The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is warning about scams where criminals are using increasingly sophisticated techniques to impersonate federal law enforcement officers in an attempt to steal money from potential victims.
The latest warning comes from FBI Honolulu, which says that while impersonation scams have existed for decades, recent reports show that “scammers are using increasingly sophisticated methods that make it difficult for individuals to determine whether a call or message is legitimate.”
In some cases, fraudsters are spoofing the official phone numbers of federal law enforcement field offices– including the FBI Honolulu office – and introducing themselves using the names of real and fictitious federal agents, impersonating agents from the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Secret Service, and other agencies.
“When potential victims attempt to verify the caller’s identity by contacting an office directly, the spoofed number may mislead them into believing they are speaking with a real representative,” the FBI warned. “In some instances, callers are unable to reach anyone and assume the communication must be authentic because the number appears to come from a government line.”
The FBI also noted that scammers are using technologies such as artificial intelligence to support their impersonation schemes. One report described a scammer who used a virtual meeting platform with a background staged to look like a federal office.
The FBI reminds residents that law enforcement and government authorities will never contact members of the public by phone or text message to demand any form of payment or to request personal information.
Anyone with information about the scams is urged to contact the FBI. The FBI also encourages victims to file a complaint with its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) at www.ic3.gov and provide screenshots and other details of their interactions.
This comes as IC3 noted that it received nearly 61,000 complaints involving law enforcement or government impersonation scams between January 2025 and July 2026, resulting in reported losses of more than $1.6 billion.
