Use the channel that matches the harm: call 911 or local police for an immediate threat; submit online fraud or cybercrime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov; report consumer scams and impersonators to the Federal Trade Commission at ReportFraud.ftc.gov; and have a business route incidents through its security team and CISA’s incident-reporting system. Preserve original evidence before deleting, resetting or blocking anything, and contact your bank, card issuer, payment app or crypto exchange immediately if money or credentials were exposed.
This guide is U.S.-focused. Police procedures, breach-notification duties, privacy remedies, emergency numbers and platform rules differ in other countries, so verify local requirements if you are outside the United States.
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Choose the right reporting channel
No single agency handles every AI-generated image, fraudulent payment, account takeover or network intrusion. Reporting works best when you send the incident to the organization whose role fits the harm, while also taking immediate containment steps.
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| What happened | Primary report | Who should use it | What the channel does | Urgency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Someone is in immediate physical danger, a crime is in progress or a threat requires urgent police response | 911 or local police | Individuals and organizations | Emergency response and local law-enforcement action | Now |
| AI-enabled fraud, online scam, account compromise, business-email compromise or other cyber-enabled crime | FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), www.ic3.gov | Individuals, businesses and institutions | Federal crime intake, investigative leads and threat intelligence | As soon as possible |
| Consumer scam, impersonator, deceptive seller or unfair business practice | Federal Trade Commission, ReportFraud.ftc.gov | Consumers and businesses reporting consumer harm | Consumer-protection cases, trend analysis and warnings | Promptly, after securing accounts and funds |
| Business intrusion, phishing campaign, exploited vulnerability or operational cyber incident | Your organization’s IT/security team, incident-response plan and CISA’s Incident Reporting System | Organizations and their designated responders | Technical coordination, federal situational awareness and incident support | Immediately under the organization’s plan |
| Deepfake harassment, sextortion or explicit synthetic media | IC3 and an FBI field office; add NCMEC’s CyberTipline when a child is involved | Victims, parents, guardians and organizations | Crime reporting and exploitation referrals | Urgent; call police for immediate danger |
| Fraudulent or abusive post, profile, message or account | The platform’s report function, alongside the appropriate agency above | Anyone targeted or exposed to the content | Content moderation under the platform’s rules | As soon as practical |
Platform reporting can remove content or restrict an account, but it is not a substitute for IC3, the FTC, CISA or police reporting. None of these channels guarantees a refund, takedown, arrest or individual investigation.
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What to do in the first hour
1. Get out of immediate danger
If a person is at risk, a perpetrator is nearby, a threat is unfolding or you need emergency medical or police assistance, call 911 in the United States (or your local emergency number). The IC3 website is for online complaint intake, not emergency dispatch.
2. Stop the attacker’s access without destroying evidence
- Stop replying to the suspected scammer. Do not send more money, passwords, one-time codes, identity documents or remote-access approvals.
- If a computer or phone is under an attacker’s remote control, disconnect it from the network when safe. Avoid wiping or reinstalling it until you have saved the evidence needed for a report.
- From a device you trust, change passwords that may have been exposed. Start with email, banking, payment services, password managers and administrator accounts.
- Turn on multifactor authentication (MFA), revoke unfamiliar sessions and tokens, and review forwarding rules, recovery addresses and newly added devices.
3. Try to stop a payment
Call the bank, card issuer, payment app or cryptocurrency exchange using a number from its official app, card or website. Ask about a recall, freeze, chargeback or fraud procedure and give the exact payment time, amount and recipient. Speed matters: the FBI says rapid reporting can support recovery of lost funds, but recovery is not assured.
4. Preserve the original material
Save the original email, message or file before blocking the sender or deleting anything. Keep a working copy for analysis and leave the original unchanged. Record the date and time of every event, including the time zone. If a deepfake is posted online, capture the full profile and post URLs, account name, display name and surrounding context, then download the file when the platform allows it.
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How to report an AI scam or online fraud to the FBI
Use IC3 for cyber-enabled crime
The FBI advises victims of cyber-enabled crime or fraud to file with IC3 as soon as possible at www.ic3.gov. This includes an AI-generated voice or video used to impersonate a family member, executive or public official; an investment or romance scam conducted online; a business-email compromise; an account takeover; a ransomware demand; and a fraudulent cryptocurrency transfer.
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Submit one detailed complaint even if you have already notified your bank or platform. If several people in an organization were affected, coordinate internally so the report identifies the full scope rather than conflicting individual timelines.
