FBI’s IC3 Finds Almost $8.5 Billion Lost to Business Email Compromise in Last Three Years
It’s a figure even the FBI called “staggering”: The losses reported to its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2024 totaled $16.6 billion, the bulk of which came from fraud. And among those frauds, business email compromise (BEC) remained a pervasive threat.
In the IC3 2024 Annual Report, released April 23, officials found that BEC was the 7th most reported crime to IC3 last year, with 21,442 complaints. However, BEC was second on the dollar list, with close to $2.8 billion in losses.
While both numbers remained fairly consistent in recent years—there were just 47 fewer BEC reports last year compared to 2023—the financial damage is stark, with nearly $8.5 billion in BEC losses reported to IC3 between 2022 and 2024.
IC3’s report came barely a week after the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) released its 2025 Fraud and Control Survey Report, which found that 63% of organizations experienced BEC last year. AFP and said “BEC remains a significant threat.”
Changes to the Nacha Rules are taking effect in 2026, aimed at reducing the incidence of successful fraud attempts through tactics such as BEC, and improving the recovery of funds after frauds have occurred.
Overall, IC3 received nearly 860,000 complaints last year. Phishing/spoofing was the most reported type of crime with 193,407. Ransomware came in at No. 20, with 3,156 complaints, but B. Chad Yarbrough, the FBI’s Operations Director for Criminal and Cyber, called it “the most pervasive threat to critical infrastructure.”
The IC3 report also noted that cyber-enabled fraud—where criminals use the internet or other technology to commit fraud—was responsible for almost 83% of all losses reported to IC3 last year, $13.7 billion. That included an increasingly popular scam: demanding money for supposedly unpaid tolls, which had more than 59,000 complaints.
“During its infancy, IC3 received roughly 2,000 complaints every month. For the past five years, IC3 has averaged more than 2,000 complaints every day,” Yarbrough wrote in his introduction to the report.
