Fake Cop Scams Cost Victims $1.6B

A phone rings. The caller says they are a police officer or a government official, claims the person on the other end is tied to a crime, and threatens arrest unless money changes hands. According to the FBI, that script has been repeated often enough to cost victims more than $1.6 billion in a 19-month stretch.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received close to 61,000 complaints of law enforcement or government impersonation between January 2025 and July 2026. The per-complaint loss works out to more than $26,000 on average.

How the fake-cop script works

The most common version involves criminals persuading targets to pay money to clear charges the scammers claim have been filed against them. Contact usually arrives through unsolicited phone calls.

Scammers typically tell the target they have committed or are connected to a crime, then threaten consequences such as arrest and prison time if a payment is not made. The threat is the lever; the payment is the goal.

That pattern accounts for the bulk of the complaints and the largest share of the losses, according to the IC3's accounting.

Jury duty and missed court dates

A separate variant, accounting for roughly 11 percent of complaints, alleges the victim failed to fulfill assigned jury duty or missed a court date. The caller then threatens a fine or arrest unless payment is made.

The IC3 logged 6,833 complaints of this type. Losses from the jury-duty and court-date angle reached nearly $36 million.

A more targeted approach

Some scammers do homework first. They research a target's profession and tailor the pitch to the job. The IC3 has seen cases in which criminals contact medical practitioners and claim their medical license is expiring or was used in the commission of a crime.

Payment is then demanded either under the guise of renewing the license or as part of an extortion attempt to protect the victim's professional reputation. Victims reported 3,322 instances of this targeted scam, with total losses exceeding $37 million.

A far less common tactic, deployed in 496 of the total complaints, involved scammers claiming documents such as driver's licenses or passports had expired and demanding payment to renew them. Despite the small case count, criminals netted $348,000 through this method.

The elaborate version: uniforms and mock sets

The IC3 also described what it called the most elaborate tactic it outlined: targeting Americans from different ethnic communities, foreign nationals, and international students in the US.

The general procedure resembles the other examples. Scammers impersonate foreign law enforcement or US-based foreign diplomatic officials and threaten to cancel the victim's home-country passport or have them extradited.

What sets this variant apart is the production value. These scams sometimes involve video calls, and the criminals are known to don a country's law enforcement uniform. In some cases they take the calls in movie-style sets they create to mimic real government facilities.

The IC3 said it received 1,809 complaints of this kind of targeted scam during the 19-month reporting period, with total losses exceeding $140 million. That means nearly 10 percent of the overall losses stemmed from a scam that accounted for less than 3 percent of the total complaints.

The tactic travels

Law enforcement impersonation scams are common across the world, though they take different shapes from country to country.

In the Netherlands, police received more than 7,200 reports of fake police officer scams in the first half of 2026 alone, although the criminals behind them do not hide behind a phone or keyboard.

Dutch scams see fraudsters approach victims at their homes, usually targeting the elderly, and offer to safeguard their valuables while posing as a trusted authority. In reality, the criminals steal the jewelry, money, bank cards, and other valuables they are entrusted to protect.

Cases like these have surged across the country in recent years, and aspiring crooks as young as 14 have tried to cash in on the trend. Police have invested more in public awareness campaigns as a result.

What the FBI says to do

The FBI reminded the public that neither it nor any other law enforcement agency will call an individual and demand payment or request personal or sensitive information.

Citizens should ask for credentials and make attempts to independently verify the identity of the caller, such as calling the relevant office using publicly available details and asking for the caller by name.

The IC3 recently reported its most damaging year for internet scams. It released 2025's data in April, covering all types of cybercrime, pegging total losses at $20.87 billion – the first time it has reported annual losses exceeding the $20 billion threshold.

Why this matters beyond the headline number

The $1.6 billion figure covers only the complaints that reached the IC3, which means the true cost is likely higher than the reported total. For businesses and consumers, the practical takeaway is that the phone remains an effective attack surface because it bypasses technical controls that would catch a phishing email or a malicious link.

The variant targeting professionals such as medical practitioners suggests scammers are willing to spend time on research when the potential payout justifies it. A tailored pitch that references a real license or a real case is harder to dismiss than a generic robocall, and the threat of losing a professional reputation can push a target toward paying without verifying.

The elaborate video-call scams, complete with uniforms and mock government sets, point to a different kind of investment: money spent on production to make the con believable. Those cases account for a small share of complaints but a disproportionate share of losses, which suggests that when a scam is convincing enough, victims pay far more before they realize what happened.

The FBI's advice remains simple: verify the caller independently, do not pay on the spot, and remember that no legitimate law enforcement agency demands payment or sensitive information over the phone.