As cybercrime losses surged 26% year-over-year in 2025, a new benchmark announcement from the identity protection industry signals a shift in how consumer coverage is being defined, and who bears the financial burden when digital fraud strikes.

A coverage gap consumers may not see coming

The financial toll of cybercrime in the United States reached a record high in 2025. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2025 Annual Report, Americans filed more than 768,000 cybercrime complaints last year, with total reported losses exceeding $20.9 billion, a 26% increase over 2024. The average reported loss per incident came in at $20,699.

Those figures arrive alongside an announcement from OmniWatch, a digital protection service offered by PeopleConnect, that it has expanded its scam reimbursement and ransomware coverage to all subscription tiers. The company says its plans now cover crime categories representing 94% of the cybercrime complaints filed with the FBI in 2025.

The announcement draws a pointed contrast between what most people expect their identity protection to cover and what traditional policies actually address. Many existing plans were designed around a narrower definition of financial harm: data breaches and classic identity theft. These categories, while serious, represent a fraction of the cybercrime landscape Americans are now navigating.

“Identity theft used to mean someone opening a credit card in your name,” said Steven Gray, CEO of OmniWatch. “Today, it means a convincing AI-generated voice call that persuades your grandmother to wire her retirement savings overseas, or a ransomware attack that holds your family’s photos hostage for thousands of dollars. The definition of protection has to evolve with the threat, and we built OmniWatch to cover the world that actually exists.”

The crimes most policies quietly exclude

Investment fraud was the single largest loss category reported to the FBI in 2025, accounting for $6.6 billion of the $20.9 billion total. Business email compromise, where scammers redirect legitimate wire transfers by impersonating executives or vendors, added $2.8 billion. Tech support scams, romance fraud, and government impersonation schemes collectively cost consumers more than $2.5 billion.

These are not obscure or low-probability threats. They are among the most reported and most financially damaging forms of consumer cybercrime in the country. And for the most part, standard identity protection policies leave victims with little recourse after the fact.

A key reason for this gap is a category of fraud known as authorized push payment (APP) fraud. When a scammer convinces a victim to initiate a wire transfer or peer-to-peer payment—even under manipulation, coercion, or deception—banks typically treat the transaction as authorized. Reimbursement requests are frequently denied, and the consumer absorbs the full loss.

The scale of APP fraud has drawn increasing legislative attention. A July 2024 U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations report found that the three largest banks on the Zelle network reimbursed only about 38% of unauthorized fraud claims, and just 12% of consumers reporting Zelle scams received reimbursement. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission reported that bank-transfer and payment fraud cost U.S. consumers $2.09 billion in 2024 alone, a 13% year-over-year increase. Projections from Deloitte suggest U.S. APP fraud losses could climb to $14.9 billion by 2028.

Unlike the United Kingdom, where mandatory APP fraud reimbursement rules took effect in October 2024, U.S. consumers currently have no statutory right to be made whole when they are deceived into authorizing a transfer. OmniWatch says its scam insurance explicitly covers qualifying APP fraud losses, regardless of how the transfer was initiated.

Coverage that starts above the FBI’s average loss figure

The structural changes announced by OmniWatch center on making broader financial protection available at entry-level pricing. The company’s Standard plan now includes $25,000 in scam insurance and $25,000 in ransomware coverage, both figures above the FBI’s reported average cybercrime loss of $20,699. The Elite plan scales to $50,000 per category, and the Family plan provides $100,000 per category, available to all household members.

Identity theft coverage is layered on top: $2 million for Standard subscribers, up to $4 million for Elite, and up to $8 million for Family plans. Combined, total maximum coverage reaches $2.05 million at the Standard tier, $4.1 million at Elite, and $8.2 million for Family plan holders.

The company also notes that its coverage carries no deductible across all plans, a distinction it positions against competitors that impose a $100 deductible and cap scam coverage at $5,000 or $10,000, amounts it says would leave the average victim significantly short of full recovery. The analysis is based on OmniWatch’s internal review of publicly available plan documentation from other leading providers.

Standard plans are priced starting at $11.99 per month, with annual billing available at a discount. OmniWatch has emphasized that its pricing does not use teaser introductory rates that contractually increase at renewal, a practice common in the identity protection industry that often surprises customers when their first renewal bill arrives.

