Most discussions of job scams rely on general impressions: that they are common, that they are getting worse, that people should be careful. This article takes a different approach, working directly from the two most authoritative sources of employment fraud data available in the United States, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), to lay out what the numbers actually say. Every figure below is drawn from an official IC3 report or an FTC press release, cited directly. Where a figure comes from secondary reporting on government data rather than a government document reviewed directly, that is stated explicitly.
This matters for the same reason the rest of this series matters: numbers, used honestly, make the case for caution better than warnings alone. They also come with real limits, covered toward the end of this article, that matter just as much as the totals themselves.
The Overall Fraud Picture
The FBI’s IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 1,008,597 complaints for the year, with total reported losses of $20.877 billion. This figure covers all internet-enabled crime reported to IC3, not employment fraud specifically, but it establishes scale: employment fraud is one category within a reporting system that logged over a million complaints in a single year.
Separately, the FTC’s own fraud data, covering a different but overlapping reporting period, showed consumers reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25 percent increase over 2023, from 2.6 million total fraud reports. The FTC noted a particularly notable shift in that data: the share of people who reported losing money to a scam, among those who reported a scam at all, rose from 27 percent in 2023 to 38 percent in 2024, even though the total number of reports stayed roughly stable. In other words, a similar volume of scam attempts translated into more actual financial losses.
These two data sets are not directly comparable, since IC3 and the FTC use different reporting mechanisms, different crime categorizations, and different time windows, but both point in the same direction: reported fraud losses, broadly, are rising.
Employment Fraud, Specifically: The IC3 Numbers
IC3 tracks “Employment” as its own crime category, separate from broader consumer fraud categories, and its 2025 Internet Crime Report shows clear, sustained growth in this category over three consecutive years:
- 2023: 15,443 complaints, $70,234,079 in reported losses
- 2024: 20,044 complaints, $264,223,271 in reported losses
- 2025: 24,688 complaints, $362,934,762 in reported losses
Reported losses in this category grew roughly fivefold between 2023 and 2025, while complaint counts grew by about 60 percent over the same period, indicating that both more people are reporting employment fraud and the average loss per incident is climbing. In the 2025 report, Employment ranked 10th among all crime types tracked by IC3, both by number of complaints and by total dollar losses, placing it below categories like investment fraud and business email compromise, but ahead of many other well-known fraud types.
IC3’s 2025 report also breaks employment fraud losses down by the age of the person reporting:
| Age Group | Complaints | Reported Losses |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 | 835 | $1,489,854 |
| 20-29 | 4,555 | $33,049,422 |
| 30-39 | 5,025 | $42,865,213 |
| 40-49 | 4,524 | $57,604,303 |
| 50-59 | 3,671 | $100,853,442 |
| 60 and over | 2,853 | $78,712,899 |
Two things stand out in this table. First, people in their 30s and 40s file the most complaints, but people aged 50 to 59 report the highest total losses despite filing fewer complaints than several younger age groups, which points to a higher average loss per incident in that age bracket. Second, losses are not concentrated among the youngest or most inexperienced job seekers; every age group, including those 60 and over, reported meaningful losses.
The 2025 report also flags an emerging pattern worth noting on its own: AI-related employment fraud, specifically cases involving voice spoofing or deepfake video during online interviews, accounted for approximately $13 million in reported losses in 2025. This is a small fraction of the category’s total losses, but it is a documented, quantified signal that the tactics described elsewhere in this series, fabricated identities and manipulated interviews, are now being tracked by IC3 as a distinct and measurable sub-pattern.
How Employment Fraud Compares to Other Crime Types
Placed alongside IC3’s other tracked categories, employment fraud is a mid-tier but clearly established crime type, not a marginal one. By total dollar losses in 2025, the top categories were investment fraud at $8.65 billion, business email compromise at $3.05 billion, tech and customer support scams at $2.13 billion, personal data breaches at $1.31 billion, and confidence or romance scams at $929 million. Employment fraud, at $362.9 million, ranked tenth by that measure, below government impersonation and non-payment or non-delivery scams, but still ahead of several other well-established categories not listed here.
By number of complaints, the ranking looks somewhat different: phishing and spoofing led with 191,561 complaints, followed by extortion at 89,129, investment fraud at 72,984, and personal data breach at 67,456. Employment fraud’s 24,688 complaints placed it tenth by count as well, just behind business email compromise’s 24,768.
Two things are worth drawing from this comparison. First, employment fraud generates a meaningfully lower average loss per complaint than categories like investment fraud or business email compromise, which tend to target larger sums directly, consistent with a pattern of many victims losing smaller amounts rather than a few victims losing very large ones. Second, despite ranking outside the top five in both measures, employment fraud’s three-year growth trajectory, roughly fivefold in losses and 60 percent in complaint volume between 2023 and 2025, was faster than the overall growth rate of total IC3 losses over the same window, which suggests it is gaining ground relative to fraud overall rather than simply growing in step with it.
