Case files
156 documented cases, each one sourced to a court record, a prosecutor's office, a regulator or an established news organisation. Outcomes are stated as they stood on the review date — a charge is an allegation, not a conviction.
2026
Laundering $3.1m of scam proceeds through salvaged cars shipped to West Africa
In August 2026 a Nigerian national living in Houston was sentenced to 95 months in prison for leading a conspiracy that laundered more than $3.1 million in proceeds from business email compr…
Business email compromise · Romance scams · Job and task scams
A Florida woman convicted of exploiting a widowed neighbor for $350,000
Kimberly Ruth Bitting, 58, of Leesburg, Florida, obtained power of attorney over an elderly neighbor shortly after the victim's husband died in August 2021, then spent roughly 15 to 18 month…
Power of attorney and caregiver financial abuse
A $200 million credit repair network halted by a federal court
In August 2026 the FTC sued a network of 17 companies operating under names including Credit Glory, Credit Sage and Credit Cop, plus five named principals, alleging the operation scammed con…
Credit repair scams
200 pharmacy websites seized, and six people dead
On 4 February 2026 the DEA announced the seizure of more than 200 website domains tied to an India-based criminal organisation it says is responsible for at least six fatal and four non-fata…
Fake online pharmacies
A 79-year-old mule ordered to repay $1.97 million she never kept
Sharon Dolisi, 79, of Phelps County, Missouri, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud after depositing more than $2 million from 28 lottery scam victims into her own bank…
Money mule recruitment · Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
The company that quoted you may not own a truck
FMCSA distinguishes between a moving company, which owns trucks and takes responsibility for your goods, and a broker, which owns nothing and arranges for someone else to do it. Both must be…
Moving company scams and hostage loads
Forever Living ordered to stop earnings claims after 77% of its distributors made nothing
The FTC sued multilevel marketing company Forever Living Products International LLC, its CEO Gregg Maughan and President Aidan O'Hare, alleging they used deceptive earnings claims to recruit…
MLM pyramid schemes
AI-cloned dealership websites, down to the last photograph
On 1 September 2026 the FTC warned that scammers are cloning real car dealers' websites — often using AI — copying logos, vehicle listings and photographs in detail, then advertising uncommo…
Online vehicle purchase scams · Ticket and marketplace scams
A sticker over the parking meter's QR code
On 3 September 2026 the FTC warned consumers that people have reported scammers covering up legitimate QR codes on parking meters with codes of their own. Scanning the substituted code leads…
QR code scams · Phishing and smishing · Toll and delivery texts
Four pet scams, all using AI-generated animals
In June 2026 the FTC described several distinct pet-related scams running at once: fraudsters posing as veterinarians or law enforcement claiming to have your lost pet, counterfeit animal sh…
Puppy and pet scams · Charity and disaster scams · Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
79 fraudulent claims, debit cards by mail, and an ATM withdrawal trail
Roosevelt Gulley, 42, of Sacramento, California, was sentenced in June 2026 to four years and six months in federal prison for wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. Over three months in …
Unemployment insurance fraud
Consent phishing: access that a password change does not revoke
In September 2026 the FBI warned about OAuth consent phishing — a technique that obtains lasting access to an account without ever taking a password. The victim is sent a link that asks them…
Phishing and smishing · Business email compromise · SIM swap · QR code scams
Scammers impersonating the FBI's own fraud-reporting centre
In July 2026 the FBI updated a warning first issued in April 2025 about an ongoing scheme in which criminals impersonate FBI personnel and the Internet Crime Complaint Center itself in order…
Recovery scams · Government impersonation · Deepfake voice and video scams
Stolen, not given: accounts broken into for explicit content
In August 2026 the FBI warned that sexual exploitation actors are illegally accessing victims' social media and personal accounts to steal explicit content and sell it on criminal marketplac…
Sextortion · Phishing and smishing · SIM swap
A $1.2 billion trading-education MLM settles for nearly $90 million in assets
The FTC and the Nevada Attorney General sued IM Mastery Academy — operating most recently as IYOVIA, and previously as iMarketsLive and IM Academy — alleging the company and named operators …
MLM pyramid schemes
23 skimmers, 12 grocery stores, two states
Denis Adelin Ionescu, 24, and Ioan Victor Stanciu, 33 — both Romanian nationals unlawfully present in the US — were sentenced on 26 March 2026 to 46 and 24 months in federal prison for insta…
Card skimming
A court-appointed guardian convicted of stealing from her own incapacitated grandmother
Linda Laird, 62, of Cordova, Maryland, was appointed a co-guardian and co-conservator of her own 81-year-old grandmother by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia in November 2017, a…
Power of attorney and caregiver financial abuse
A romance scam victim who then became the mule
Samuel D. Marcus, 33, of Oreland, Pennsylvania, lost money to a romance scam in late 2022 and early 2023 — then, prosecutors say, knowingly kept working with the same Nigeria-based fraud rin…
Money mule recruitment · Romance scams
A Georgia mail carrier stole $1 million in checks and gift cards from her own route
Melissa McAfee, a US Postal Service mail carrier in the Smyrna area of metro Atlanta, stole checks and gift cards from customers on her own delivery route between August 2022 and September 2…
