What is the most recorded cyber scam report in the united state like romace scam

1. Phishing: the volume champion of U.S. cybercrime reports

Government and industry tabulations show phishing as the top-reported cybercrime category by victim count: Statista’s summary of IC3 data lists roughly 193,000 phishing/spoofing victims in 2024, more than any other single category reported to the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) ^{[1] [2]}. Those numbers reflect a broad set of delivery methods—email, text (smishing), and increasingly voice (vishing)—and are reinforced across multiple analyst writeups that peg phishing as the foundational scam vector feeding many other schemes ^{[3] [5]}.

2. Why phishing shows up more than romance scams in the data

Phishing’s dominance by raw complaint volume stems from scale and simplicity: automated mass campaigns and inexpensive phishing-as-a-service let attackers reach millions with minimal human touch, while romance scams require lengthy social engineering and thus produce fewer, often higher-value, individual cases ^{[6] [7]}. Reports also show phishing variants have evolved into specialized operations—like the 2025 “E‑ZPass” smishing campaign—illustrating how impersonation of trusted services turns routine communications into mass-exploitation events ^[6].

3. Money versus numbers: investment and business email compromise (BEC)

Although phishing leads in victim count, other categories dominate financial losses. The FBI’s IC3 data and industry summaries repeatedly highlight business email compromise as generating billions in losses—$2.7 billion in one recent year—and investment scams were flagged by the FTC as the most common category by reported losses in 2024 ^{[3] [4]}. This mismatch—high-count, lower-dollar phishing versus lower-count, higher-dollar BEC and investment fraud—creates competing priorities for law enforcement, regulators, and vendors ^{[3] [4]}.

4. The AI/voice-deepfake accelerant and the shifting threat picture

Emerging technologies are erasing old telltale signs: generative AI and voice cloning have been explicitly identified by multiple private-sector analyses and consumer guides as tools that make impersonation scams—and therefore phishing and vishing—more convincing and scalable ^{[8] [9] [7]}. Industry forecasts warn that scam centers and AI-enabled fraud agents will amplify existing phishing and impersonation schemes into 2026, complicating detection and victim recovery ^{[10] [7]}.

5. Sources, agendas, and what the numbers don’t show

Public data (IC3/Statista) and private reports paint a consistent quantitative picture but reflect different emphases: government complaint portals measure volume and help lines ^{[2] [1]}, while industry white papers and vendor blogs highlight emerging threats and commercial solutions—sometimes with implicit marketing agendas ^{[3] [11]}. Chainalysis and other crypto-focused reports draw attention to transnational, industrial-scale scam operations tied to cryptocurrency flows, a narrative that surfaces geopolitical and jurisdictional friction points but may over-index on high-profile crypto cases versus everyday phishing victims ^[6].

6. Bottom line — the most recorded U.S. cyber scam today

By number of reported victims, phishing (including smishing and spoofing variants) is the most recorded cyber scam in the U.S.; romance scams are significant and devastating to individuals but are not the top category by complaint count in the most recent aggregated reporting ^{[1] [2]}. The landscape, however, is dynamic: AI-driven impersonation will likely increase both the volume and financial severity of phishing-related schemes unless detection, authentication, and public awareness scale faster than the fraud tools do ^{[8] [9] [7]}.