IC3’s report also breaks losses down geographically. California recorded the highest complaint count nationally at 116,414 and the highest total losses at $3.67 billion in 2025, followed by Texas (97,912 complaints, $1.83 billion in losses) and Florida (71,843 complaints, $1.60 billion in losses). The report reviewed for this article did not provide a state-level breakdown specific to the employment fraud category alone, so this article does not attribute these state totals to job scams specifically; they are included here only to illustrate the overall geographic concentration of reported internet crime in the United States.
The FTC’s View: Business and Job Opportunity Scams
The FTC categorizes this type of fraud somewhat differently, under a broader heading of “Business and Job Opportunities,” with a narrower subcategory specifically for job and employment agency scams. According to the FTC’s own March 2025 data release, the broader Business and Job Opportunities category accounted for $750.6 million in reported losses in 2024, an increase of nearly $250 million from the prior year.
Within that category, the FTC’s narrower Job and Employment Agency Scams subcategory, which maps most closely to what most people mean by “job scams,” accounted for $501 million in reported losses in 2024. That figure has grown substantially from $90 million in 2020, and the FTC describes the number of reports in this subcategory as having tripled over that same period. Using the FTC’s own framing, this is one of the fastest-growing fraud subcategories the agency tracks.
The Fastest-Growing Slice: Task-Based and “Pay-Per-Task” Scams
In a December 2024 data release, the FTC specifically called out the growth of what it terms “game-like” online job scams, referring to the pay-per-task schemes covered elsewhere in this series, where victims are asked to complete simple tasks such as liking social media posts or rating products in exchange for pay, before eventually being asked to pay money themselves.
The FTC’s figures on this specific pattern are striking. Reports of these task-based scams went from essentially zero in 2020, to roughly 5,000 in all of 2023, to approximately 20,000 in just the first half of 2024 alone, a roughly fourfold increase in reporting volume within a matter of months. By the FTC’s own account, task scams made up nearly 40 percent of all job scam reports it received in 2024. In dollar terms, the FTC reported more than $220 million in total job scam losses in just the first six months of 2024, with $41 million of that tied specifically to cryptocurrency payments, an amount the FTC itself described as nearly double the cryptocurrency-related job scam losses reported for all of 2023. The FTC described the typical pattern behind these numbers as consistent with what this series has covered previously: victims receive an unsolicited message about online work, are paid a small amount early to build trust, and are then encouraged to invest increasing amounts of their own money in pursuit of larger returns that do not materialize.
A More Recent Signal: Text Message and Online Job Scams in 2025
More recent reporting, published by Fortune in November 2025 and attributed to FTC data, indicates the trend has continued. According to Fortune’s reporting, FTC data shows job-scam-related text message reports rose from 4,872 in 2020 to 20,673 in the most recent year covered, an increase of roughly 324 percent over five years. The same reporting states that online job scam reports in the first half of 2025 were up 19 percent compared to the same period the previous year, with reported losses approaching $300 million for that six-month window alone. These figures are presented here as reported by Fortune, since this article did not independently locate and review the underlying FTC document directly; they are consistent in direction and rough scale with the FTC’s own directly reviewed 2024 data above, but should be read with that sourcing caveat in mind.
Why Job Scams Are Likely Undercounted More Than Other Fraud Types
The self-reporting limitation noted below applies to every category IC3 and the FTC track, but there is reason to think it affects employment fraud more than most. Investment fraud and business email compromise, the two largest categories by dollar loss, typically involve a single, identifiable, often large transaction that a victim can point to and is motivated to report, both because the amount lost is significant and because insurance, tax, or legal processes may require a police report or complaint number. Job scams frequently involve smaller individual amounts, a processing fee here, a deposit there, and in the pay-per-task pattern described above, the victim may not even recognize a clear moment of loss, since money is often described as being withheld or requiring a further payment to “unlock,” rather than taken outright in a single transaction.
There is also a psychological dimension worth naming plainly, without overstating it: several consumer-facing summaries of this data, along with the FTC’s own consumer guidance on job scams, note that victims of employment fraud, especially those who believed they had genuinely secured a new job, often report feeling embarrassed about having been deceived in a professional context, which can reduce the likelihood of filing a formal report compared to more clearly criminal-feeling fraud like a hacked bank account. This article cannot quantify how large this effect is, since no source reviewed provides a measured figure for it, but it is a reasonable, widely acknowledged contributing factor to why the reported figures above should be read as a floor rather than a ceiling.
What These Numbers Do Not Show
Government fraud statistics are valuable, but they have real, well-understood limitations that are worth stating plainly rather than glossing over.
They rely on self-reporting. Both IC3 and the FTC collect complaints that victims choose to file. Many victims of job scams, particularly smaller-dollar losses or cases involving embarrassment, do not report the incident at all, which means both agencies’ figures almost certainly understate the true scale of the problem rather than overstate it.
