Scam losses by state: what the FBI's 2025 data shows

Every spring the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center publishes what Americans reported losing to internet crime, broken out by state. The 2025 totals: 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses — the losses a 26% increase over 2024.

Then come the headlines. California lost the most. Texas was second. Florida third. All true, and close to meaningless: those are also the three largest states. A ranking by total dollars is, for the most part, a ranking by population.

The correction is already in the report, and almost nobody quotes it. Two pages after the dollar table, on page 31, IC3 publishes Losses per 100K Citizens by state — the same losses adjusted for how many people live there. Below, that table is restated as dollars per resident and set beside the total-dollar ranking, which the report keeps on a separate page, for every state, district, and territory.

The per-resident figures are the FBI’s own, divided by 100,000. Appendix C of the report says IC3 derives them from the Census Bureau’s 2025 state population estimates; we recomputed all 52 from that Census table ourselves, and they match to the cent.

The dollar ranking is mostly a population ranking

Seven of the ten states with the largest reported losses — California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Georgia — are also among the ten most populous. The other three (New Jersey, Virginia, Arizona) sit 11th, 12th, and 14th by population. That is not a finding about fraud. It is a finding about where people live.

Take the FBI’s per-100K table instead and the picture reorders:

Per-resident rank	State	Loss per resident	Rank by total dollars
1	District of Columbia	$140.37	35
2	California	$93.37	1
3	Nevada	$92.08	18
4	Arizona	$82.73	6
5	Hawaii	$74.29	32
6	New Jersey	$69.17	5
7	Florida	$68.03	3
8	Rhode Island	$64.57	41
9	Maryland	$62.29	15
10	New York	$61.31	4

A note on the top line: the District of Columbia is one city, not a state, and its daytime population is far larger than the residents the Census counts. Read it as a city figure, not a state one.

The states that move furthest are the small ones. Rhode Island is 41st in total dollars and 8th per resident. Hawaii is 32nd and 5th. Delaware is 43rd and 13th; South Dakota 47th and 18th; Alaska 49th and 19th. Nothing about them is small once you account for how few people live there.

The reverse happens too. Ohio is 13th in total dollars and 42nd per resident. Pennsylvania is 7th and 34th. North Carolina is 12th and 37th; Illinois 8th and 31st. Big losses, spread across a lot of people.

Across the 50 states and DC, the 2025 reported losses work out to about $55 per resident. The median state — Montana — sits at about $46. The gap between the highest and lowest state, California to Louisiana, is roughly four to one.

What the numbers cannot tell you

Before anyone uses this table to argue that one state is more gullible than another, four limits matter, and they are not small:

• These are reported losses, not total losses. IC3 counts complaints people chose to file. Most fraud never reaches an authority at all — a 2021 analysis of FTC-sponsored fraud surveys by Keith B. Anderson found that only about 4.8% of mass-market fraud victims complained to a government agency or a Better Business Bureau — so every figure here is a floor, not a total.
• These are all internet-crime losses, not only scams. IC3’s $20.877 billion covers every complaint type it receives. The report scopes cyber-enabled fraud specifically at $17.697 billion across 452,868 complaints — 45% of complaints and 85% of losses. The state tables are not broken out that way, so each state figure includes some non-fraud cybercrime as well.
• Reporting rates are part of what you are measuring. A state with active police outreach and a strong local news habit of covering fraud will generate more complaints from the same amount of crime. Low numbers can mean less fraud or fewer filings, and this data cannot separate the two.
• One case can move a small state. In a state with 1,500 complaints, a single business email compromise or investment loss in the tens of millions visibly bends the per-resident figure. Treat the small jurisdictions as noisy.

The state field also reflects where the complainant is, not where the criminal is — and nothing in this table tells you where the money ended up.

Where the money actually went

The crime-type breakdown is national only. Apart from cryptocurrency, IC3 does not publish crime type by state, so read this as the backdrop to the state columns — not as an explanation of any one state’s rank:

• Investment fraud — $8,648,617,756. The largest single category by a distance. Because IC3 reports it only as a national figure, it cannot be traced to particular states: a category this size plausibly shapes the per-resident spread, but the report does not let us prove it. Most of it starts as a friendly stranger, not a cold pitch — the pattern in pig butchering crypto romance scams.
• Business email compromise — $3,046,598,558, across 24,768 complaints. Few victims, enormous per-case losses, heavily weighted toward businesses and real estate closings.
• Tech and customer support fraud — $2,134,675,818. The category that most often ends with an older adult moving money at a stranger’s instruction, including the phantom hacker scam.
• Cryptocurrency — $11,366,669,732 across 181,565 complaints. IC3 applies this as a descriptor rather than a crime type — it marks any complaint that references virtual currency — so it overlaps the categories above rather than adding to them. Often it is how the money left; sometimes it is what the lie was about. It is also the one measure IC3 does break out by state, and it undercuts the easy assumption that crypto explains the per-resident leaders: crypto accounts for about 54% of national losses but only about 20% of Rhode Island’s, and Rhode Island ranks 8th per resident.
• AI-related complaints — $893,346,472 across 22,364 complaints, the first year IC3 has broken this out at all.

Those top three categories alone account for over $13.8 billion of the $20.877 billion total.

The age gap is the sharpest line in the data

Complainants aged 60 and over filed 201,266 complaints and reported $7.748 billion in losses — 37% more complaints and 59% more money than 2024, with an average loss of $38,500. 12,444 people over 60 reported losing more than $100,000 each.

