Reporting Fraud: Which Agency Does What

What comes before any report?

The payment channel. Reports are worth filing, but not one of them can pull money out of an account, and the institution that moved the funds can sometimes try. Call your bank's fraud line, your card issuer, the payment app, or the exchange first, and say plainly that the transfer was induced by fraud.

Timing is the reason for the order. A wire may be recallable while the funds still sit in the receiving account, which is often a matter of hours rather than days. That sequence is set out in the answer on the first hours after a fraudulent wire, and it applies whatever the underlying scheme was.

Then preserve the evidence before it disappears. Screenshot the messages and the profile, save the emails with their full headers, note the phone numbers, account numbers, and wallet addresses, and write a short timeline while it is fresh. Every complaint below asks for the same details, so gathering them once saves the whole evening.

Who takes which kind of report?

Each agency owns a slice, and the slices overlap without connecting. Filing with one does not reach the others, so pick the two or three that match what happened and file with each.

The split is easier to hold if you think about what each agency was built to do. The FTC is a consumer protection and enforcement body that runs on aggregated complaint data. The FBI is a criminal investigative agency. The CFPB regulates financial companies and makes them answer their customers. The securities regulators police markets and the people selling into them. Your state attorney general enforces state law against businesses operating locally.

Beyond those, the specialists matter when they fit. The Postal Inspection Service takes anything involving the mail, including reshipping. The CFTC handles commodities, futures, and many digital asset trading schemes. Each agency's inspector general takes reports of impersonation of that agency, and the tax authorities handle tax-specific impersonation.

What does each report actually accomplish?

Different things, and it is worth being clear-eyed about which is which. The FTC complaint is data. It does not open a case for you, and it does feed the database that supports enforcement actions, industry-wide rules, and public warnings. It is quick and it is worth doing every time.

The IC3 complaint is the one with an operational edge. Filed promptly, with the receiving bank and transfer details, it can support a request that a receiving institution hold the funds. Filed later, it becomes intelligence that ties your case to others and may support a criminal investigation.

The state attorney general is the most underused of the group. State consumer protection statutes are broad, the offices are closer to the conduct, and they act on things federal agencies rarely reach: a contractor who took a deposit and vanished, a solicitation campaign working a single region, price gouging during an emergency, an unlicensed operator running out of a local address.

The CFPB complaint is the only one on the list where you personally get an answer. It goes to the company, which generally must respond, and you see what it says. Use it when the dispute is about how a financial institution handled your claim rather than about the fraudster. The identity theft report at identitytheft.gov is different again: it produces a document you can use with credit bureaus, creditors, and debt collectors.

In what order should you file?

Front-load anything time-sensitive and treat the rest as an evening's work.

1. Call the bank, card issuer, app, or exchange. Ask for a fraud claim and, for a wire, a recall request.
2. File at ic3.gov if any money moved online, the same day.
3. File at reportfraud.ftc.gov, or at identitytheft.gov if your personal information was misused.
4. File a local police report where there is theft, forgery, or a local suspect, and keep the report number.
5. Add the specialist regulator: SEC or CFTC for investments, the Postal Inspection Service for mail.
6. File with your state attorney general, especially for solicitations, contractors, and unlicensed operators.
7. Escalate to the CFPB if a financial institution mishandles your claim.

What should a complaint contain?

Identifiers, not adjectives. Investigators match complaints to each other using specific strings, so a report full of numbers is worth several written as a story. Include everything you have, and say plainly where you are uncertain.

• Amounts and the order in which they were sent.
• Receiving account and routing numbers, wallet addresses, and transaction references.
• Phone numbers, email addresses, domains, app handles, and profile links.
• Company names, license numbers, or badge and case numbers the caller claimed.
• How first contact happened and on which platform.
• Your own case and report numbers from the bank and the police.

Reporting on someone else's behalf is allowed and common. Most portals ask whether you are reporting for yourself or another person, and a relative or caregiver can file with what they know. Say clearly which parts you observed directly and which were described to you, since an investigator needs to know where the account came from.

Write in plain terms, and do not soften what happened. People routinely describe a wire they were tricked into sending as a payment they made, or a takeover of their account as a mistake. The words matter, because they determine how the complaint is categorized and, in a bank claim, whether it is treated as authorized or unauthorized.

Then keep every confirmation number in one file with your notes. If the matter ever reaches an insurer, an employer, a court, or a victim distribution, that file is what you will be asked for, and reconstructing it later is far harder than saving it now.

What happens after you file, and what does not?

Mostly silence. No investigator is assigned to each complaint, agencies generally cannot discuss confidential investigations, and there is no portal that shows your case progressing. That is normal. Occasionally, complaints do produce contact: an investigator calls, a state office follows up, or a court-appointed administrator writes about a distribution in a case you were part of.

What will not happen is anyone calling you out of the blue to arrange the return of your money for a fee. Once you have reported, expect approaches from firms and "agencies" offering recovery, some of which will quote your complaint details back to you. That is the subject of the answer on the second fraud that follows the first, and no legitimate government process ever charges to give you money.

Keep reporting anyway if something new surfaces. A later payment you had forgotten, a fresh contact from the same operation, or a name you finally identified can be added, and updates are useful to the people matching complaints together. Filing again with new information is not duplication; filing the same account four times is.

Set expectations about outcomes as well. Reporting is how the system learns, and honest odds on getting funds back depend almost entirely on how you paid and how fast you moved, which is laid out in the answer on which payments can actually be reversed. Reporting is still worth the hour, because it is the only reason anyone ever pursues the people who did this.