Email Scams Drive $48M in Missouri Business Losses
Business email compromise accounted for most of the 516 Missouri business victims in 2025, according to FBI-reported figures.
Updated on Nov. 5, 2026 in Cybersecurity
Missouri businesses reported nearly $48 million in losses to cyberattacks in 2025, according to FBI-reported figures for the state. Business email compromise scams accounted for most of the Missouri business victims and losses, with 355 of 516 victims targeted this way.
Why it matters
The figures point to impersonation-based fraud, not technical intrusion, as the dominant cost driver for Missouri companies. Business email compromise works by tricking employees into sending money or data, which makes it a people-and-process problem as much as a security-software one.
The FBI-reported data counts 516 Missouri business victims, with 355 targeted through business email compromise, against 73 through ransomware and 61 through data breaches. Missouri's exposure rate is 20.3 victims per 10,000 businesses, compared with 47.3 in Alaska, the top-ranked state, and 25.2 in California, which ranked 28th. The data does not show how much of the reported loss was ultimately recovered.
The players
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
The U.S. federal law enforcement agency that compiles and publishes the cybercrime complaint and loss data cited in this report.
The details
Business email compromise scams work by impersonating a company's trusted leaders, such as an executive or vendor, so that an employee is persuaded to send money or sensitive data. Some scammers instead hack into real company email accounts and send requests from inside the organization. Because these attacks rely on plausible messages rather than malware, they often bypass technical defenses that focus on blocking intrusions. The FBI counts incidents that victims report, so the totals reflect reported cases rather than every attempt.
Timeline
2025: Missouri businesses lost nearly $48 million to cyberattacks, per the year's FBI-reported figures.
The Tech Race
Missouri's loss total sits inside a national picture in which reported cybercrime losses have grown 74 percent since 2020, according to FBI data. The source frames business email compromise as the dominant category by both frequency and cost, which places the emphasis on identity verification and payment controls rather than only on network defense.
Missouri businesses that handle payments or sensitive data face the most direct exposure to email-based fraud, which the figures show is the most common route to loss. Staff who approve wire transfers or change vendor payment details are the people most often targeted, so verification steps for those requests matter most.
The takeaway
The 2025 totals suggest that verifying payment requests through a second channel is one of the most effective defenses available to Missouri businesses. Watch for the next annual FBI release to see whether the state's exposure rate moves from its current 44th-place ranking.
Further reading
For broader context on how these attacks are defended against, see Cybersecurity coverage across Missouri.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Jefferson City News Tribune.