Information IC3 asks you to provide
- Your identity and reliable contact information.
- The suspect’s names, aliases, phone numbers, email addresses, usernames, profile links and other identifiers.
- How the contact began, which service was used, what was said and how the interaction progressed.
- Every payment date, amount, currency and method, including bank or card details, payment-app identifiers, cryptocurrency exchange information and receiving wallet addresses.
- Account numbers, transaction IDs, wire instructions, invoices, gift-card numbers or other transaction references.
- A chronological narrative explaining what you believed at each stage, when you realized it was fraudulent and what you did afterward.
- Copies or descriptions of relevant emails, messages, files, screenshots, call records and system or access logs.
Use the narrative to distinguish verified facts from assumptions. For example, state that a voice call came from a number displayed as your manager’s, then explain how you independently confirmed that the caller was not your manager; do not claim to know who controlled the number unless you have evidence.
Why early reporting matters
IC3 complaints combine individual reports into investigative and intelligence leads. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report recorded 22,364 complaints containing AI-related information and $893,346,472 in adjusted losses. In that same 2025 scope, the report described AI-linked business-email-compromise losses above $30 million, confidence or romance losses above $19 million, and distress-scam losses above $5 million. Those are reported, adjusted figures for the report’s defined categories and year, not a prediction of your case’s outcome.
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IC3 warns that it does not contact victims to request money and does not use non-law-enforcement recovery agents. Anyone promising to retrieve your funds for an upfront fee, asking for your wallet seed phrase or requesting remote access while claiming to represent IC3 is another scam. Do not send that person evidence or payment; preserve the messages and report the new fraud.
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When the FTC is the better destination
Report consumer fraud and impersonation
Use ReportFraud.ftc.gov for a fake online store, deceptive subscription, government or company impersonator, misleading AI-generated advertisement, tech-support scam, unwanted payment demand or other consumer scam. Include the business or person’s identifying information, contact method, dates, money lost and copies of the communications.
FTC attorney Rosario Mendez explains the purpose of reporting: “Every time you file a report with the Federal Trade Commission you are helping us build cases, stop scammers, and also alert others about the current trends.” An FTC report contributes to consumer-protection enforcement and trend data; it does not itself open a guaranteed individual investigation or produce a refund.
Use both FTC and IC3 when the incident is both
A scam that uses online communications and causes a financial loss fits IC3’s cybercrime intake as well as the FTC’s consumer-fraud reporting. File with both when practical, keeping the facts and transaction amounts consistent. The two reports serve different functions: IC3 supplies federal cybercrime intelligence, while the FTC aggregates consumer complaints for enforcement and warnings.
Reporting a business cyberattack, phishing campaign or vulnerability
Activate the internal response plan
- Notify the organization’s IT or security team through the approved emergency channel, not an email account that may be compromised.
- Follow the incident-response plan for isolation, evidence preservation, executive notification, legal review and communications.
- Identify affected systems, accounts, data types, timestamps, indicators of compromise and the actions already taken.
- Ask the security lead or designated incident coordinator to submit the incident to CISA’s Incident Reporting System or its current 24/7 contact channel.
- Submit a parallel IC3 complaint for business-email compromise, fraudulent transfers or other cyber-enabled crime.
CISA materials also direct organizations to IC3 for business-email compromise and to the Anti-Phishing Working Group for phishing emails. Follow your sector’s reporting obligations and counsel’s advice for breach notices; those duties vary by the data involved, the states or countries affected and the organization’s industry.
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Do not investigate by changing the scene
Security staff should collect logs, memory or disk images and email headers according to the organization’s forensic procedure. Avoid repeatedly logging into a compromised account, opening suspicious attachments or running cleanup tools that overwrite timestamps before evidence has been preserved.
Reporting a deepfake, sextortion or synthetic explicit media
Preserve the abuse as evidence
Save the original image, video, audio or message, the page and profile URLs, account identifiers, phone numbers, email addresses, timestamps and any demand for money or additional images. Keep a copy in a secure location and do not forward explicit material unnecessarily. If the platform provides a download or report reference number, save that as well.
Send the report to the right authorities
Report deepfake harassment, sextortion or explicit synthetic media to IC3 and an FBI field office. If a child is involved, also report through NCMEC’s CyberTipline. Call police immediately if there is a physical threat, stalking, an imminent meeting with the perpetrator or any other emergency.
