Nigeria ranked 12th among foreign countries filing cybercrime complaints with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Centre in 2025, with 1,219 reports submitted. This comes as global cybercrime losses surpassed $20 billion for the first time.

The FBI’s IC3 2025 Annual Report, released to mark the centre’s 25th anniversary, recorded 1,008,597 complaints from victims worldwide, representing total losses of $20.877 billion, a 26 per cent increase from 2024’s $16.6 billion.

Canada led foreign complainants with 7,479 reports, followed by India (5,879), Japan (5,764), and the United Kingdom (4,106). Nigeria’s 1,219 complaints placed it behind Pakistan (1,514) but ahead of Greece (1,205) and Iran (1,101).

The report identified Nigeria among the countries frequently receiving fraudulent wire transfers. Hong Kong topped the list with 1,858 transactions, followed by Mexico (1,782), Indonesia (1,685), Vietnam (1,583), and the Philippines (1,538).
Investment fraud was the costliest crime at $8.648 billion for the second year in a row. Business email compromise accounted for $3.046 billion from 24,768 complaints, and tech support scams caused $2.134 billion in losses.

The FBI noted that cryptocurrency investment fraud alone resulted in losses of up to $7.228 billion across 61,559 complaints, representing a 48 per cent increase in complaints and a 25 per cent rise in losses from 2024. These scams typically involve sophisticated long-term operations run by organised criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia.

“These scams are largely perpetrated by organised criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labour to run the scam operations,” the FBI report stated.