WFA Research
What FTC and FBI data reveal about employment fraud, fake jobs and the scams affecting remote job seekers.
Updated September 2, 2026
Two US agencies publish figures on employment fraud, and they count different things. The Federal Trade Commission records consumer reports through its Consumer Sentinel Network; the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center records complaints filed with it. This page takes the figures from each agency's own documents, names the category each one belongs to, and keeps them apart.
Neither agency separates remote work from other employment. Where a figure covers job scams generally, it is described that way here.
Consumer Sentinel Network reports, in the FTC's own category names.
| FTC subcategory | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job Scams & Employment Agencies | 71,562 | 85,533 | 104,946 |
| Business & Work-at-Home Opportunities | 15,258 | 16,197 | 14,809 |
| Pyramids & Multi-Level Marketing | 8,735 | 6,797 | 6,283 |
| Franchises & Distributorships | 2,673 | 3,219 | 3,858 |
| Invention Promotion | 438 | 365 | 355 |
The subcategories sum to 130,251 against a category total of 126,217 for 2024, because a single report can carry more than one subcategory.
On losses, the FTC has published two figures for 2024. Its March 2025 press release stated that reported losses to job and employment agency scams rose from $90 million in 2020 to $501 million in 2024. A business blog post in September 2025 put 2024 reported job scams at over 105,000 with reported losses of over $513 million.
Both are official and both are for calendar 2024. They were published six months apart. We show both with their publication dates rather than treating either as interchangeable, and we have not found an FTC statement explaining the difference, so we do not offer one. Where a single figure is quoted, its publication date should travel with it.
The IC3 Employment crime type, from the 2025 Internet Crime Report.
| Year | Complaints | Reported losses | Average per complaint |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 15,443 | $70,234,079 | $4,548 |
| 2024 | 20,044 | $264,223,271 | $13,182 |
| 2025 | 24,688 | $362,934,762 | $14,701 |
Complaints and reported losses are published by the FBI. The fourth column is a WFA calculation: reported losses divided by complaints.
Complaints rose 60% between 2023 and 2025. Reported losses rose 417%. The two figures describe different things, and the distance between them is what changed.
The two agencies use different classification systems, and within the FTC's system the relevant figures sit at two different levels.
| Category, as the agency names it | Publisher | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Job Scams & Employment Agencies | FTC | A subcategory of Business and Job Opportunities. The narrower job-scam figure. |
| Business and Job Opportunities | FTC | The wider category. Also contains franchise and business opportunity offers, work-at-home plans, multi-level marketing and invention promotion. |
| Employment | FBI IC3 | A crime type in the Internet Crime Report, counted from complaints filed with IC3. |
Figures from different categories are not interchangeable, and neither agency splits remote work out from other employment. A number for one category should be quoted with that category's name attached.
The FTC has documented rapid growth in a particular form of employment fraud it calls gamified job scams, or task scams.
A person is contacted about online work, often by message, and asked to complete simple repetitive tasks in an app. The app displays mounting earnings. At some point the person is told a deposit is needed before the balance can be withdrawn. The displayed earnings are not real and the deposits are not returned.
About 20,000 people reported these scams in the first half of 2024, against roughly 5,000 in all of 2023. Reported losses to job scams topped $220 million in that half-year.
Task scams are one documented example of how employment-related fraud can generate repeated payments and escalating losses. The FTC has reported their rapid growth, but the FBI data on this page do not establish that task scams caused the increase in Employment losses. The two sets of figures come from different agencies and neither publishes an attribution of cause.
One in three people who reported losing money to a job or business opportunity scam in 2025 said the interaction began on social media.
Source: FTC Data Spotlight, April 2026. Data year 2025. The FTC's category here is job or business opportunity scams, which is wider than job scams alone.
The two agencies run separate reporting systems. A person may report to one, the other, both, or neither. The classification schemes differ, the intake channels differ, and the overlap between them is not published.
Adding an FTC report count to an FBI complaint count therefore does not produce a national total, and neither does adding their loss figures. Where both cover a period, they belong side by side with their source named.
FTC categories are quoted as the agency names them: Job Scams & Employment Agencies and Business and Job Opportunities. The FBI category is Employment. No category has been renamed here.
The subcategory counts for 2022, 2023 and 2024 appear in the Consumer Sentinel Data Book 2024 in both the PDF, under Detailed Report Categories, and the machine-readable release. The FBI figures come from the Three Year Comparison tables in the 2025 Internet Crime Report, read with the 2025/2024/2023 column headers visible so the direction is not assumed. All documents were retrieved on September 2, 2026.
One derived metric appears on this page. Average reported loss per complaint is total reported losses divided by total complaints, computed from the FBI's own published totals. It is labelled wherever it appears. Percentage changes are computed from the published endpoints and rounded to the nearest whole percent; dollar figures are shown as published, and abbreviated to one decimal place where a card requires it.
Every other figure is read directly from a source document.
The FTC published $501 million in March 2025 and over $513 million in September 2025, both for calendar 2024 job and employment agency scams. Neither is treated here as superseding the other, and both carry their publication date. We looked for an FTC statement accounting for the difference and did not find one, so no explanation is offered: a revision is plausible but we cannot source it.
The subcategories sum to 130,251 while the Data Book prints 126,217 for the whole category in 2024. A single report can carry more than one subcategory, so the parts exceed the whole. Neither figure has been adjusted.
Reported losses are losses consumers reported to the agency. They are not an estimate of total losses across the economy. Reports and complaints are filings, not incidence: not every scam is reported, and one reporting system should not be treated as a census of all fraud.
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