Job Scam Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-authors: David Park & Marcus Chen | Last updated: October 15, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
Americans reported losing $362,934,762 to employment fraud in 2025, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center — 5.17 times the $70.2 million logged in 2023. Axis Intelligence Research finds no other IC3 crime type above $250 million grew losses that fast over the same two years, and 79.4% of those losses carried a cryptocurrency nexus.
Quick Answer: How Big Is the Job Scam Problem in 2026?
Job scams cost reported victims $362.9 million in 2025 across 24,688 FBI complaints, an average of $14,700.86 per complaint. The FTC’s narrower job-and-employment-agency category hit $501 million in 2024, up from $90 million in 2020. Axis Intelligence Research finds crypto-paid job scams cost 5.35 times more per complaint than non-crypto ones.
Key Findings
- According to Axis Intelligence Research, US employment-fraud losses reported to the FBI rose 5.17x between 2023 and 2025, the fastest loss growth of any IC3 crime type with $250 million or more in 2025 losses.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds 79.4% of 2025 employment-fraud losses ($288.2 million) involved cryptocurrency, from just 41.9% of complaints.
- A crypto-linked job scam complaint averaged $27,877.71 in 2025 versus $5,208.01 without crypto — a 5.35x “crypto rail premium,” per Axis Intelligence Research.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds job seekers aged 50 and over filed 30.4% of age-tagged employment complaints in 2025 but absorbed 57.1% of age-tagged losses.
- Employment-fraud losses among Americans 60+ rose 11.5x in two years, from $6.8 million in 2023 to $78.7 million in 2025, according to FBI IC3 data analyzed by Axis Intelligence Research.
How Much Money Do Job Scams Cost Victims Each Year?
The FBI’s IC3 has tracked “Employment” as its own crime type for years. Its definition matters: a victim who believes they are legitimately employed and either loses money or launders money and goods while doing the “job.” That covers fake remote jobs, task scams, reshipping schemes and check-cashing “payroll” frauds — but not ghost listings that waste time without taking money.
Employment fraud reported to the FBI, 2023–2025
| Year | Complaints | Reported losses | Loss per complaint (Axis calc.) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 15,443 | $70,234,079 | $4,547.96 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 2024 | 20,044 | $264,223,271 | $13,182.16 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
| 2025 | 24,688 | $362,934,762 | $14,700.86 | FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report |
Complaints rose 59.9% over two years. Losses rose 5.17x. That gap is the story: the number of people reaching the FBI grew at a steady clip, but the amount taken from each one more than tripled.
Between 2024 and 2025 the curve flattened somewhat — losses up 37.4%, complaints up 23.2% — yet employment still ranked tenth among all IC3 crime types by both complaint count and dollar loss. It sits at 2.45% of all IC3 complaints and 1.74% of the $20.877 billion total.
What the FTC counts differently
The FTC’s Consumer Sentinel data runs on a separate pipeline with its own categories. Its subcategory for job scams and employment agencies recorded:
| Year | Reported losses | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $90M | FTC Data Spotlight, Dec. 2024 |
| 2021 | $131M | FTC Data Spotlight, Dec. 2024 |
| 2022 | $179M | FTC Data Spotlight, Dec. 2024 |
| 2023 | $286M | FTC Data Spotlight, Dec. 2024 |
| 2024 | $501M | FTC press release, March 10, 2025 |
That is a 5.57x increase in four years (Axis calc.: 501 ÷ 90). The broader “Business and Job Opportunities” category reached $751 million in 2024 across 126,217 reports, with 36% of reporters saying they lost money.
Why Axis does not add the FBI and FTC figures together. The FTC’s Sentinel database ingests IC3 complaints among its data contributors, so summing the two double-counts victims. The two agencies also define the category differently. We report them side by side and treat them as two independent instruments pointing the same way.
David Park: The number that keeps people up at night is the per-victim loss, not the headline total. In 2023 an employment-fraud complaint to the FBI averaged about $4,500 — painful, survivable. By 2025 it was $14,700. For someone already between paychecks, that is often a credit card balance they will carry into the next job. The good news buried in the same data: complaint growth slowed to 23% last year. More people are recognizing the pattern before the second deposit.
Are Job Scams Growing Faster Than Other Scams?
Yes — by a wide margin on losses. Axis Intelligence Research ranked IC3 crime types with more than $250 million in 2025 losses by how much those losses multiplied between 2023 and 2025.