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Use platform tools in parallel
Report the account and each violating post under the platform’s rules, request removal where the service offers that option and record the resulting case number. A platform decision can change visibility, but it does not preserve evidence for investigators or replace a criminal complaint.
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Core collection checklist
- Original emails with full headers when possible, plus exported message files rather than screenshots alone.
- Chat messages, call logs, voicemails and the phone numbers or caller-ID details shown.
- Complete URLs, profile links, usernames, platform names and post or message IDs.
- Unedited images, videos, audio, documents and downloaded files, with a working copy for viewing.
- Bank, card, payment-app, wire and exchange records; transaction IDs; receiving institutions; wallet addresses; and screenshots of confirmation pages.
- System, authentication, firewall, endpoint and access logs relevant to an intrusion.
- A timeline listing the date, local time, time zone, event, source of the information and action taken.
Keep a simple chain of custody
Write down when you obtained each item, from which device or account, and where you stored it. Hashes or forensic images may be appropriate for an organization’s investigation, but a household victim can still improve reliability by retaining the untouched original, creating a clearly labeled copy and avoiding edits, filters or re-encoding.
Protect sensitive evidence
Share only through the official reporting portal or a verified law-enforcement contact. Redact unrelated account numbers when the form does not require them, but do not crop away identifiers, timestamps or URLs that establish what happened. Never upload intimate images, identity documents or credentials to an unofficial “recovery” service.
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After filing: recovery and account protection
Secure identity information
If you gave a scammer your Social Security number or other personal information, use the Federal Trade Commission’s recovery guidance at IdentityTheft.gov. Follow its current steps for documenting identity theft, contacting affected companies and placing the appropriate alerts or freezes.
Review every affected account
- Check bank, card, brokerage, payment-app and exchange activity for unauthorized transactions.
- Replace reused passwords and remove unknown recovery addresses, forwarding rules, API keys, app authorizations and trusted devices.
- Tell contacts or coworkers if an account may have sent convincing AI-generated messages in your name.
- Ask your mobile provider about an unexpected SIM change or port-out and add the provider’s account-PIN protections.
- If remote-access software was installed, preserve evidence first, then run current security scans and consider professional device cleaning or reinstallation.
Keep records after the report
Save IC3, FTC, police, bank, platform and CISA confirmation numbers. Add new payments, threats, accounts or URLs to a dated supplement rather than deleting the original report. If a financial institution requests a written statement or affidavit, use the institution’s official channel and keep a copy.
Common mistakes that weaken a report
- Waiting for absolute proof that a video is a deepfake. Report the conduct and explain what makes the media suspicious; investigators can assess authenticity.
- Deleting the first message. Blocking a sender is useful only after the original message, URL and account details are preserved.
- Reporting only to the platform. Moderation may address visibility, while agencies need the financial, identity and technical facts.
- Sending more money to “unlock” a refund. A second payment rarely recovers the first and can expose more credentials.
- Using a search-result phone number. Reach banks, exchanges and agencies through their official websites, apps or statements.
- Mixing guesses with facts. Label an account as “suspected” and give the observable evidence instead of naming an unverified individual.
- Wiping a compromised device immediately. Disconnect it when necessary, but preserve logs and files before cleanup.
- Assuming a report guarantees action. Intake supports investigations, intelligence and trend analysis; outcomes depend on the facts, jurisdiction and available evidence.
A practical decision path
- Is anyone in immediate danger? Call 911 or local police first.
- Did the event involve online fraud, a cyber intrusion, an AI impersonation or a payment? Preserve evidence and file with IC3.
- Is the main harm a consumer scam or deceptive business practice? File at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, adding IC3 when the conduct is cyber-enabled or money was lost.
- Is an organization’s system, data or service affected? Activate the internal security plan and notify CISA through its current reporting channel; use IC3 for the criminal component.
- Is the material a deepfake used for harassment, sextortion or sexual exploitation? Preserve it, report to IC3 and an FBI field office, add NCMEC’s CyberTipline for a child, and use the platform’s abuse process.
- Were money, passwords or identity details exposed? Contact the financial provider immediately, change credentials from a clean device, enable MFA and use IdentityTheft.gov for identity-theft recovery.
Report promptly, preserve originals and give each agency a precise timeline. Those three actions make it easier for investigators, consumer-protection officials, security teams and financial institutions to connect your incident to related activity and act within their authority.
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