regardless of who seems to be saying it. The costume got better. The test did not change.
Reported losses are a floor, not a ceiling. The real number is higher, because shame keeps most of it off the books. That is exactly why writing the honest version down, and refusing to be ashamed, is part of the defense.
If you read one thing, set a family code word and agree that any urgent money call gets a callback on a known number. It is free, it takes five minutes, and it defeats a cloned voice completely. The plain guides, with nothing to sell you, are here: our one-page Family Phone-Scam Safety Card, the full guide When You Can't Trust the Voice, and the sourced answers in Money Answers. If it already happened to you or someone you love, start with After the Scam, Honestly.