Check washing
A pandemic relief programme, invoked six years later
In June 2026 a federal court in California halted an operation trading as National Amendment Assistance, which the FTC alleges falsely represented that its mortgage relief services were conn…
Mortgage relief and foreclosure rescue scams · Government impersonation
A student loan operation stopped mid-flight, in April 2026
On 16 April 2026 the FTC announced it had obtained a temporary restraining order against NERD Solutions and ED REF, alleging they cold-called borrowers — thousands of them on the Do Not Call…
Student loan forgiveness scams
One word means "lawyer" in Mexico and "not a lawyer" in the US
In much of Latin America a notario público is a qualified lawyer. In the United States a notary public is neither, and cannot represent anybody in an immigration case. That single mistransla…
Immigration and visa scams
The 276-arrest scam-centre takedown and the San Diego charges
On 29 April 2026 the US Justice Department announced a coordinated international takedown of cryptocurrency scam centres that produced at least 276 arrests across several countries. Alleged …
Pig butchering · Fake investment platforms · Romance scams
A state labour department's own laptop, used to hijack $3.5 million in claims
Kiara Smith, 28, of Prince George's County, Maryland, worked as a contractor for the Maryland Department of Labor and gave her state-issued laptop to co-conspirators, who used it to alter un…
Unemployment insurance fraud
$140m against a timeshare exit operation that took $90m from older adults
A federal court granted summary judgment in April 2026 against Christopher Carroll, president and CEO of Square One Group, ordering $140 million and permanently banning him from timeshare ex…
Timeshare exit and resale scams
A top MLM recruiter settles over "no less than six figures" claims across two companies
The FTC sued Stormy Wellington, a high-level participant in the multilevel marketing companies Total Life Changes (TLC) and Farmasi, alleging she used false or baseless earnings claims on Yo…
MLM pyramid schemes
USCIS lists fifteen scams, and says what it will never do
USCIS maintains a standing catalogue of immigration scams — impersonators, fake websites, visa lottery fraud, job offers, "jumping the line" schemes — and pairs it with a short list of thing…
Immigration and visa scams · Government impersonation · Job and task scams
Two postal employees, a rapper, and $63 million in checks sold on Telegram
Vanessa Hargrove and Crystal Jenkins, both then-current or former US Postal Service employees in Detroit, diverted and stole checks — including US Treasury tax refund checks — from the mail …
Check washing
2025
FTC halts a $100 million debt-relief operation accused of impersonating banks to target veterans
On 14 July 2025 the FTC sued seven companies and three individuals behind "Accelerated Debt," alleging the operation took in roughly $100 million from consumers, mostly older adults and some…
Debt settlement scams
Amazon pays $2.5bn over Prime enrolment and cancellation
On 25 September 2025 the FTC announced a $2.5 billion settlement with Amazon over allegations that it enrolled millions of people in Prime without consent and made cancelling deliberately di…
Subscription traps and free trials
Puppy scams: a $600 median, and 4.8% of victims reporting
The Better Business Bureau's 2025 puppy scam study update recorded 1,632 reports through September 2025 with a median loss of $600, following 2,278 reports in 2024 and 2,899 in 2023. Its mos…
Puppy and pet scams · Ticket and marketplace scams
Six company names, one script, and debts that never existed
A federal court froze the assets of Blackstone Legal and its affiliates in March 2025 after the FTC alleged they collected on debts that never existed, threatening lawsuits, wage garnishment…
Phantom debt collection
"Dada Joe Remix": a decade of romance and inheritance fraud, and an extradition request
A grand jury indictment unsealed in Arizona in May 2025 charged Joseph Kwadwo Badu Boateng, a Ghanaian citizen known as "Dada Joe Remix", with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy …
Romance scams · Advance fee and 419 scams · Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
Fewer victims, four times the loss: Canada's bank investigator scam
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre files the safe-account scam under "Bank Investigator", and its open dataset shows two lines moving in opposite directions. Reports fell from 2,311 in 2021 to 1…
Bank impersonation and the safe account · Government impersonation
Canada's emergency scam moved from the phone to the text message
Between 2021 and 2025 the share of Canadian emergency scam reports arriving by text message rose from 1.2% to 17.7%, while the telephone's share fell from a peak of 71% to 56%. Losses throug…
"Hi Mum" and family impersonation texts · Grandparent and family emergency scams
Canada's emergency scam: a spike, then a collapse
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre files grandparent scams under "Emergency (Jail, Accident, Hospital, Help)", and its open dataset shows a category that rose fast and then fell just as fast. Re…
Grandparent and family emergency scams · "Hi Mum" and family impersonation texts · Deepfake voice and video scams
Canada's recovery-pitch reports: from C$1.7m to C$21.9m in four years
The Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre publishes its full reporting database, and it files second-wave recovery approaches under their own category. That category shows one of the sharpest increases…
Recovery scams
Ten times fewer reports, ten times the loss each
Canadian vendor fraud reports fell from 4,120 in 2021 to 426 in the first nine months of 2025 — a fall of about 90% — while loss per victim rose from roughly C$3,200 to roughly C$8,500, and …
