Law in Failure: The Real Number of Crimes, Billions

Comprehensive inventory of crimes commonly left out of headline crime totals

Agreed on the method: lack of a complete official census is not a reason to assign a category zero crimes. Each category should receive a low, central, and high estimate based on the best available survey, administrative data, market data, or modeled proxy.

The main national victimization survey covers only specified nonfatal personal crimes and household-property crimes. It does not constitute a census of homicide, commercial crime, drug transactions, public corruption, tax crime, most regulatory crime, or the full range of fraud and cybercrime. Crimes against commercial establishments are expressly outside its normal scope. Fraud, identity theft, cybercrime, tax noncompliance, missing persons, and other categories are maintained in separate systems that cannot simply be mistaken for a complete national crime total.

Counting rules

A broad estimate should maintain two totals:

1. Criminal-event total: one underlying episode, transaction, victimization, or continuing course of conduct counted once.
2. Statutory-offense total: every separately satisfied criminal offense arising from those events.

For example, one illegal drug exchange is one event, although it might legally involve distribution, purchase, possession, conspiracy, weapons, and money-laundering offenses. One account takeover is one cyber event, although it may also constitute unauthorized access, identity theft, wire fraud, data theft, and extortion.

Completed and attempted crimes should be counted separately. Attempts should be included when the conduct satisfies the relevant legal threshold for criminal attempt—not merely because an unwanted message or harmless technical error occurred.

The following is an inventory, not a set of mutually exclusive numbers. Before adding estimates, each event must be assigned a primary category so that the same event is not counted repeatedly under every applicable label.

---

1. Undetected homicides and criminal disappearances

Include:

• Murders recorded as accidents, suicides, overdoses, fires, exposure deaths, drownings, natural deaths, or undetermined deaths.
• No-body homicides.
• Bodies concealed, destroyed, dismembered, burned, buried, or otherwise never recovered.
• Homicides in which remains are recovered but never identified.
• Neonaticide, infanticide, and concealed child deaths.
• Deaths resulting from criminal neglect or intentional deprivation that are not recognized as homicides.
• Serial killings whose victims have not been connected to one offender.
• Killings of transient, unhoused, undocumented, isolated, or socially disconnected victims whose disappearance is not promptly investigated.
• Missing persons who were abducted, trafficked, unlawfully confined, or killed.
• Deaths concealed through falsified medical, institutional, employment, military, prison, or care-facility records.

Counting unit: one victim for each estimated criminal death or criminal disappearance.

A missing-person record is not automatically a crime. At the end of 2025, NCIC contained 88,093 active missing-person records, but the file includes people missing because of disability, danger, catastrophes, juvenile runaway episodes, and other circumstances. The criminal estimate should therefore include an estimated crime-linked fraction, not all active records.

---

2. Assault, battery, and other physical violence

Include reported and unreported:

• Simple assault and battery.
• Aggravated assault.
• Domestic assault and intimate-partner violence.
• Strangulation and suffocation.
• Nonfatal shootings and stabbings.
• Beatings, kicking, biting, burning, poisoning, and attacks with objects.
• Assaults causing no visible injury.
• Assaults for which the victim does not seek medical treatment.
• Reckless endangerment.
• Criminally negligent injury.
• Assaults by caregivers, family members, employers, teachers, coaches, clergy, medical personnel, security personnel, or government employees.
• Violence in schools, workplaces, hospitals, nursing homes, group homes, prisons, jails, military facilities, and shelters.
• Gang assaults.
• Hazing involving criminal force or injury.
• Violence associated with robbery, drug dealing, prostitution, trafficking, or illegal gambling.
• Assaults treated informally by an institution rather than reported to police.
• Repeated domestic assaults collapsed into one police incident or one survey response.

Counting unit: one victim per discrete violent episode. “Assault” and “battery” should not be added as entirely separate national totals when they describe the same physical event under different state terminology.

