FBI reports 20.8 billion dollars in losses from internet crime

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) has published its 2025 annual report. Over the year it received 1,008,597 complaints, and total financial losses surpassed 20.8 billion dollars, a 26 percent increase on the previous year. Cyber-enabled fraud drove most of that, accounting for 85 percent of reported losses. The report also describes how criminals increasingly rely on artificial intelligence, including voice cloning and automated chat generation, in business email compromise, employment scams and confidence or romance fraud. AI-related losses exceeded 893 million dollars.

What this means for your organisation

The figures are American, but the pattern is not. What weighs heaviest is not sophisticated intrusion, but fraud that exploits people and processes. For most organisations that means the largest financial losses will not come from a technical vulnerability, but from a payment made because someone trusted the wrong message. That makes this a management topic rather than only an IT one.

Berigo recommends

• Review who can approve payments on their own, and reduce that number.
• Introduce out-of-band confirmation for every change to payment details.
• Establish a clear routine for what staff do when they suspect fraud, and who they alert first.
• Include fraud risk in the board's annual review, with figures drawn from your own organisation.

Source

• fbi.gov
• ic3.gov