Invoice and vendor fraud · Business email compromise
Bail money at the door: a courier for Dominican Republic call centres
In May 2025 a grand jury in the District of New Jersey indicted Jhonny Cepeda of New York with wire fraud conspiracy. Prosecutors allege he worked as a courier in a "grandparent" or "family-…
Grandparent and family emergency scams · Government impersonation
Chegg charged 200,000 people after they cancelled
The FTC announced on 15 September 2025 that the education company Chegg would pay $7.5 million over allegations that it hid its cancellation route and then kept charging people who had used …
Subscription traps and free trials
A cartel ran call centres selling Americans their own timeshares back
The Justice Department indicted a senior member of the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion in September 2025 over an advance fee scheme, run from call centres in Mexico since about 2012, that…
Timeshare exit and resale scams · Advance fee and 419 scams
20% of the stores earned nothing, and 95% were shut down
The FTC halted Click Profit in March 2025, alleging it sold managed Amazon storefronts as guaranteed passive income while claiming AI technology and partnerships with Nike and Disney. Its ow…
E-commerce automation and business opportunity schemes · Job and task scams
The US "click to cancel" rule was made, then vacated
The FTC finalised a rule in October 2024 requiring cancellation to be as easy as sign-up. On 8 July 2025 the Eighth Circuit vacated it on procedural grounds, without ruling on the substance,…
Subscription traps and free trials
A family skimming ring across seven states, 15,000 cards compromised
Four members of an extended family — Nicolas Longin Codreanu, Armando Ion Codreanu, Isabela Ignat Codreanu and Robby Vicson Codreanu, all in their early twenties and living together in Place…
Card skimming
A SIM swap that moved the price of bitcoin
In May 2025 an Alabama man was sentenced to 14 months in prison for his part in taking over the US Securities and Exchange Commission's account on X. He obtained control by performing a SIM …
SIM swap · Phishing and smishing
Fake cheque reports fell by two thirds — but the mechanism did not go away
US fake cheque scam reports to the FTC fell from 38,451 in 2022 to 13,616 in 2024, and FBI overpayment complaints fell from 4,144 in 2023 to 2,194 in 2025. Losses did not fall with them: FBI…
Overpayment and fake cheque scams · Job and task scams · Ticket and marketplace scams
The FDA's three questions, and why one of them is the buying method
The FDA's counterfeit medicine guidance asks three questions to spot a fake, and the third is not about the pill at all — it is "did you buy the drug from an online pharmacy?" The agency's a…
Fake online pharmacies
37,342 crypto kiosks, and a third of one state's operators unregistered
FinCEN's notice of 4 August 2025 records 10,956 IC3 complaints involving crypto kiosks in 2024 with about $246.7 million lost — complaints up 99% in a year. It also records the machines grow…
Bitcoin ATM and crypto kiosk scams · Government impersonation
Four sentences a storm chaser will not say
The FTC's post-disaster contractor guidance lists four things scammers say — that they do not need a licence, that the discount expires today, that you should sign over your insurance cheque…
Contractor and storm chaser scams
$2.95bn lost to impersonation, and a rule with a $53,088 price tag
The FTC's Impersonation Rule took effect in April 2024 and makes it illegal to falsely pose as a business or a government body, or to misrepresent an endorsement, with civil penalties of up …
Celebrity endorsement and deepfake ads · Government impersonation · Deepfake voice and video scams
"Real Medicare cards are free and mailed to you automatically"
The FTC publishes a Medicare Open Enrollment warning every autumn, and the 30 September 2025 edition contains the single most useful sentence in the whole category: real Medicare cards are f…
Medicare and health insurance scams · Government impersonation · Phishing and smishing
$49,000 returned to 198 people, and what that ratio means
In January 2025 the FTC sent more than $49,000 to 198 consumers harmed by a mortgage relief scheme — about $250 each, against upfront fees this industry charges in the thousands. It is the p…
Mortgage relief and foreclosure rescue scams
Older adults losing six figures to impersonation scams rose eightfold
The FTC reported in August 2025 that combined losses from older adults who lost more than $100,000 to impersonation scams rose eightfold, from $55 million in 2020 to $445 million in 2024. Th…
Bitcoin ATM and crypto kiosk scams · Government impersonation · Bank impersonation and the safe account · Fake tech support
"Real utilities won't demand payment to avoid same-day disconnection"
The FTC's standing guidance on utility impersonation contains the one fact that resolves the whole scheme: a real utility company does not demand immediate payment to prevent a same-day shut…
Utility shut-off scams · Government impersonation
The FTC ranks "wrong number" texts among the five biggest text scams
In April 2025 the FTC published its analysis of 2024 text-message fraud reports and placed the "wrong number" opener fifth among the top five text scams — the only one of the five with no pr…
Wrong number texts · Pig butchering · Phishing and smishing
The engineer hired to secure a token's liquidity rug-pulls it himself
Eric Zhu, a New York-based blockchain engineer hired to work on the "Game Coin" (GME) token, kept exclusive, undisclosed control of the liquidity provider tokens the project had publicly cla…
NFT and crypto token rug pulls
Stolen identities, VPNs and proxy servers, and $2.3 million in unemployment claims
David Godin, of Miami, Florida — who also used the aliases "James St Patrick," "David Wetty" and "Vic Pro" — was sentenced in June 2025 to 78 months in federal prison for wire fraud and aggr…