---

3. Sexual offenses

Include:

• Rape and attempted rape.
• Sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact.
• Intimate-partner and marital rape.
• Child sexual abuse.
• Statutory rape and unlawful sexual conduct with minors.
• Incest offenses.
• Drug-facilitated sexual assault.
• Sexual abuse of incapacitated, disabled, elderly, hospitalized, institutionalized, detained, or intoxicated victims.
• Sexual assault in prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, military institutions, schools, colleges, workplaces, religious institutions, and care facilities.
• Sexual coercion and criminal sexual extortion.
• Voyeurism and unlawful recording.
• Image-based sexual abuse or unlawful distribution of intimate images.
• Criminal sexual harassment where applicable.
• Indecent exposure.
• Sexual exploitation of minors.
• Online enticement or grooming offenses.
• Production, distribution, possession, or solicitation of child sexual-abuse material.
• Commercial sexual exploitation.
• Sexual offenses not disclosed because the victim does not recognize the conduct as criminal or fears retaliation.

Counting unit: one victim per episode for victimization totals; each production, distribution, possession, or solicitation event may also appear in the statutory-offense ledger.

---

4. Child abuse, elder abuse, and abuse of dependent persons

Include:

• Criminal physical abuse.
• Criminal neglect.
• Failure to provide food, shelter, medical care, or necessary supervision.
• Abandonment.
• Emotional abuse where criminalized.
• Sexual abuse.
• Financial exploitation.
• Theft by caregivers or relatives.
• Misuse of guardianship, conservatorship, or power of attorney.
• Medication theft or deliberate overmedication.
• Unlawful restraint or isolation.
• Abuse in foster care, schools, childcare centers, nursing homes, hospitals, group homes, residential treatment centers, and religious institutions.
• Child labor violations carrying criminal penalties.
• Concealment or failure to report abuse where reporting is legally required.
• Institutional record falsification intended to conceal injury, neglect, or death.

Counting unit: one victim per discrete episode, with continuing neglect also reported as a separate duration-based measure.

---

5. Threats, stalking, harassment, and intimidation

Include:

• Criminal threats.
• Death threats.
• Extortionate threats.
• Stalking.
• Cyberstalking.
• Repeated unwanted surveillance.
• Criminal harassment.
• Threatening communications.
• Witness intimidation.
• Victim intimidation.
• Retaliation against employees, witnesses, informants, tenants, family members, or complainants.
• Swatting.
• Bomb threats.
• Threats involving firearms, explosives, sexual images, immigration status, employment, housing, or disclosure of private information.
• Doxxing when the conduct satisfies a criminal statute.
• Bias intimidation and hate crimes that are never reported as such.
• Threats handled internally by schools, employers, online platforms, or families.

Counting unit: one targeted person or organization per threatening course of conduct, with materially separate threats recorded as additional events.

---

6. Kidnapping, unlawful confinement, and human trafficking

Include:

• Stranger abduction.
• Parental or custodial abduction.
• Kidnapping for ransom.
• False imprisonment.
• Hostage-taking.
• Unlawful restraint.
• Forced transportation.
• Sex trafficking.
• Labor trafficking.
• Child trafficking.
• Domestic servitude.
• Debt bondage.
• Forced criminality.
• Forced begging.
• Forced marriage where criminalized.
• Trafficking for organ removal.
• Recruitment, transportation, harboring, transfer, receipt, or concealment of trafficking victims.
• Withholding passports or identity documents as part of coercive exploitation.
• Trafficking victims misclassified as offenders in prostitution, immigration, theft, or drug cases.
• Exploitation hidden in agriculture, construction, domestic work, hospitality, factories, caregiving, massage businesses, and illicit markets.

Counting unit: one victim per trafficking episode in the event ledger; individual recruitment, transport, harboring, sale, and exploitation offenses may be counted separately in the statutory ledger.

---

7. Unreported personal and household-property crime

Include:

• Burglary.
• Trespassing connected with criminal entry.
• Motor-vehicle theft.
• Theft from vehicles.
• Bicycle and motorcycle theft.
• Package and mail theft.
• Theft of tools, electronics, jewelry, firearms, cash, clothing, and household property.
• Catalytic-converter and vehicle-parts theft.
• Theft by acquaintances, relatives, guests, roommates, contractors, caregivers, or household employees.
• Vandalism and criminal mischief.
• Arson and attempted arson.
• Utility theft.
• Theft of electricity, gas, water, cable, telecommunications, or internet service.
• Theft of personal services.
• Property crime not reported because the loss is below an insurance deductible.
• Theft reported only to an insurer, bank, retailer, landlord, platform, or delivery company.
• Repeated theft treated as routine loss rather than reported crime.

