The FTC had 19 fake versions of its own website taken down. Imposter scams cost people $3.5 billion in 2025, so a pause before paying or clicking matters.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says 19 websites pretending to be the FTC were taken down over the past year. The agency announced it in a press release on Thursday, Oct. 29. It also had fake social media pages that posed as the agency or its officials reported and removed.
The FTC sent letters to domain registrars and other website providers. A domain registrar is a company that sells website addresses. After getting the letters, those companies took the 19 sites down. The release did not say what the fake sites looked like or how many people visited them.
The agency is also using a rule that took effect in 2024, called the Impersonation Rule. It lets the FTC take scammers to federal court and seek money back for victims, plus civil penalties. Since then, the FTC says it has brought 14 enforcement actions that secured $80 million for consumers.
Imposter scams have drawn the most fraud reports to the FTC for nine years in a row. In 2025, people sent in more than 1 million reports and said they lost $3.5 billion. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said the agency will keep enforcing the law against bad actors.
Two common versions stand out. Texts demanding money for unpaid tolls helped drive a 40% rise in reports of government imposter scams. Romance scams, where an online love interest suddenly asks for money, cost people $1.48 million in 2025, according to the FTC. That was 22% more than the year before.
Anyone with a phone or an email address can get these messages. The FTC's cases under the rule cover scammers who pretended to be:
Those 19 fake FTC sites are now down, so there is nothing to undo if you never visited them. The larger risk is the next message that borrows a trusted name.
The alert box above lists the steps. The short version: do not act on pressure from an unexpected message, and check with the real organization on your own.
The FTC says it will keep pursuing impersonators. The release does not say how many fake sites may still be online or whether more takedowns are planned. Because scammers copy trusted names, a fake site or page can look real, so the safest habit is to treat any unexpected request for money as suspect until you have checked it.
If a message claims to be from the government or a known business and asks for money, stop and verify it yourself before you click or pay.
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