Unemployment insurance fraud
$60,000 in back taxes, a signature, and a house sold within a month
Joseph Goodnough, 42, of Rensselaer County, New York, was sentenced in October 2025 after deceiving an elderly Schoharie County homeowner — who had fallen more than $60,000 behind on his pro…
Home title fraud
Ten sham entities, filed with the SEC to look registered
A federal grand jury in Washington DC indicted a Hong Kong businessman in November 2025 over an alleged conspiracy to file false investment adviser forms with the SEC for at least ten sham e…
Pump and dump, and finfluencer manipulation
One million Americans' Medicare numbers, and a $10.6bn catheter claim
The Justice Department's June 2025 health care fraud takedown charged 324 defendants over more than $14.6 billion in alleged fraud — the largest in its history. Two of its cases matter to co…
Medicare and health insurance scams · Government impersonation
The tell is the packaging, and it is meant not to be
Homeland Security Investigations' guidance to retailers describes the core problem with card draining: the packaging is opened, the card data taken, and the card re-packaged in a way that ma…
Gift card draining
83,668 WhatsApp accounts blocked, and still no case count
Across three parliamentary answers between December 2024 and December 2025, the Indian government reported blocking Skype IDs, WhatsApp accounts, SIM cards and handsets used for digital arre…
Digital arrest · Government impersonation
$893 million in AI-involved fraud, and where it actually shows up
The FBI received more than 22,000 complaints reporting AI-related information in 2025, with adjusted losses of $893,346,472. Its breakdown is more useful than the headline: over $30 million …
Deepfake voice and video scams · Business email compromise · Romance scams · Job and task scams · Grandparent and family emergency scams
The FBI started counting charity fraud, and found $7.9 million
Charity appeared for the first time as its own crime type in the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report: 662 complaints and $7,907,609 in reported losses. The category did not exist in 2023 or 202…
Charity and disaster scams
Extortion complaints nearly doubled while losses did not
FBI extortion complaints rose from 48,223 in 2023 to 89,129 in 2025 — an 85% increase — while reported losses went from $74.8 million to $122.5 million and then fell back in the most recent …
Sextortion
Fictitious law firms: the recovery scam that borrows the FBI's name
The FBI has issued three escalating public warnings about a scheme that targets people who have already lost money to cryptocurrency fraud. Operators posing as lawyers at firms that do not e…
Recovery scams · Pig butchering · Fake investment platforms
Prize scam losses nearly doubled in a year while Canada's halved
US reported losses to lottery, sweepstakes and inheritance fraud rose from $102.2 million in 2024 to $194.1 million in 2025, a 90% increase, on 5,623 complaints. Canada moved the other way o…
Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams · Advance fee and 419 scams
$503m of undelivered purchases, with no way to see the cars inside it
IC3 recorded 56,478 Non-Payment/Non-Delivery complaints and $503,373,587 in losses in 2025 — a category that holds concert tickets, puppies, construction materials and cars in the same numbe…
Online vehicle purchase scams · Ticket and marketplace scams
The FBI records a 300% rise in ramp-and-dump complaints
On 3 July 2025 the FBI issued a public service announcement warning that criminals were recruiting US stock investors into fake "investment clubs" on social media and messaging apps, then us…
Pump and dump, and finfluencer manipulation · Fake investment platforms
Property fraud losses rose 58% in a year
US real estate fraud complaints rose from 9,359 in 2024 to 12,368 in 2025, and losses rose from $173.6 million to $275.1 million — a 58% increase in a single year, after being roughly flat t…
Rental and real estate scams · Business email compromise
75,000 sextortion reports, and where the money actually is
The FBI received more than 75,000 sextortion submissions in 2025 and referred over 5,700 involving minors to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. Its age breakdown shows the…
Sextortion
SIM swap complaints halved, and so did the losses
US SIM swap complaints fell from 2,026 in 2022 to 971 in 2025, and reported losses fell from $72.7 million to $17.4 million over the same period — a 76% drop. It is one of the few categories…
SIM swap
US tech support losses more than doubled in two years
FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data shows tech support fraud losses in the United States rising from $924.5 million in 2023 to $1.46 billion in 2024 and $2.13 billion in 2025 — a 131% i…
Fake tech support · Refund and remote access scams
Reported cyber fraud losses in India rose tenfold in two years
A parliamentary answer of 2 December 2025 records cyber fraud losses reported in India rising from ₹2,290 crore in 2022 to ₹22,846 crore in 2024 — a tenfold increase in two years — while com…
Digital arrest · Government impersonation · Fake investment platforms
One victim, $400,000: Jamaican lottery fraud in Arizona
In May 2025 the US Attorney's Office for the District of Arizona announced an indictment charging Deeno Jackson, 27, a citizen of Jamaica, with wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud…
Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams · Advance fee and 419 scams
Job scams: five times the losses in Canada, double the reports in Australia
Canadian job-scam losses rose from C$9.5 million in 2021 to C$48.9 million in 2024 — more than five times — while report counts fell. In Australia, Scamwatch job-scam reports rose 102.4% in …
Job and task scams · Pig butchering · Overpayment and fake cheque scams
Texas preparer sentenced after filing 610 false returns worth $1.2 million in bogus refunds