The NCVS captures several household and personal categories, including incidents not reported to police, but it is still limited to its defined survey population and offense classifications.

---

8. Crimes against businesses and organizations

Include:

• Shoplifting.
• Employee theft.
• Embezzlement.
• Payroll theft.
• Inventory theft.
• Warehouse theft.
• Cargo theft.
• Construction-equipment and agricultural-equipment theft.
• Retail return fraud.
• Coupon, refund, warranty, and loyalty-program fraud.
• Vendor and supplier fraud.
• Procurement fraud.
• Commercial burglary.
• Robbery of commercial premises.
• Theft of services.
• Fuel theft.
• Utility theft.
• Commercial vandalism and arson.
• Insurance fraud committed against a business.
• Theft of customer data.
• Theft of trade secrets, source code, designs, formulas, or client lists.
• Corporate espionage.
• Insider computer abuse.
• Counterfeit payments and chargeback fraud.
• Theft from nonprofits, churches, schools, hospitals, and government agencies.
• Crimes absorbed as “shrinkage,” operational losses, bad debt, or cybersecurity expense.
• Crimes reported only to private security, insurers, payment processors, or industry databases.

Commercial establishments are outside the regular NCVS crime count. A former national business cybercrime survey is inactive, and its latest data are from 2005, leaving a particularly serious modern measurement gap.

---

9. Fraud, scams, and identity crime

Include completed and attempted:

• Credit-card and debit-card fraud.
• Bank-account and payment-account fraud.
• Check fraud.
• Wire fraud.
• Payment-app fraud.
• Identity theft.
• Synthetic-identity fraud.
• New-account fraud.
• Account takeover.
• Loan and credit-application fraud.
• Mortgage fraud.
• Insurance fraud.
• Healthcare fraud.
• Investment and securities fraud.
• Cryptocurrency investment scams.
• Romance scams.
• Business-email compromise.
• Executive and employee impersonation.
• Government-impersonation scams.
• Police, court, tax, immigration, and utility impersonation.
• Tech-support scams.
• Advance-fee scams.
• Prize, lottery, and sweepstakes scams.
• Charity and disaster-relief fraud.
• Employment and work-from-home scams.
• Rental and real-estate scams.
• Timeshare and travel scams.
• Online marketplace fraud.
• Non-delivery and non-payment schemes.
• Counterfeit-check scams.
• Subscription and negative-option fraud.
• Elder-targeted fraud.
• Funeral, probate, and inheritance fraud.
• Benefits fraud.
• Education and student-loan fraud.
• Bankruptcy fraud.
• Fraud involving forged or stolen documents.
• Deepfake voice, video, or document impersonation.
• Fraudulent advertising and deceptive sales when criminal statutes apply.

The FTC’s Sentinel system received 6.5 million consumer reports in 2024, but those reports are unverified and do not come from a prevalence survey. They therefore show the size and diversity of the reporting system, not the total number of fraud crimes. BJS separately measures unauthorized or attempted account use, new-account identity theft, and fraudulent misuse of personal information.

Counting unit: normally one victim-scheme episode. Distinct unauthorized transactions can additionally be counted as transaction offenses.

---

10. Unauthorized computer access and other cybercrime

Include completed and attempted:

• Unauthorized access to computers, servers, cloud systems, phones, routers, vehicles, industrial systems, and internet-connected devices.
• Account takeover.
• Credential stuffing.
• Password spraying.
• Brute-force access attempts.
• Use of stolen credentials.
• Phishing and spoofing.
• Malware installation.
• Ransomware.
• Cyber extortion.
• Data theft.
• Database exfiltration.
• Theft of authentication tokens.
• SIM swapping.
• Domain and DNS hijacking.
• Session hijacking.
• Denial-of-service attacks.
• Distributed denial-of-service attacks.
• Botnet creation, rental, or operation.
• Cryptojacking.
• Website defacement.
• Unauthorized data alteration or destruction.
• Insider misuse of authorized access.
• Cyber sabotage.
• Theft of source code or trade secrets.
• Interception of communications.
• Unlawful surveillance or spyware installation.
• Cyberstalking and online harassment.
• Sextortion.
• Online child exploitation.
• Fraudulent online advertisements, stores, profiles, and investment platforms.
• Compromise of businesses, hospitals, schools, governments, utilities, and critical infrastructure.
• Attacks detected by cybersecurity companies but never reported to police.
• Attacks never discovered by the victim.

