An FBI warning has flagged an escalation in the long-running scheme to impersonate the Bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), with scammers now deploying deepfake videos of senior FBI officials and spoofed IC3 websites to defraud previous fraud victims a second time.
A public service announcement issued on July 20 by the IC3 follows an April 2025 warning about the same core scheme.
Nick Tausek, lead security automation architect at security automation vendor Swimlane, said the scheme had become materially more polished since that earlier warning. What used to be text-only recovery pitches, he warned, now resembled "an official government process from start to finish."
The Bureau confirmed scammers have combined social media impersonation, generative AI video and lookalike complaint portals into a coordinated campaign.
In one variant, a fraud victim who mentioned filing an IC3 complaint was contacted on Facebook Messenger by someone posing as an FBI agent, who supplied a link to update the report. The link either carried malicious code or collected further financial details.
Read more on IC3 impersonation: FBI Says Threat Actors Are Spoofing its IC3 Site
Deepfake Videos of Senior FBI Leadership
The latest escalation of the campaign saw a social media platform host AI-generated videos of a senior FBI leader urging users to file complaints on a spoofed IC3 site.
The fake portal mimicked the real ic3.gov but stripped the complaint workflow down to a single form requesting name, phone number, email, scam type and estimated financial loss. After submission, the site issued a reference number and promised follow-up, at which point the operators harvested further data.
Pete Luban, field CISO at breach-and-attack simulation firm AttackIQ, said messages appearing to come from the FBI carried disproportionate weight in a phishing context. Employees who believed they were speaking with law enforcement, he said, might "share credentials, financial records, or internal details without following normal verification procedures."
The pattern echoed deepfake trading-platform scams that Group-IB documented in May 2025, which used AI-generated videos of public figures to funnel victims into fraudulent sites.
The FBI noted scammers are also using AI video in live calls to impersonate executives or officials, and urged users to watch for distorted hands, unrealistic accessories, inaccurate shadows and voice-call lag.
IC3 said it does not maintain a social media presence, does not communicate through Facebook, Telegram, phone or public forums and never requests payment to recover lost funds.
The Bureau urged users to type ic3.gov directly into the address bar, avoid sponsored search results and verify that any IC3 URL ends in a .gov domain.