Karistha Johnson, a paid tax preparer in Tyler, Texas, prepared and filed 610 false federal tax returns between 2017 and 2019, fabricating deductions and business expenses to generate $1,244…
Fraudulent tax preparers
Three forged quitclaim deeds, one seller already dead a year
Rosalyn M. Johnson, 40, and Diamond D. Washington, 39, both of Huber Heights, Ohio, ran a company called Love Has Homes LLC that filed forged quitclaim deeds on three Montgomery County prope…
Home title fraud
The most common scam, and the least discussed
Purchase scams are the highest-volume fraud in every national dataset that separates them, and they attract the least attention. UK Finance recorded purchase scams as 71% of all authorised p…
Ticket and marketplace scams · Puppy and pet scams · Overpayment and fake cheque scams · Rental and real estate scams
Selling the list: seven million elderly Americans, sold to lottery scammers
In June 2025 the Justice Department's Consumer Protection Branch charged Troy Murray, also known as "Steve Dixson", with conspiracy to commit wire fraud for selling a lead-list database cont…
Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams · Advance fee and 419 scams
Pop-ups, live agents and 300 victims across 37 states
In May 2025 the US Attorney's Office for the District of Rhode Island indicted eight people over a transnational fraud and money laundering scheme aimed at elderly people in the United State…
Fake tech support · Refund and remote access scams · Government impersonation · Bank impersonation and the safe account
Payment redirection: the only major Australian scam category still growing
Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre reported combined losses of A$166.8 million to payment redirection scams in 2025, up 9.3% on 2024. Every other category in the country's top five fell o…
Business email compromise · Invoice and vendor fraud
Rebate scams: half the reports, nearly three times the losses
Australia's National Anti-Scam Centre recorded a 49.1% fall in rebate-scam reports to Scamwatch in 2025 while losses to the same category rose 170%, from A$1.7 million to A$4.7 million. The …
Refund and remote access scams · Recovery scams
Florida tax-shop chain sentenced for training staff to fabricate client deductions
Jonathan Carrillo and Franklin Carter Jr. ran Neighborhood Advance Tax, a chain of roughly a dozen Florida tax-prep offices, from 2016 to 2020, then reopened in the same storefronts as Taxma…
Fraudulent tax preparers
Japan counts the ads that use a famous face, and names the faces
Japan's National Police Agency counts SNS-type investment fraud by how the victim was first reached, and the largest single route is a banner advertisement using a celebrity's name — 3,202 c…
Celebrity endorsement and deepfake ads · Fake investment platforms · Deepfake voice and video scams
Japan's "fake police" fraud took 69% of all special-fraud losses
Japan's National Police Agency began counting ニセ警察詐欺 — police impersonation fraud — as a separate category in January 2025. By the end of November it accounted for 9,642 cases and ¥83.19 bil…
Ore-ore sagi and Japan's special fraud · Digital arrest · Government impersonation
The scam for grandparents now takes a third of its victims from people in their twenties and thirties
Japanese ore-ore fraud nearly tripled in the first half of 2025 — 6,278 cases against 2,140 a year earlier — and the growth came almost entirely from young adults. Cases among people in thei…
Ore-ore sagi and Japan's special fraud · Grandparent and family emergency scams
Crypto handovers in Japanese fraud rose 1,446% in a year
Japan's special fraud reached 13,213 cases and ¥59.73 billion in the first half of 2025, up 47.5% and 162.1%. Underneath the totals the delivery channel is moving: bank transfers now carry 6…
Ore-ore sagi and Japan's special fraud · Fake investment platforms · Government impersonation
The Ohio–Ghana romance conspiracies: eleven defendants, seven years
Between May and June 2025 the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio unsealed charges against eleven people over wire fraud and money laundering conspiracies that ran from De…
Romance scams · Business email compromise
Posing as federal agents: $2.1 million from people told they were under investigation
In May 2025 the US Attorney's Office for the District of Delaware announced that Rakeshkumar Patel, an Indian national, had pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy over an elder…
Government impersonation · Fake tech support · Digital arrest
PGI Global: $198m in memberships, and Lamborghinis
The SEC charged Ramil Palafox on 22 April 2025 over PGI Global, a purported crypto and foreign exchange trading company that allegedly raised about $198 million on guaranteed high returns an…
Ponzi schemes and high-yield investment programmes · Fake investment platforms
Phishing reports fell while losses rose elevenfold
US phishing and spoofing complaints fell from 298,878 in 2023 to 191,561 in 2025, while reported losses rose from $18.7 million to $215.8 million — roughly eleven times. Australia saw the sa…
Phishing and smishing · QR code scams · Toll and delivery texts · Wrong number texts
Prince Group: the $15 billion forfeiture and the Cambodian compounds
In October 2025 US prosecutors in Brooklyn unsealed an indictment charging Chen Zhi, founder and chairman of the Cambodian conglomerate Prince Holding Group, with running forced-labour scam …
Pig butchering · Fake investment platforms · Romance scams
Millions of notices telling people they had been specially chosen
A federal jury convicted Phillip Priolo in March 2025 over a scheme that mailed millions of prize notices falsely telling recipients they had been specifically chosen for a large cash prize,…
Mass-mailing and psychic letter fraud · Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
Project Red Hook: gift cards as a laundering rail
