Trend Alert: 4 Fraud Schemes to Watch in 2025
Fraud is a persistent problem that organizations continue to struggle with, including the U.S. Federal Trade Commission—one of the U.S. federal agencies tasked with addressing consumer fraud.
“Despite the efforts of the FTC and other agencies, scam proliferation continues to rise,” wrote FTC Inspector General Andrew Katsaros in a September 2024 memo. “Consumers who contacted the FTC about scams reported losses of $10.3 billion in 2023 (up from $8.9 billion in reported losses in 2022). In 2024, fraud losses reported to the FTC are on track to top 2023 reported losses—with actual consumer losses likely much higher than those reported to the FTC.”
Below are some of the top fraud scams that affected individuals and organizations in 2024 that are likely to continue to be a problem in 2025.
1. Investment Scams
It’s a scam tactic as old as time. Someone drops into your life and presents you with a seemingly lucrative business opportunity that will provide regular returns if you invest, immediately.
At first, the returns appear real. You get checks or financial statements that show that your investment is making money. But later on, when you go to pull your investment, you’ll find that the account is empty.
Investment scams cost Americans a reported $4.57 billion in 2023—the most recent year that data is available for—and marked a 38 percent increase from reported losses in 2022, according to the FBI's 2023 Internet Crime Compliant Center annual report.
Many of the latest investment scams involve cryptocurrency, says U.S. Secret Service Criminal Investigative Division Special Agent Nicholas Schlereth.
In recent cases, the fraudster will have the victim set up an account on a cryptocurrency exchange—such as Crypto.com or Coinbase—and send fiat currency to the exchange, such as $1,000, which is then converted into cryptocurrency and directed to use for investment.
“Twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours goes by, [the victim] logs back in, they see [the investment] grew to $30,000,” Schlereth says. “They’re like, ‘this is a great investment opportunity!’”
Seeing these supposed gains encourages the victim to put even more money into the exchange to see the returns continue to grow. At a certain point, though, the victim might want to withdraw their funds—only to find out that the money is no longer available to them. They’ve been scammed and there’s limited recourse to recover the lost funds.
“I’ve seen cases where it’s been millions of dollars from one person,” Schlereth adds. “That’s an investment scheme we see regularly. It’s non-stop.”
2. Business Email Compromise
Business email compromise (BEC) schemes have been around since email was created and are typically carried out in one of two ways, Schlereth says.
Fraudsters will either spoof a legitimate email address or a domain name, often adding an extra letter so at quick glance the sender appears to be authentic. The other method involves fraudsters socially engineering their way into obtaining an employee’s credentials to then log into the victim’s work email. CFO’s or CEO’s emails are particularly lucrative targets. That’s because these accounts are tied to individuals who have authority in the workplace.
Fraudsters will then send emails asking for employees to buy gift cards or even wire money to an account that appears to have a legitimate business connection but is actually controlled by the fraudster.
In 2023, the most recent year data is available for, the FBI tracked $2.9 billion in reported losses due to BEC scams—the second-highest grossing reported fraud scheme behind investor fraud.
“These BEC schemes historically involved compromised vendor emails, requests for W-2 information, targeting of the real estate sector, and fraudulent requests for large amounts of gift cards,” according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center 2023 annual report. “More recently, the IC3 data suggests fraudsters are increasingly using custodial accounts held at financial institutions for cryptocurrency exchanges or third-party payment processors, or having targeted individuals send funds directly to these platforms where funds are quickly dispersed.”
3. Check Fraud
What’s old is new again. Check fraud took off last year after people recorded themselves writing bad checks, depositing them at ATMs, withdrawing cash before the check bounced, and posting their behavior to social media, where it became a viral trend.
“Some participants in this trend may not have been fully aware of the repercussions,” said Experian in its annual Future of Fraud Forecast. “In reality, consumers were committing check fraud by joining the bandwagon. Experian predicts that social media users could perpetuate additional trendy financial fraud schemes with the fraudsters being everyday people instead of savvy criminals.”
Along with cashing bad checks, fraudsters are also stealing other people’s checks out of the mail and cashing them. Matthew O’Neil, cofounder and partner of 5OH Consulting LLC and former Secret Service agent, says that one of the main ways fraudsters do this is by obtaining mailbox keys.
