Scammers posing as police officers, federal agents and immigration officials took more than $140 million from Americans who were told they faced arrest, prosecution or deportation unless they paid immediately, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center said in a September 17 alert. Those 1,809 extradition-and-passport-threat complaints made up the single costliest script inside a broader wave of government-impersonation fraud the bureau has tracked since January 2025. Callers spoofed real law-enforcement phone numbers and employee names, and in a growing share of cases, IC3 said, generated artificial-intelligence video or voice to pose as a federal agent in real time.
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A $140 million line inside one FBI alert
The alert, titled “Scammers Impersonating Law Enforcement and Government Officials in Fraud Schemes”, broke the extradition-threat script out as its own category for the first time, tallying 1,809 complaints and losses topping $140 million. Victims described callers who claimed a warrant had already been issued for their arrest or that immigration officials were prepared to deport them within hours, then offered to make the problem disappear for an upfront payment. Those cases sat inside a wider account IC3 kept for context: nearly 61,000 government-impersonation complaints and losses exceeding $1.6 billion recorded from January 2025 through July 2026, a span covering several distinct scripts beyond the extradition threat alone. Divided across the 1,809 extradition-threat complaints, the $140 million works out to roughly $77,000 per complaint, a sum well beyond what a single wire transfer or gift-card purchase typically moves and a sign that many victims kept paying across repeated contacts before recognizing the script.
Jury duty and medical-license threats ran the same play
Two other borrowed-authority scripts in the same alert relied on the identical formula of manufactured legal jeopardy. Jury-duty impersonators, who tell targets they missed a summons and now face contempt charges, generated 6,833 complaints and nearly $36 million in losses. A separate script in which callers claimed a victim’s medical or professional license was under suspension produced 3,322 complaints and more than $37 million lost, while a fourth category built around ordinary license-renewal notices added 496 complaints and just over $348,000. Combined, the four scripts IC3 broke out by name accounted for roughly $213 million of the alert’s $1.6 billion total, each one built on the same pressure: a caller asserting that an official consequence is already in motion and only immediate payment can stop it.
How the badge-and-deportation script is staged
IC3 said the callers behind the extradition-threat script spoofed authentic phone numbers, email addresses, employee names and credentials to make contact appear official, then pressed victims to pay through prepaid cards, couriers, bank wires, cryptocurrency or cash inserted into cryptocurrency kiosks. Those payment channels share one trait investigators flagged repeatedly: once the money moves, it is difficult or impossible for a bank to claw back, which is why the bureau’s own advice centers on stopping a payment before it happens rather than recovering one afterward.
Why an old scam looks new this year
A separate July 20 alert, “FBI Warns of Scammers Impersonating the IC3”, described criminals going a step further and impersonating the bureau itself, building fake FBI social-media profiles and deepfake videos of senior officials to push victims toward a cloned version of the ic3.gov website that collects payment and personal information through a simplified complaint form. The bureau noted in that alert that IC3 “does not maintain a social media presence” and “will never directly communicate with individuals via phone, email, social media, phone apps, online chat, or public forums,” a distinction scammers count on victims not knowing. Read together, the two alerts describe the same shift: technology that once required real production resources to fake a federal official convincingly is now cheap enough to run at scale against ordinary callers.
Older savers carry a rising share of the losses
Government-impersonation fraud has been climbing inside a broader fraud tally that already skews toward retirement-age households. AARP, citing a joint FBI and Federal Trade Commission accounting released earlier this year, reported that adults 60 and older lost $7.7 billion to fraud in 2025, an increase of about 60 percent from 2024, and named government and business impersonation among the fastest-growing categories behind that total. That earlier accounting covers a different period than the September 17 alert and a broader set of scams than the extradition-threat script alone, but it shows the same age group absorbing an outsized share of exactly the kind of manufactured-authority call the FBI’s newest numbers describe. The September 17 alert does not break victims out by age, though IC3 routes its broader elder-fraud reporting toward a dedicated hotline, a sign of where the bureau expects households hit by an authority-based script like this one to sit.
What the FBI and FTC say to do in the first minutes
The Federal Trade Commission’s guidance on government-impersonation calls is blunt: hang up, because no legitimate agency demands payment by phone, and never send money by wire, gift card, cryptocurrency or payment app to someone who called first. Anyone unsure whether a call is real is told to call the agency back at a number looked up independently, never one the caller provides, and to file a report at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. IC3’s own elder-fraud page lays out a three-step response for a household that has already paid: contact the bank immediately to request a wire recall or a hold-harmless letter, alert the three major credit bureaus, and file a complaint at ic3.gov or IdentityTheft.gov. The bureau’s Elder Fraud Hotline, staffed weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern, said it can walk callers through that filing directly.
The order of calls that follows a fake extradition threat
The FBI’s September 17 alert tied significant losses to 1,809 extradition-and-passport-threat complaints, cases built entirely on a caller’s claim that arrest or deportation was already underway. Once a household has paid, or is close to it, the practical problem shifts from spotting the scam to moving fast enough to limit what it costs.
The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit lays out the first-hour recovery plan for exactly that sequence, alongside a fraud evidence and report log for capturing the caller’s number, the payment method and the account it moved through before the details fade.
Follow the first-hour recovery plan in The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit.
This article was produced with AI assistance and checked against the primary sources linked above.
Warren Cohen is a finance writer based in Phoenix, Arizona, covering personal finance topics including credit, banking, and beginner investing. He earned his degree in business administration from Arizona State University and began his career working in consumer finance, where he gained direct experience with lending and credit systems. He now writes for personal finance websites and fintech platforms, focusing on clear, practical content that helps readers make informed financial decisions.