Homeland Security Investigations runs a dedicated initiative against Chinese organised crime groups exploiting gift cards. Its account is the clearest available: three techniques — tampering…
Gift card draining · Government impersonation · Utility shut-off scams
Bronx tax preparer known as "the Magician" sentenced over a $145 million refund fraud scheme
Rafael Alvarez, owner of ATAX New York, LLC in the Bronx, pleaded guilty in December 2024 to conspiracy and preparing false tax returns after filing roughly 90,000 federal income tax returns…
Fraudulent tax preparers
Gold couriers: collecting precious metals from the door
In May 2025 a grand jury in the Northern District of Florida charged Atharva "Andy" Sathawane with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering over a scheme tha…
Government impersonation · Fake tech support · Grandparent and family emergency scams
$45.9m taken from borrowers by a fake Department of Education
The FTC settled with the operators of Nevada-based Superior Servicing in September 2025 over allegations that they posed as the Department of Education or its loan servicers, promised forgiv…
Student loan forgiveness scams
A pinhole camera at the ATM, and $177,280 gone
Florin Nicolae Tarta, a 40-year-old Romanian national, was sentenced on 10 September 2025 to six years and nine months in federal prison for installing skimming devices and a pinhole camera …
Card skimming
679,981 Tether: a forfeiture that starts on LinkedIn and a dating app
On 3 June 2025 the US Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio filed a civil forfeiture complaint against 679,981.22 in Tether cryptocurrency suspected of coming from a romance an…
Romance scams · Pig butchering · Fake investment platforms
Text scam reports collapsed 62% while losses went up
Australian text-message scam reports fell from 77,365 in 2024 to 29,058 in 2025 — a 62.4% collapse that the National Anti-Scam Centre attributes to disruption across the ecosystem. Losses th…
Toll and delivery texts · Phishing and smishing · Wrong number texts
Maine barbershop tax preparer charged with diverting clients' refunds to himself
Thierry Musese, 35, ran a tax preparation side business out of FreshCutz, the barbershop he owned in Auburn, Maine. A federal grand jury indicted him in February 2025 on 31 counts of prepari…
Fraudulent tax preparers
Treasury sanctions nineteen targets across Burma and Cambodia
On 8 September 2025 the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control designated nineteen targets — nine in Burma and ten in Cambodia — over their role in scam compounds targeting Americans…
Pig butchering · Fake investment platforms
The Justice Department prosecuted the printer
In April 2025 the owner of a Las Vegas printing and mailing business pleaded guilty to conspiracy over her part in producing millions of fraudulent prize notices between 2012 and 2018, in a …
Mass-mailing and psychic letter fraud · Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
£576 million and 248,070 cases: the UK's authorised push payment problem
UK Finance recorded £1.28 billion in total payment fraud losses in 2025, of which £576.4 million was authorised push payment fraud — money victims sent themselves after being deceived — acro…
Bank impersonation and the safe account · Ticket and marketplace scams · Fake investment platforms · Romance scams
"USA Student Debt Relief", run from Colombia, and the Do Not Call list
In May 2025 the FTC banned the operators of Start Connecting LLC and its Colombian affiliate, trading as USA Student Debt Relief, from the debt relief industry. They allegedly took more than…
Student loan forgiveness scams
$91m on a bond-trading business that did not exist
The SEC charged three Dallas–Fort Worth men on 29 April 2025 over a scheme that allegedly raised at least $91 million from more than 200 investors, promising 3% to 6% a month from an interna…
Ponzi schemes and high-yield investment programmes
Extradited from Malaysia: romance victims used as unwitting money mules
On 22 May 2025 Malaysia extradited Kenyan national John Muriuku Wamuigah to stand trial in the District of Connecticut on a wire fraud charge. Prosecutors allege he and others executed a sch…
Job and task scams · Romance scams · Business email compromise · Overpayment and fake cheque scams
A stolen postal master key and $1.86 million in washed checks in rural Indiana
Michael Jerome Wright and Cortney Lashea Young of Princeton, Indiana used a stolen USPS "arrow" master key to open collection boxes across Evansville, stealing mail and checks between 2023 a…
Check washing
2024
"Passive investment income" from AI storefronts, and a $21.7m judgment
The FTC banned the owners of Automators AI in February 2024 over promises of passive investment income from AI-powered Amazon and Walmart storefronts. The vast majority of clients did not ma…
E-commerce automation and business opportunity schemes · Job and task scams
Fake pharmacies in three countries, and pills in every US state
The DEA's October 2024 warning records an increase in illegal online pharmacies shipping counterfeit pills made with fentanyl and methamphetamine to people who believed they were buying Oxyc…
Fake online pharmacies
A Boise couple sentenced for defrauding an elderly rancher out of her home
James Dougherty, 44, and his wife Jessica Dougherty, 43, of Boise, Idaho, moved onto a retired schoolteacher's 46-acre ranch in 2015 to help with horses and ranch work in exchange for free r…
Power of attorney and caregiver financial abuse
A credit repair pyramid scheme, $12 million clawed back, 443,000 people refunded
The FTC sued Financial Education Services and related entities in May 2022, alleging the company lured consumers with low credit scores by promising to clean up their credit, then recruited …
Credit repair scams
The US told its banks what timeshare fraud looks like from the inside
