$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 number. It is the only current US figure that contains vehicle sale fraud, and it cannot tell you how much of it is vehicles.
- Year
- 2025
- Where
- United States
- Outcome
- Ongoing
- Reported loss
- $503.4 million
- Victims
- 56,478
- Schemes
- Online vehicle purchase scams, Ticket and marketplace scams
- Last reviewed
- 2026-09-07
The facts, as recorded
- IC3 recorded 56,478 Non-Payment/Non-Delivery complaints in 2025, with $503,373,587 in reported losses.
- That is an average of about $8,913 per complaint, one of the higher averages among IC3's consumer categories.
- IC3 does not publish a vehicle category; vehicle sale fraud is recorded inside Non-Payment/Non-Delivery.
- The most recent vehicle-specific US figure remains IC3's own 2018 alert, covering May 2014 to December 2017.
- For comparison, IC3 recorded 12,368 Real Estate complaints with $275,110,419 in losses in 2025 — real estate has its own category; vehicles do not.
- The FTC's Consumer Sentinel categories for new and used auto sales are consumer-complaint categories about real dealers, and this site does not map them to a scam.
Why this case matters
It is a worked example of the problem this whole site is built around: the agency category is not the scheme.
$503,373,587 across 56,478 complaints is a real, current, official number. It contains vehicle sale fraud. It also contains undelivered concert tickets, puppies that do not exist, construction materials, electronics and everything else somebody paid for and did not receive.
There is no way to see the cars inside it.
The average is the only clue
About $8,913 per complaint — one of the higher averages among IC3’s consumer categories.
That figure is doing something interesting. Non-delivery is mostly a small-ticket crime: a jacket, a games console, a pair of tickets. An average approaching nine thousand dollars means the category contains a meaningful number of very large individual losses, and vehicles are the obvious candidate.
We are stating that as an inference and labelling it as one. It is not a measurement, and we are not going to convert it into one.
Why real estate has a category and vehicles do not
IC3 recorded 12,368 Real Estate complaints and $275,110,419 in 2025 — fewer complaints and roughly half the losses of Non-Payment/Non-Delivery, and it gets its own line.
That is not an oversight; it reflects how the crime is committed. Real estate fraud is usually a payment redirection — a compromised email, a diverted completion payment — which is a distinct mechanism worth counting separately. Vehicle fraud is usually a non-delivery, mechanically identical to any other thing that was paid for and never arrived.
So the taxonomy is coherent from the FBI’s point of view and useless from a buyer’s. Somebody about to send $30,000 for a car is not helped by knowing what happens to people who did not receive a jacket.
What we are doing about it
Publishing the number with the caveat attached, rather than either omitting it or dressing it up.
The most specific US measurement of vehicle sale fraud is still IC3’s own 2018 alert, which covers May 2014 to December 2017 — a period that ended before the current form of the scheme existed. That is the honest state of the evidence, and saying so is more useful than borrowing a broader figure and implying it is about cars.
Sources
- 2025 Internet Crime Report. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. Accessed 2026-09-07. Supports: The 56,478 Non-Payment/Non-Delivery complaints and $503,373,587 in 2025, the Real Estate comparison of 12,368 complaints and $275,110,419, and the absence of a vehicle category.
- Fraudulent Online Vehicle Sales. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. Accessed 2026-09-07. Supports: The most recent vehicle-specific US figures, covering May 2014 to December 2017.
- Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024. US Federal Trade Commission. Accessed 2026-09-07. Supports: The new and used auto sales complaint categories, which record disputes with real dealers.