The FBI has urged cybercrime victims to exercise caution when visiting its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) website, claiming that threat actors have created various spoofed versions.
In a public service announcement (PSA) on Friday, the FBI warned of the dangers of visiting a scam or phishing site designed to mimic the IC3 portal for cybercrime reporting.
“A spoofed website is designed to impersonate a legitimate website and may be used for illegal conduct, such as personal information theft and to facilitate monetary scams,” it said.
“Threat actors create spoofed websites often by slightly altering characteristics of legitimate website domains, with the purpose of gathering personally identifiable information (PII) entered by a user into the site, including name, home address, phone number, email address and banking information.”
They could also impersonate FBI IC3 staff in an attempt to revictimize individuals, by claiming to be able to recover lost funds for a fee, for example.
In fact, the IC3 homepage currently features an alert from back in April, when the FBI was forced to warn of impersonation scammers. It said it received more than 100 reports of such scams between December 2023 and February 2025.
Read more on the FBI’s IC3 initiative: Crypto Scams Reach New Heights, FBI Reports $5.6bn in Losses.
FBI Issues Advice for Cybercrime Victims
To mitigate the risk of visiting a spoofed site, the FBI urged internet users to:
- Always type www.ic3.gov directly into the address bar rather than use a search engine
- If using a search engine, avoid any sponsored results
- Avoid clicking on any link whose URL differs from the legitimate IC3 site
- Never click on links that may include suspicious artifacts or graphics, such as low-quality graphics used to imitate legitimate websites
- Report any incidents of FBI impersonation scams to www.ic3.gov
- Never pay anyone posing as an FBI officer or IC3 staff member
- Don’t visit any social pages branded with IC3, as the center does not have a social media presence
Anyone reporting FBI impersonation attempts was urged to include as much information as possible about their identity, communication methods, financial transaction info (if relevant) and a detailed description of the interaction.