Axis loss-acceleration ranking, IC3 crime types, 2023→2025
| Rank | Crime type | 2023 losses | 2025 losses | Loss multiple (Axis calc.) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Employment | $70.2M | $362.9M | 5.17x |
| 2 | Tech/customer support | $924.5M | $2,134.7M | 2.31x |
| 3 | Government impersonation | $394.1M | $797.9M | 2.02x |
| 4 | Real estate | $145.2M | $275.1M | 1.89x |
| 5 | Investment | $4,570.3M | $8,648.6M | 1.89x |
| 6 | Confidence/romance | $652.5M | $929.3M | 1.42x |
| 7 | Business email compromise | $2,946.8M | $3,046.6M | 1.03x |
Source: FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report, three-year complaint loss comparison. Multiples: Axis Intelligence Research.
Investment fraud is still 24 times larger in dollars. But no category accelerated like employment fraud — and the reason, as the next section shows, is that job scams have quietly turned into a crypto product.
How Do Job Scammers Get Paid? The Crypto Rail Premium
This is the original finding of this report, and the one we’d ask journalists to look at first.
The IC3 report breaks out a cryptocurrency descriptor by crime type. For employment fraud in 2025: 10,338 complaints and $288,199,807 in losses.
| Segment | Complaints | Losses | Loss per complaint | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Crypto nexus | 10,338 | $288,199,807 | $27,877.71 | FBI IC3; Axis calc. |
| No crypto nexus | 14,350 | $74,734,955 | $5,208.01 | FBI IC3; Axis calc. |
| All employment | 24,688 | $362,934,762 | $14,700.86 | FBI IC3; Axis calc. |
Formula: Crypto rail premium = (288,199,807 ÷ 10,338) ÷ ((362,934,762 − 288,199,807) ÷ (24,688 − 10,338)) = 5.35x.
The FTC saw this coming. Its December 2024 data spotlight on gamified job scams found crypto losses to job scams reached about $41 million in the first half of 2024 alone, against about $21 million in all of 2023, and that crypto had become the costliest payment method for job scams.
David Park: If a “recruiter” asks you to buy crypto, deposit to unlock earnings, or “recharge” an account, you are no longer in a hiring process. No payroll system on earth works that way. The 5.35x figure explains why scammers push so hard for crypto: it is the rail where the money can’t come back.
What Are Task Scams, and How Common Are They Now?
Task scams — the FTC also calls them gamified job scams — pay you to “like” videos, rate products or “optimize” apps in sets of tasks, show a growing balance, then require a deposit to withdraw it.
| Indicator | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Estimated task-scam reports to FTC | ~5,000 | Full year 2023 | FTC Data Spotlight |
| Estimated task-scam reports to FTC | ~20,000 | First half 2024 | FTC Data Spotlight |
| Task scams as share of FTC job-scam reports | 5.6% → 38.8% | 2023 → H1 2024 | FTC Data Spotlight (sample of 500 reports/yr) |
| Task scams reported to BBB Scam Tracker | ~680 | 2025 | BBB |
| Median task-scam loss, BBB Scam Tracker | $2,300 | 2025 | BBB |
The FTC estimate comes from hand-coding a random sample of 500 job-scam reports per year — a real method, but an estimate, and the FTC labels it as such.
How do task scams reach people?
The BBB’s 2026 employment-scam study found that half of the more than 23,000 employment-scam reports to Scam Tracker in 2025 named text messages as the delivery channel, and that Scam Tracker reports about employment scams doubled versus 2024. The usual sequence: unsolicited text → move to WhatsApp or Telegram → instant “hire” → gamified dashboard → small early payout → deposit demand.
Who Loses the Most to Fake Job Offers? The Recruitment Fraud Exposure Index
The conventional picture is that job scams hit young, first-time job seekers. On volume, that’s right. On damage, it is wrong — and the age data shows it clearly.
Employment fraud by age group, 2025
| Age group | Complaints | Losses | Loss per complaint (Axis) | Share of complaints* | Share of losses* | Loss Concentration Ratio (Axis) | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 20 | 835 | $1,489,854 | $1,784.26 | 3.89% | 0.47% | 0.12 | FBI IC3 |
| 20–29 | 4,555 | $33,049,422 | $7,255.64 | 21.22% | 10.51% | 0.50 | FBI IC3 |
| 30–39 | 5,025 | $42,865,213 | $8,530.39 | 23.41% | 13.63% | 0.58 | FBI IC3 |
| 40–49 | 4,524 | $57,604,303 | $12,733.05 | 21.08% | 18.31% | 0.87 | FBI IC3 |
| 50–59 | 3,671 | $100,853,442 | $27,473.02 | 17.10% | 32.06% | 1.87 | FBI IC3 |
| 60+ | 2,853 | $78,712,899 | $27,589.52 | 13.29% | 25.02% | 1.88 | FBI IC3 (Elder Fraud section) |
*Shares are of the 21,463 age-tagged complaints and $314,575,133 in age-tagged losses. IC3 complainants may decline to give an age, so these do not sum to the national total.