On 16 July 2024 the Treasury sanctioned three Mexican accountants and four Mexican companies over CJNG timeshare fraud, and FinCEN issued a notice — jointly with OFAC and the FBI — telling U…
Timeshare exit and resale scams · Advance fee and 419 scams
Federal investigators went looking for movers holding people's belongings
FMCSA ran Operation Protect Your Move in 2023 and again in 2024 in response to a significant increase in complaints of movers holding household possessions hostage to extort additional charg…
Moving company scams and hostage loads
Losses at Bitcoin ATMs rose nearly tenfold in three years
The FTC's September 2024 analysis found reported losses at Bitcoin ATMs rising nearly tenfold from 2020 to over $110 million in 2023, and topping $65 million in the first half of 2024 alone.…
Bitcoin ATM and crypto kiosk scams · Government impersonation · Fake tech support
Three federal agencies issued one warning as a hurricane approached
On 9 October 2024, with hurricanes making landfall, the FTC, the Justice Department and the CFPB issued a joint warning about disaster scams and price gouging. It names four categories — fak…
Contractor and storm chaser scams · Charity and disaster scams · Government impersonation
The US banned AI-generated testimonials, and then sued a company selling them
In August 2024 the FTC finalised a rule banning fake reviews and testimonials, including AI-generated ones, and requiring disclosure of material connections behind celebrity endorsements. A …
Celebrity endorsement and deepfake ads · Fake investment platforms · Job and task scams
$212m on gift cards, and the reason that number is small
US consumers reported losing $212 million on gift or reload cards across 41,120 reports in 2024 — the sixth-largest payment method by losses, well behind bank transfers at $2.09 billion. The…
Gift card draining · Government impersonation · Utility shut-off scams · Fake tech support
Health care fraud costs consumers $283 at a time and Medicare billions
In 2024 US consumers filed 78,763 health care fraud reports with the FTC, losing about $80 million with a median of $283 each. The same year's federal takedown alleged $14.6 billion. Both nu…
Medicare and health insurance scams
Home repair fraud reports track the storms, not the calendar
US reports in the FTC's Home Improvement, Repair, and Solar category ran at 10,573 in 2022, 12,313 in 2023 and 11,408 in 2024 — flat, not rising, and unlike almost every other category on th…
Contractor and storm chaser scams
US immigration services fraud reports nearly tripled in two years
Reports to the FTC in its Immigration Services category rose from 478 in 2022 to 1,291 in 2024 — a 170% increase, and the sharpest proportional rise in any category we track. The absolute nu…
Immigration and visa scams
141,902 telemarketing complaints, and what they cannot tell you
US consumers filed 141,902 unwanted telemarketing complaints with the FTC in 2024, alongside 200,331 about unsolicited email and 164,634 about unsolicited texts. None of those figures measur…
Auto warranty robocalls · Phishing and smishing
US utility scam reports rose 28% in two years
Reports to the FTC in its Utilities category rose from 6,040 in 2022 to 7,729 in 2024. The count is small next to phishing or investment fraud, and it is measuring something narrower than th…
Utility shut-off scams
$7.6m collected with threats of jail, and calls to the family
The FTC sued Global Circulation, Inc. and its owner in November 2024 over allegations that it collected more than $7.6 million in bogus debt by threatening consumers with jail, calling their…
Phantom debt collection
HyperFund: 1% a day, $1.89bn, and no mining operation
HyperFund sold "membership" packages promising 0.5% to 1% a day in passive rewards, said to come from large-scale crypto mining. The SEC and the Justice Department allege there were no minin…
Ponzi schemes and high-yield investment programmes · Fake investment platforms
Ten years of business email compromise: $55.5 billion in global exposed losses
In September 2024 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center published a decade of business email compromise figures: $55.5 billion in global exposed losses across complaints filed between Oc…
Business email compromise · Invoice and vendor fraud · Rental and real estate scams
The FBI's catalogue of how generative AI gets used in fraud
In December 2024 the FBI published an itemised account of how criminals use generative AI across text, images, audio and video. The most consequential entries are the mundane ones: AI used t…
Deepfake voice and video scams · Romance scams · Fake investment platforms · Phishing and smishing
Five operations, one template, eighteen months
Operation AI Comply, announced in September 2024, brought five FTC actions against businesses selling AI-boosted promises. Three were storefront schemes — Ascend Ecom, FBA Machine and Ecomme…
E-commerce automation and business opportunity schemes · Job and task scams · Celebrity endorsement and deepfake ads
India's government describes the fake police station on the screen
On 14 May 2024 India's Ministry of Home Affairs published an alert describing a scheme it calls "digital arrest": callers posing as police, CBI, the narcotics department, the RBI or the Enfo…
Digital arrest · Government impersonation
CFPB and seven states sue a debt-relief network over $100 million in illegal fees
On 10 January 2024 the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the attorneys general of seven states sued StratFS, LLC (formerly Strategic Financial Solutions) and roughly thirty affiliated…
Debt settlement scams
$18 million raised, $194,809 to patients
In March 2024 the FTC and ten states sued Cancer Recovery Foundation International, trading as Women's Cancer Fund, and its operator Gregory B. Anderson. Between 2017 and 2022 the organisati…
Charity and disaster scams