That single group accounts for well over a third of the national total. If you are choosing one conversation to have because of this data, have it with your parents: protecting aging parents from scams is where the dollars are.

Every state, district, and territory

FBI IC3, 2025 calendar year. Every figure here is the FBI’s: complaints and losses from pp. 28–29 of the report, and loss per resident from its Losses per 100K Citizens table (p. 31) divided by 100,000, with that table’s own ranking. IC3 derives the per-100K figures from Census Bureau 2025 state population estimates. The five territories IC3’s per-100K table does not cover are shown with a dash.

Rank	State or territory	Complaints	Reported losses	Loss per resident	Per-resident rank
1	California	116,414	$3,674,716,305	$93.37	2
2	Texas	97,912	$1,825,636,181	$57.57	14
3	Florida	71,843	$1,596,138,595	$68.03	7
4	New York	45,255	$1,226,307,877	$61.31	10
5	New Jersey	20,648	$660,411,901	$69.17	6
6	Arizona	28,868	$630,700,609	$82.73	4
7	Pennsylvania	31,154	$537,787,231	$41.18	34
8	Illinois	32,977	$535,255,201	$42.08	31
9	Georgia	25,936	$534,581,965	$47.30	25
10	Virginia	25,314	$476,120,025	$53.62	20
11	Washington	25,619	$458,165,375	$57.26	16
12	North Carolina	25,940	$431,561,716	$38.54	37
13	Ohio	27,626	$421,289,526	$35.40	42
14	Massachusetts	22,936	$410,924,066	$57.44	15
15	Maryland	19,430	$390,242,821	$62.29	9
16	Michigan	22,191	$381,068,131	$37.63	38
17	Colorado	18,847	$355,049,719	$59.05	12
18	Nevada	13,366	$302,235,247	$92.08	3
19	Tennessee	16,261	$269,214,519	$36.80	40
20	South Carolina	14,699	$264,083,026	$47.41	23
21	Minnesota	13,595	$248,892,986	$42.69	30
22	Missouri	14,087	$233,933,401	$37.31	39
23	Indiana	20,777	$233,016,771	$33.42	43
24	Connecticut	9,714	$219,500,212	$59.51	11
25	Utah	9,903	$195,417,205	$55.22	17
26	Wisconsin	16,680	$194,227,722	$32.52	45
27	Oregon	12,477	$193,196,479	$45.21	27
28	Alabama	9,936	$167,212,658	$32.20	46
29	Kansas	7,927	$147,337,101	$49.49	22
30	Oklahoma	11,964	$131,921,776	$31.99	47
31	Kentucky	9,414	$119,685,861	$25.98	50
32	Hawaii	3,328	$106,447,375	$74.29	5
33	Louisiana	8,623	$105,440,238	$22.83	51
34	Arkansas	6,161	$102,541,947	$32.92	44
35	District of Columbia	3,113	$97,368,097	$140.37	1
36	Iowa	5,436	$95,520,131	$29.50	48
37	West Virginia	4,209	$92,648,544	$52.46	21
38	Idaho	4,479	$88,725,284	$43.71	29
39	New Mexico	5,688	$85,571,285	$40.26	35
40	Mississippi	5,084	$77,360,761	$26.19	49
41	Rhode Island	2,700	$71,960,439	$64.57	8
42	Nebraska	3,724	$71,844,724	$35.60	41
43	Delaware	3,089	$62,012,494	$58.51	13
44	New Hampshire	4,374	$59,283,023	$41.89	32
45	Maine	2,888	$56,536,020	$39.96	36
46	Montana	2,618	$53,192,859	$46.47	26
47	South Dakota	2,514	$51,452,806	$55.02	18
48	Puerto Rico	4,108	$44,266,380	$13.90	52
49	Alaska	3,202	$39,972,438	$54.22	19
50	North Dakota	1,418	$37,865,442	$47.37	24
51	Vermont	1,580	$26,567,033	$41.21	33
52	Wyoming	1,552	$25,826,205	$43.87	28
53	United States Minor Outlying Islands	211	$3,486,871	—	—
54	Virgin Islands, U.S.	125	$2,448,598	—	—
55	Guam	171	$1,416,690	—	—
56	Northern Mariana Islands	30	$290,585	—	—
57	American Samoa	188	$172,395	—	—

The 50 states and DC account for 915,490 complaints and $18,873,969,353 of the national total. The remainder comes from complaints not tied to one of these jurisdictions.

The habit behind every row

Different states, one mechanism. Most of the money in this table left through a payment the victim was talked into making, under time pressure, often to someone they had never met in person — a wire, a bank transfer, crypto, or a gift card. Investment fraud, business email compromise, tech support, romance, and government impersonation alone come to more than $15.5 billion of the $20.877 billion national total, and every one of them ends that way.

That is the point where this is still stoppable, and it is the same point in all 57 rows:

• Give it a night. No legitimate investment, invoice change, or account “security” issue collapses because you waited until morning.
• Verify on a channel you chose. Look up the bank, the title company, or the platform yourself. Never use the number, link, or address in the message that prompted you.
• Say the amount out loud to one other person. Fraud of this size almost always happens in private. Naming the number to a family member or your bank teller breaks the isolation the script depends on.
• File the report anyway. If it already happened, ic3.gov is where these numbers come from, and where a case can actually be routed to investigators. Then read how to get your money back by payment method — and be ready to recognize recovery scams, which target people who just filed.

For the other half of the national picture — the FTC’s separate dataset, and how the two differ — see scams in 2025, by the numbers.