The hidden costs that follow a fraud incident

Financial recovery from cybercrime rarely ends with reimbursement for the initial loss. Victims often face weeks or months of downstream costs that most insurance arrangements never touch: legal fees to dispute fraudulent transactions, notary and documentation expenses, and significant lost wages from the time required to file reports, contact financial institutions, and restore compromised accounts.

OmniWatch’s updated coverage explicitly includes reimbursement for legal fees and lost wages incurred during the resolution of a covered incident, a provision the company says is broadly absent from competing policies. For victims already managing the psychological fallout of a scam, the practical burden of navigating government reporting systems, bank fraud departments, and legal processes simultaneously can be overwhelming.

To address this, the company offers live identity theft recovery specialists who manage the claims and recovery process directly on behalf of subscribers. According to OmniWatch, specialists can contact banks, file required reports, complete paperwork, and coordinate recovery end-to-end, acting as a dedicated advocate rather than routing callers through an automated support queue.

“The moment after someone realizes they’ve been scammed is one of the most disorienting experiences imaginable,” said Balazs Wellisch, CTO of OmniWatch. “You’re not thinking clearly. You don’t know who to call or what to say. Having a real person pick up the phone, take over, and tell you, ‘we’ve got this’ is not a feature. It is the product.”

What the 94% coverage claim actually means

The 94% figure (rounded from a calculated 93.6%) is derived from OmniWatch’s analysis of named crime-type complaint volume in the FBI IC3 2025 report. Of the 768,452 complaints assigned to named crime categories, 719,652 fall within categories covered under OmniWatch’s published plan terms. Four categories were excluded from coverage: Harassment/Stalking, Threats of Violence, IPR/Copyright and Counterfeit, and the IC3’s general “Other” designation, which the agency defines as criminal or civil matters not currently assigned to a specific crime type.

The company has published a full methodology document with its calculations, source citations, and notes on limitations, including the caveat that IC3 data does not specify payment method at the crime-type level, meaning cryptocurrency-related complaints within covered categories cannot be cleanly excluded from the denominator. The 94% figure reflects coverage of crime categories as reported, not a guarantee that every individual claim within those categories would qualify.

The covered crime types span the full range of modern cybercrime reported to the FBI, including phishing and spoofing, government impersonation, business email compromise, tech support scams, romance and confidence fraud, employment scams, real estate wire fraud, SIM swap attacks, ransomware, and dozens of others. The breadth of categories reflects how significantly the fraud landscape has shifted from the data-breach-centric threats that shaped early identity protection products.

Where VPN fits in the protection plan

Reimbursement coverage and financial protection help consumers recover their losses after a cybercrime incident. However, prevention is the main form of defense, keeping people from becoming victims in the first place. Cybersecurity experts advise on privacy tools such as virtual private networks (VPNs) to proactively keep data protected against attacks.

VPNs effectively encrypt traffic and keep the information from being intercepted when using public Wi-Fi, reducing exposure to cyberthreats. VPNs alone cannot prevent all phishing scams or social engineering attacks, but their addition makes it more difficult for cybercriminals to find the network and access important information. Military-grade encryption and no-logs policies keep the online activity concealed from prying eyes, with mixed protection offering the strongest form of defense.

A formal commitment to back up the coverage

The announcement is accompanied by what OmniWatch calls its Make It Right Pledge: a guarantee that if a subscriber experiences a covered scam or identity theft incident and the company cannot fix it, OmniWatch will refund every dollar the customer has paid over the lifetime of their membership.

The pledge is framed less as a marketing commitment and more as a direct answer to a long-standing consumer hesitation around identity protection services: the concern that the coverage sounds comprehensive in the brochure but falls short when it is actually needed. The company says the guarantee applies to new and existing subscribers immediately, with no action required on the part of current members to receive updated coverage.

As cybercrime volumes and financial losses continue to grow, the FBI has now recorded increases in reported losses for multiple consecutive years; the question of which protections consumers actually have access to, and at what price point, is becoming harder to ignore. For a category that has historically sold itself on peace of mind, the gap between what is promised and what is paid out in practice is drawing sharper scrutiny from consumers and policymakers alike.