A forged deed, a fake notary stamp, and an elderly owner's home in LeDroit Park
Jeffrey M. Young-Bey, 67, of Washington, D.C., was found guilty by a federal jury on 12 February 2024 on 12 charges after prosecutors showed he forged the signatures of an elderly homeowner …
Home title fraud
2023
The rule that makes a hostage load illegal, and almost nobody knows it
Under a non-binding estimate, an interstate mover cannot require more than 110% of the estimate at the time of delivery. Under a binding estimate, it is 100%. A crew demanding triple the quo…
Moving company scams and hostage loads
The two biggest credit repair brands, a $2.7 billion judgment
The CFPB sued PGX Holdings, Progrexion Marketing and the law firm behind Lexington Law and CreditRepair.com — the two largest brands in the industry, with combined 2022 revenues of $388 mill…
Credit repair scams
Twenty years of letters from psychics who were not writing them
Patrice Runner ran a mass-mailing scheme from 1994 to November 2014, sending millions of letters that purported to be personal messages from the psychics Maria Duval and Patrick Guerin, offe…
Mass-mailing and psychic letter fraud · Prize, lottery and sweepstakes scams
2022
"Hi Mum": Australia names the WhatsApp version and counts it
The ACCC issued a formal alert on 23 August 2022 after more than 1,150 Australians lost A$2.6 million to family impersonation messages in seven months, most of them in June and July. It is t…
"Hi Mum" and family impersonation texts · Grandparent and family emergency scams
Eight traders with a Discord, and $114m in alleged profits
In December 2022 the SEC and the Justice Department charged eight men who ran the Atlas Trading community on Discord and Twitter, alleging they bought stocks, urged hundreds of thousands of …
Pump and dump, and finfluencer manipulation
Baller Ape Club: a $2.6 million rug pull, and a defendant the US has not caught
Le Anh Tuan, a 26-year-old Vietnamese national, and unnamed co-conspirators sold "Baller Ape Club" NFTs in October 2021, then deleted the project's website and disappeared with investors' mo…
NFT and crypto token rug pulls
A fake driver's licence, a rented alias, and a mail drop for stolen credit
Corey Cato, 41, of Atlanta, was sentenced in September 2022 to more than seven years in federal prison for his role in a nationwide fraud ring that used stolen Social Security numbers — incl…
Synthetic identity fraud
Eight billion robocalls from one operation, cut off in a week
On 7 July 2022 the FCC ordered every US voice provider to stop carrying auto warranty robocall traffic from a single operation it believed had generated upwards of eight billion calls since …
Auto warranty robocalls
5,187,677,000 calls in three months, and a $300m fine
In December 2022 the FCC proposed a $299,997,000 penalty — the largest in its history — against the auto warranty robocall operation, having found it placed approximately 5.19 billion calls …
Auto warranty robocalls · Phishing and smishing
Frosties: $1.1 million gone within hours of the mint finishing
Ethan Nguyen and Andre Llacuna, both 20, created "Frosties," an 8,888-piece Ethereum NFT collection that promised buyers a themed video game and ongoing community rewards. Within hours of th…
NFT and crypto token rug pulls
50 fraudulent accounts, $9.5 million, and a 25-year sentence
Elvis Eghosa Ogiekpolor, 46, of Norcross, Georgia, was sentenced in October 2022 to 25 years in federal prison for opening and directing others to open at least 50 fraudulent business bank a…
Money mule recruitment · Romance scams · Business email compromise
An active-duty airman and a co-developer rug pull $400,000 in Solana NFTs
Devin Alan Rhoden, an active-duty US Air Force member stationed at MacDill Air Force Base, and Berman Jerry Nowlin Jr. minted three Solana NFT collections — UndeadApes, Undead Lady Apes and …
NFT and crypto token rug pulls
The shut-off threat arrives when the weather makes it credible
The FTC's utility scam alerts cluster around cold snaps and high-bill seasons — February 2021, September 2022, and a heating-cost warning tied to winter. That timing is the scheme's design: …
Utility shut-off scams · Charity and disaster scams
2021
Shell companies built years of fake credit history for identities that didn't exist
A Suffolk County, New York, investigation unravelled a 13-person, three-corporation ring that created more than 20 synthetic identities using the Social Security numbers of children, recent …
Synthetic identity fraud
A 'credit repair' front that built fake credit files instead
Michael Griffin ran a purported credit repair business out of Raleigh and Knightdale, North Carolina, that in reality created fictitious credit profiles for clients using stolen and syntheti…
Synthetic identity fraud
2020
Ninety per cent to the fundraiser, less than two to the cause
In September 2020 the FTC and four states permanently banned Mark Gelvan and three associates from all charity fundraising. Their telefunding operation raised money for sham charities claimi…
Charity and disaster scams
Fifty enforcement actions, and nearly half of complaints about debts not owed
Operation Corrupt Collector, announced in September 2020, brought more than 50 enforcement actions across the FTC, three federal partners and 16 states. Its supporting figure is the useful o…
Phantom debt collection
2019
2018
2017
2014
$25m in illegal advance fees, and $6,000 to lose a house
A joint sweep by the CFPB, the FTC and 15 states in July 2014 brought 41 actions against foreclosure relief operations that had collected more than $25 million in illegal advance fees. The f…
Mortgage relief and foreclosure rescue scams
Mission Settlement Agency's owner sentenced to 9 years for a $6.6 million scheme
Michael Levitis and his company, Mission Settlement Agency, pleaded guilty in April 2014 to mail and wire fraud after taking $6.6 million in fees from more than 1,200 financially struggling …
Debt settlement scams