The Recruitment Fraud Exposure Index (RFEI)
RFEI — Recruitment Fraud Exposure Index is an Axis Intelligence Research metric that scores each age group 0–100 on how exposed it is to employment fraud, blending how often the group is hit with how hard.
Formula: RFEI = 100 × [0.4 × (group complaint share ÷ highest group complaint share) + 0.6 × (group loss per complaint ÷ highest group loss per complaint)]
Weights: 40% frequency, 60% severity — severity weighs more because a single loss can wipe out months of income. Inputs: FBI IC3 2025 age tables. Reading date: losses reported through December 31, 2025. This is the baseline reading.
| Age group | RFEI (baseline reading, 2025 data) |
|---|---|
| 50–59 | 89.0 |
| 60+ | 82.7 |
| 40–49 | 63.7 |
| 30–39 | 58.6 |
| 20–29 | 52.0 |
| Under 20 | 10.5 |
Reading the RFEI: job seekers in their 50s are the most exposed group in America — frequent enough targets and the second-highest per-complaint loss. The Loss Concentration Ratio (share of losses ÷ share of complaints) tells the same story more bluntly: above 1.0 means a group loses more than its share. Only the 50–59 and 60+ groups clear it, at 1.87 and 1.88.
The 60+ trend is the steepest of all. Their employment-fraud losses went from $6,835,684 (2023) to $37,882,347 (2024) to $78,712,899 (2025) — 11.5x in two years — while complaints rose from 1,079 to 2,853.
David Park: Late-career job seekers are often searching after a layoff, with savings to protect and less familiarity with how remote hiring now works. The scam lands on exactly that combination: a “flexible remote role” plus a request to move money. If you’re over 50 and job hunting, the single rule worth taping to the monitor is this: an employer pays you; you never pay an employer.
The RFEI pairs with Axis’s Crypto Scam Harm Index and Deepfake Fraud Exposure Index: crypto drives the severity, and age decides who absorbs it.
Are AI and Deepfakes Driving Job Scams?
Less than the headlines suggest — on the money side.
The IC3 tagged 691 employment complaints as AI-related in 2025, with $12,550,185 in losses: 2.8% of employment complaints. The FBI’s own reading is that the AI-enabled employment cases — voice spoofing or deepfaked faces during video interviews — seem aimed at getting into company networks, not at taking the applicant’s money.
That is the other half of the job-scam problem: fake candidates. The IC3 report notes it identified dozens of victim companies of the North Korean IT-worker scheme through complaints. And Gartner’s July 2025 survey of 3,000 job candidates found 6% admitted to interview fraud; Gartner predicts one in four candidate profiles worldwide will be fake by 2028. Only half of candidates in a separate Gartner survey trusted that the jobs they applied for were legitimate.
Trust is breaking on both sides of the hiring table. For deeper AI-fraud data, see Axis’s AI scam statistics.
Job Scam Statistics by Country: US, Canada and Australia
| Country | Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | Employment-fraud losses (FBI) | $362.9M USD | 2025 | FBI IC3 |
| United States | Job & employment agency losses (FTC) | $501M USD | 2024 | FTC |
| Canada | Employment-fraud losses | CA$7.3M → CA$49M | 2022 → 2024 | Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre |
| Canada | Employment-fraud losses | CA$46.5M | Jan–Sep 2025 | Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre |
| Australia | Jobs & employment scam losses (Scamwatch) | A$13.7M → A$24.8M | 2024 → 2025 | ACCC / National Anti-Scam Centre |
| Australia | Jobs & employment scam reports | +102.4% | 2025 vs 2024 | ACCC / National Anti-Scam Centre |
Canada’s losses grew 6.71x from 2022 to 2024 (Axis calc.), and the CAFC’s December 2025 bulletin shows nine months of 2025 nearly matching all of 2024. Australia’s Targeting Scams 2025 report found online-contact job scams caused over A$19 million in losses, and job scams were the second-costliest scam for Australians aged 25–34 (A$5.9M) and 35–44 (A$6.3M). A taskforce there removed more than 29,000 scam social media accounts and 1,850 fake job ads.
Three countries, three reporting systems, one pattern: losses climbing far faster than reports. We deliberately do not convert or sum currencies — the systems measure different things.
How Many Job Scam Victims Never Report?
Most of them. A study cited by the FTC in its March 2026 Congressional testimony found only 4.8% of mass-market fraud victims complained to a BBB or a government agency. Every figure on this page is a floor, not a total. Axis does not publish a “true cost” multiplier for job scams because no study measures underreporting for this category specifically.
Job Scam Red Flags Backed by the Data
Each warning sign below maps to a pattern in the statistics above:
- Unsolicited text or WhatsApp job offer — half of BBB employment reports in 2025 arrived by text.
