FBI Warns Its Website for Reporting Cyber Crimes Is Being Spoofed by Scammers

An FBI seal is displayed on a podium before a news conference at the field office in Portland, Ore., Jan. 16, 2025. (AP Photo/Jenny Kane, File)

The FBI issued a public service announcement revealing that its website for reporting cyber crimes had been spoofed by scammers looking to steal personal information.

The statement was posted Friday, Sept. 19 on the FBI’s official website for the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). According to the bureau, “threat actors” had created replicas of IC3’s website for the purpose of harvesting user data. The PSA continued:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is providing this Public Service Announcement (PSA) to warn that threat actors are spoofing the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) government website. 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.

Threat actors create spoofed websites often by slightly altering characteristics of legitimate website domains, with the purpose of gathering personally identifiable information entered by a user into the site, including name, home address, phone number, email address, and banking information. For example, spoofed website domains may feature alternate spellings of words or use an alternative top-level domain to impersonate a legitimate website. Members of the public could unknowingly visit spoofed websites while attempting to find FBI IC3’s website to submit an IC3 report.

Also included in the statement was a list of tips to avoid the imposter sites, such as typing “www.ic3.gov” into the address bar as opposed to trying to look up the official website in a search engine.