The FBI issued a public service announcement warning that victims of an ongoing law enforcement and government impersonation scam lost more than US$1.6 billion over an 18-month period, based on nearly 61,000 complaints filed with the Internet Crime Complaint Center between January 2025 and July 2026. The dominant pattern — the majority of government-impersonation complaints — has the scammer accuse the victim of committing or being connected to a crime, then threaten arrest, prosecution or imprisonment unless they pay to have the charges removed or to help investigate the "real" criminals. The FBI says scammers spoof caller ID so calls appear to come from an agency's legitimate number, and that it is aware of cases where they wore fake police uniforms and staged mock government facilities to make the approach credible. International victims were targeted too: 1,809 IC3 complaints in the same period, with losses exceeding US$140 million. The figures matter to organisations beyond their consumer-protection value, because the same impersonation method — a credible official identity used to extract information or payment — is the mechanism behind the fake-law-enforcement requests that have produced disclosure incidents against regulated firms, including the fraudulent request for data on roughly 680 customers submitted through a legitimate Italian government email domain that put Revolut in front of the UK ICO last week.

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