They are largely U.S.-centric. IC3 and the FTC primarily capture reports from within the United States or involving U.S. victims. Job scams are a global phenomenon, and this article does not have a verified, directly sourced global total to cite; readers outside the U.S. should treat these figures as illustrative of a broader pattern rather than as a global count.
Categorization varies between agencies. IC3’s “Employment” category and the FTC’s “Business and Job Opportunities” and “Job and Employment Agency Scams” categories are not defined identically, which is part of why their totals differ from each other. Neither should be read as the single, definitive count of job scam losses; each is one agency’s best accounting under its own methodology.
A reported loss is not necessarily a recovered or fully investigated one. These figures represent what victims reported losing, not confirmed, adjudicated losses, and they do not indicate how much of that money, if any, was later recovered.
None of this undermines the core finding across both data sets: employment fraud, by whichever agency’s count, has grown substantially and consistently over the past several years, in both the number of people affected and the dollar value lost.
What This Means for the Advertising and AdTech Industry
Neither the FBI nor the FTC breaks its employment fraud data down by industry in the sources reviewed for this article, so this article does not claim advertising, media, marketing, or AdTech professionals are disproportionately represented in these figures. What can be said, based on the nature of the categories themselves, is that the fastest-growing segment of this data, task-based and online, remote-first job offers, describes exactly the kind of work arrangement that is common across this industry: freelance content and social media tasks, remote ad operations roles, and flexible marketing gig work. An industry that relies heavily on this style of hiring is operating in the same conditions that these statistics show are drawing the fastest growth in fraud, even without industry-specific data to confirm a disproportionate impact.
This also has a bearing on how companies in this industry think about their own name and reputation. As earlier articles in this series have covered, scammers frequently borrow the name of a real, recognizable company to lend credibility to a fake offer, and the growth documented here means that borrowed credibility is being deployed more often, not less, year over year. A company that has never experienced a reported impersonation incident is not necessarily exempt from this trend; it may simply not have detected or been informed of an attempt yet. The IC3 and FTC figures in this article do not name specific companies, so this observation is offered as reasonable context drawn from the documented growth trend, not as a claim about any particular company’s exposure.
A Note on Reading Year-Over-Year Comparisons
One methodological point is worth flagging for anyone using these figures in their own writing or presentations: IC3 and the FTC occasionally revise prior-year figures slightly as additional complaints are processed or reclassified after initial publication, which is standard practice for complaint-based statistical reporting and is disclosed in both agencies’ own methodology notes. The three-year IC3 trend and the FTC’s 2020-to-2024 comparison cited in this article reflect the figures as published in the most recent report reviewed for each respective data set. Anyone citing these numbers in the future should reference the specific report and publication date, provided in the sources below, rather than treating any single year’s figure as permanently fixed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is more accurate, the FBI’s numbers or the FTC’s numbers?
Neither is more “accurate” in an absolute sense; they are two different agencies using different reporting channels and category definitions, both drawing from self-reported complaints. Reading them together, as this article does, gives a more complete picture than relying on either alone.
Do these statistics include internship scams and freelance income scams specifically?
IC3’s Employment category and the FTC’s Business and Job Opportunities and Job and Employment Agency Scams categories are broad enough to plausibly include internship and freelance-income scams, but neither agency’s published summary breaks out those specific subtypes with their own separate figures in the sources reviewed for this article, so this article does not cite a specific number for either.
Is the growth in reported losses because more scams are happening, or because more people are reporting them?
Both agencies’ data cannot fully separate these two factors from the outside. Rising reports could reflect more scam activity, greater public awareness leading to more reporting, or both. The FTC’s own observation that the share of scam contacts resulting in an actual reported loss rose from 27 percent to 38 percent between 2023 and 2024 suggests the underlying scam activity itself, not just reporting behavior, is a meaningful part of the trend.
Where can someone verify these figures directly?
The FBI’s IC3 annual reports are published at ic3.gov, and the FTC publishes its fraud data and press releases at ftc.gov; both are cited directly in the sources below.
Key Takeaways
Across two independent, authoritative U.S. data sources, employment fraud shows a consistent, multi-year growth trend, in both the number of people reporting it and the dollar value they report losing. The fastest-growing segment within that trend, task-based, pay-per-task, and other remote online work offers, matches the tactics this series has covered in detail. These figures come with real limitations, most importantly that they almost certainly undercount the true scale of the problem rather than overstate it, and that they are primarily U.S.-focused. Read carefully and cited directly, they support the same conclusion this entire series has argued from the start: verification before money or sensitive information changes hands remains the most effective protection available, and the data suggests more people need it every year, not fewer.
Sources:
- 2025 Internet Crime Report – Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
- New FTC Data Show a Big Jump in Reported Losses to Fraud to $12.5 Billion in 2024 – Federal Trade Commission
- New FTC Data Show Skyrocketing Consumer Reports About Game-Like Online Job Scams – Federal Trade Commission
- FTC data confirms job offer text scams more common now – Fortune
