People who get a call from someone claiming to be a police officer, a court official or a federal agent are being told to feed cash into cryptocurrency kiosks, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center says. The warning, reissued September 17, lists kiosk deposits alongside prepaid cards, couriers and wire transfers as the ways impostors collect.
The FBI’s complaint center received nearly 61,000 reports of law enforcement and government impersonation from January 2025 through July 2026. Reported losses topped $1.6 billion, which works out to roughly $26,000 for every complaint.
Cash into a machine, crypto out the other side
The FBI’s public service announcement names five payment channels: prepaid cards, couriers, bank wires, cryptocurrency, and cash inserted into cryptocurrency kiosks. The FBI updated an alert that first went out in March 2022 rather than writing a new one, and the kiosk deposit is now part of the list.
A kiosk deposit turns paper money into cryptocurrency sent to a wallet address. The FBI asks victims to hand over crypto addresses and other payment details when they file a complaint, because that trail is what investigators have to work with.
Anyone who receives a call, text or email from a self-described official who wants payment should treat the demand itself as the giveaway. The FBI says law enforcement and government officials will never request payment by prepaid card, cryptocurrency or courier, and will never call or text to demand any payment or sensitive information. The advice is to ask for credentials, then reach the agency through official, publicly listed contact information and never through a number the caller provides.
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The stories callers tell
The most common script is an accusation. The victim is told they committed a crime or are tied to one and will be arrested or prosecuted unless they pay. Callers often spoof real phone numbers, agency addresses, employee names and credentials, and they may use artificial intelligence to appear on a video call.
The jury duty variant drew 6,833 complaints and nearly $36 million in losses. Victims hear that they skipped jury duty and face a fine, or that a warrant exists for a missed court date, and that paying now makes it go away. Roughly $5,300 per complaint is the average loss.
Other scripts target narrower groups. Callers tell people that a passport, driver’s license or professional license is about to expire and must be renewed by payment, a pitch that produced 496 complaints and more than $348,000 in losses. Medical practitioners, threatened with license revocation, filed 3,322 complaints and lost more than $37 million.
The costliest per victim are impersonations of foreign police or diplomats aimed at foreign nationals and international students, which drew 1,809 complaints and more than $140 million in losses, an average near $77,000. Those callers threaten extradition or passport cancellation, and some use fake police uniforms and mock government sets on video.
How the pressure works
The FBI describes the same pressure tactics across these scripts. Callers keep an urgent, aggressive tone, will not let anyone else take a message, keep the victim on the line, and tell the person not to contact family, a bank or the police. Isolation is the point, because a second person is the likeliest source of the question that ends the call.
The FBI also warns about lookalike websites that use a .com address where a real agency would use .gov, and it advises checking a web address against the official domain. A link sent by a caller leads to the scammer’s page, not the agency’s.
If money has already moved
The FBI’s steps for a victim are to stop all contact with the scammers, notify the bank or other financial institution, report to local law enforcement, and file a complaint at the Internet Crime Complaint Center with the scammer’s contact details, payment details and copies of the communications. The agency also advises keeping all financial records.
A related false promise is the refund. The FTC says on its refunds page that it will never threaten anyone, tell anyone to transfer money to get a refund, or promise a prize, and it points people who meet an FTC impostor to ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The page lists each active refund program with its dates and the phone number of its claims administrator.
The complaint center says to file “even if you are unsure of whether your complaint qualifies,” and it asks for a report from anyone contacted by someone claiming to work with the center itself, or who finds a website posing as it. Callers impersonate the reporting channel too, so the address to type in is ic3.gov, not a link in a text.
The pattern across every script is that the payment method gives the scam away. Real agencies do not collect fines through a kiosk, a courier or a gift card, so a caller who names one of those has ended the question of whether the call is genuine.
Had a call like this already?
A caller who has the victim’s attention is one step from the accounts behind it. The impostor’s script ends at a kiosk, but the same call can open a hunt for logins, credit and a Social Security number.
Scam-Proof Your Accounts in a Weekend shuts those doors before a caller reaches them: how to freeze credit at all three bureaus, free by federal law, and how to lock bank logins with two-step login, alerts and a verbal password. It also includes a family code word for fake grandchild-in-trouble calls.
Get the credit-freeze, bank-lock and family-code-word guide →
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