“The keys that open the mailbox receptacles and cluster boxes are all the same—they’re called arrow keys,” O’Neil explains. “Bad actors realized it, probably about two-and-a-half or three years ago, and that if they just stole the keys, they can get access to all of the mail.”
Criminals have also assaulted mail carriers to steal mail directly from them, including checks.
“When I first started in the ‘90s, the stolen checks that we did were deceased payee or not deceased payee cases—they were cases in which Treasury [Department] checks were stolen out of the mail and then forged,” he says. “Then in the early 2000s, it was bad actors making counterfeit checks on Versacheck. Now they’re just, quite frankly, stealing them, washing them, changing payees, things like that.”
Fraudulently altered checks can cause significant losses to financial institutions and disrupt bank operations.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) even flagged check fraud as a rising risk for banks in its 2024 Risk Report.
“Fraudulently altered checks can cause significant losses to financial institutions and disrupt bank operations,” according to the report. “Because of a nationwide surge in check fraud schemes targeting the U.S. mail, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an alert to financial institutions to be vigilant in identifying and reporting such activity.”
The FBI and U.S. Postal Investigative Service also issued a warning on 27 January 2025 that check fraud is rising—nearly doubling from 2021 to 2023.
“Fraudsters take advantage of regulations requiring financial institutions to make check funds available within specified timeframes, which is often too short a window for the consumer or financial institutions to identify and stop the fraud,” the warning said. “As a result, the compromised checks clear, and the funds are withdrawn by the criminal participants before the fraud is detected.”
4. Impersonation Fraud
It was a story that grabbed headlines for weeks—a woman was contacted by someone she believed to be an FBI agent. She agreed to help him with an investigation and ultimately sent her contact roughly $600,000, despite counseling not to by trusted individuals and her financial institution, before realizing that the individual was actually a scammer.
The Washington Post released a series on the scam about the seemingly novel case of fraud. But the FTC noted in a recent report on its top management and performance challenges that it received nearly 360,000 reports about imposter scams in the first six months of 2024—more than double the second-most frequent fraud type reported (online shopping and negative review fraud).
“Imposter scams were also the most-reported fraud type in 2023, resulting in reported losses of $2.7 billion,” the FTC said. “In our fiscal year 2023 report, we noted that perpetrators of these scams conduct their schemes by masking their identities and locations, using voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), social media, robocalls, text messages, and computer popups—often from overseas locations.”
Consumers who contacted the FTC about scams reported losses of $10.3 billion in 2023.
The FTC also tracked that fraudsters impersonating government representatives were increasingly using text messages and emails, instead of phone calls, to reach victims. They were also more likely to be paid via bank transfer or cryptocurrency than any other payment method.
Independently, the FBI tracked a reported 14,190 complaints about it in 2023 with associated losses of $394 million—an increase of 63 percent from 2022.
In April 2023, for instance, the FBI issued a public service warning about criminal actors posing as Chinese law enforcement officials or prosecutors to conduct fraud schemes targeting the U.S. based Chinese community.
“Criminals tell victims they are suspects in financial crimes and threaten them with arrest or violence if they do not pay the criminals,” the FBI said. “Criminals exploit widely publicized efforts by the People’s Republic of China government to harass and facilitate repatriation of individuals living in the United States to build plausibility for their fraud.”
Joel Grannum, vice chair of the ASIS International Banking and Finance Community based in Ontario, Canada, says this same tactic has been used to target the Canada-based Chinese community.
The victim “sent the money to who they thought was the Chinese government because they’d recently immigrated here to Canada and they were contacted by a number that seemed legitimate, and told that they owed money back in China,” Grannum explains. “If they didn’t deliver it, they were going to be detained and brought back to China. They were in the midst of buying a home here and they were really, obviously, scared. That’s what these fraudsters do. They exploit that panic.”
Fraudsters are also impersonating customer and tech support providers, especially targeting people who are older than 60 by phone—claiming that the victim’s computer has been compromised and that it needs to be repaired.
Grannum, a risk management and loss prevention expert, and adds that credit unions have been seeing many instances of members being affected by tech support scams. Fraudsters will call their targets and tell them their computer needs to be repaired.
Using that initial contact over the phone, the fraudster will then work with the victim on taking over their computer “or having them download remote desktop applications onto their computer so that they could get control of their computer,” Grannum says. “That was one of the schemes that caused a lot of damage last year.”
Megan Gates is editor-in-chief of Security Technology. Connect with her at [email protected] or on LinkedIn.