- Pay to unlock earnings, “recharge,” or “upgrade” — the core task-scam mechanic (FTC, BBB, CAFC).
- Any payment in cryptocurrency — 79.4% of FBI-reported job-scam losses.
- Liking, rating or “boosting” for pay — the FTC notes that paying for fake reviews and ratings is itself illegal.
- Checks to deposit and forward — the IC3 definition includes victims used to launder money.
Report fraud in the US at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and ic3.gov.
Methodology
Collection. Axis Intelligence Research fetched and read each source on October 15, 2026. US totals come from the FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report (published April 2026) and FTC releases. The FTC had not published a 2025 job-scam subcategory figure in its public releases at retrieval; the most recent full-year FTC job figure is 2024. International data come from the ACCC/NASC and CAFC.
Axis-calculated figures. Loss per complaint = losses ÷ complaints. Loss multiple = later-year losses ÷ earlier-year losses. Crypto rail premium = crypto loss per complaint ÷ non-crypto loss per complaint. Loss Concentration Ratio = age group’s share of age-tagged losses ÷ its share of age-tagged complaints. RFEI formula and weights appear in the index section above. Each calculation’s inputs are rows in the CSV.
Scope notes. IC3 and FTC figures are self-reported and not summed. IC3 age bands exclude complaints without an age. FTC task-scam counts are FTC estimates from sampled reports. Currencies are not converted.
About This Dataset
The CSV holds 157 rows covering employment-fraud complaints, losses, age, crypto and AI segments, FTC job-scam history, task scams, and Canada and Australia, each with source organization, document, URL, retrieval date and a method note for every Axis calculation. It is updated when the FBI, FTC, ACCC or CAFC releases new annual data. License: CC BY 4.0 — reuse freely with attribution.
Cite This Report
APA: Axis Intelligence Research. (2026). Job scam statistics 2026: Losses up 5.2x in two years, and 79% now move through crypto. https://axis-intelligence.com/job-scam-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research. “Job Scam Statistics 2026: Losses Up 5.2x in Two Years, and 79% Now Move Through Crypto.” Axis Intelligence, 15 Oct. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/job-scam-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research. “Job Scam Statistics 2026: Losses Up 5.2x in Two Years, and 79% Now Move Through Crypto.” Axis Intelligence, October 15, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/job-scam-statistics/.
Job Scam Questions, Answered With Data
Is a job that pays you to like YouTube videos or rate products real?
No. The FTC classifies these as task scams, and its sampled data show they grew from 5.6% to 38.8% of job-scam reports between 2023 and the first half of 2024. Paying people for fake ratings is illegal under the FTC’s fake-review rule.
How much does the average job scam victim lose?
It depends on the measure. The FBI’s 2025 employment-fraud complaints averaged $14,700.86 in losses (Axis calculation). The FTC’s 2024 median loss for business and job opportunity fraud was $2,250 — about 4.5 times the $497 median for all fraud.
Why do fake recruiters ask for cryptocurrency?
Because it is hard to reverse. In 2025, 79.4% of FBI-reported job-scam losses involved crypto, and crypto-linked complaints averaged $27,877.71 versus $5,208.01 without crypto, according to Axis Intelligence Research.
Which age group loses the most money to job scams?
Job seekers aged 50–59 lost $100.9 million in 2025, the most of any age band, and score highest on the Axis Recruitment Fraud Exposure Index (89.0). People in their 20s and 30s file more complaints but lose less per case.
Are job scams on LinkedIn, Indeed or text messages more common?
Public agency data do not break job-scam losses down by named job board. What is measured: half of the 23,000+ employment-scam reports to BBB Scam Tracker in 2025 came by text message, and Australia’s NASC found online contact caused the most job-scam losses.
Can I get my money back after a job scam?
Sometimes, if you act fast. The FBI’s Recovery Asset Team froze funds in 58% of its 2025 Financial Fraud Kill Chain incidents, which start when victims file at ic3.gov quickly. Crypto payments are much harder to recover than bank wires.
Are fake job candidates a bigger risk to employers than fake jobs?
They are a different risk. Gartner found 6% of candidates admitted interview fraud and predicts a quarter of profiles will be fake by 2028; the FBI links AI-assisted interview fraud mainly to network access, including North Korean IT-worker schemes.
Is the job scam problem getting worse in 2026?
The latest full-year data (2025) show US losses still rising 37.4% year over year, but complaint growth slowing to 23.2%. Canada’s first nine months of 2025 nearly matched its 2024 total. 2026 annual figures arrive in spring 2027.
Related Axis research: Online scam statistics · Crypto crime statistics · AI scam statistics · Deepfake fraud statistics · Phishing statistics · Employee turnover statistics