IC3 statistics depend on victims submitting complaints; the FBI itself emphasizes the importance of reporting. Its leading 2024 complaint categories included phishing or spoofing, extortion, and personal-data breaches. In May 2026, BJS was still testing how cybercrime should be measured through NCVS supplements, which illustrates that general victimization statistics do not yet provide a comprehensive cybercrime census.

Counting unit: one targeted account, device, system, or organization per distinct attack episode. Count successful compromises separately from unsuccessful attempts. A second, more expansive technical count may record every targeted account attempt, but individual packets or automated requests should not automatically be treated as separate crimes without a legal basis.

---

11. Drug-market and controlled-substance crimes

Include:

• Cultivation.
• Manufacture and synthesis.
• Importation and exportation.
• Wholesale distribution.
• Retail sale and delivery.
• Purchase where criminalized.
• Possession.
• Possession with intent to distribute.
• Trafficking.
• Conspiracy.
• Solicitation.
• Drug courier activity.
• Operation of drug premises.
• Prescription forgery and doctor shopping.
• Pill-mill offenses.
• Diversion by medical personnel, pharmacies, manufacturers, distributors, patients, or caregivers.
• Theft of controlled substances.
• Counterfeit pills.
• Fentanyl adulteration and misrepresentation.
• Illegal manufacture or possession of precursor chemicals.
• Distribution to minors.
• Distribution near protected locations where separately criminalized.
• Drug-paraphernalia offenses where criminalized.
• Drug-related money laundering.
• Use of firearms in drug trafficking.
• Drug proceeds concealed through businesses or financial accounts.
• Cross-border and mail-based trafficking.
• Online and darknet drug sales.

Counting unit: each completed wholesale or retail transfer should count once in the event ledger. Continuous possession should generally count as one possession episode rather than one crime per minute or day. Manufacture, trafficking, possession, weapons, and laundering can also be entered separately in the statutory ledger.

Drug transactions are likely to be one of the largest contributors to a broad event count because most individual sales never become police-recorded incidents.

---

12. Weapons and explosives offenses

Include:

• Illegal firearm possession.
• Possession by prohibited persons.
• Unlawful carrying.
• Unlicensed dealing.
• Straw purchasing.
• Firearms trafficking.
• Theft of firearms.
• Receipt or possession of stolen firearms.
• False statements during firearm acquisition.
• Obliteration or alteration of serial numbers.
• Unlawful manufacture or transfer of unserialized weapons where prohibited.
• Illegal conversion devices and machine guns.
• Illegal suppressors.
• Ammunition offenses.
• Unlawful discharge.
• Brandishing and threatening use.
• Firearms used in other criminal activity.
• Possession, manufacture, trafficking, or use of illegal explosives.
• Bomb-making offenses.
• Explosive threats and hoaxes.
• Unlawful storage or transport of explosives.
• Weapons trafficked through private sales, theft networks, or illicit markets.

Counting unit: one acquisition, transfer, possession episode, or trafficking transaction, while avoiding duplicate counting of the same weapon merely because it remains possessed over time.

---

13. Other illicit markets and organized crime

Include:

• Fencing and trafficking stolen property.
• Chop shops and stolen-vehicle parts markets.
• Counterfeit goods.
• Criminal copyright piracy.
• Trademark counterfeiting.
• Trade-secret trafficking.
• Counterfeit pharmaceuticals and medical products.
• Illicit tobacco and alcohol.
• Fuel smuggling.
• Illegal gambling and bookmaking.
• Match-fixing and sports corruption.
• Prostitution-related offenses where criminalized.
• Commercial sexual exploitation and pimping.
• Human smuggling, which is distinct from human trafficking.
• Organ trafficking.
• Wildlife trafficking.
• Illegal logging, fishing, mining, and resource extraction.
• Antiquities, cultural-property, and art trafficking.
• Black-market firearms.
• Black-market medicines.
• Stolen credentials and personal-data markets.
• Illicit waste disposal.
• Sanctions evasion.
• Customs smuggling.
• Contraband in prisons and detention facilities.
• Racketeering and criminal-enterprise activity.
• Protection rackets and criminal extortion.
• Loan-sharking.
• Organized retail theft.
• Laundering proceeds through cash businesses, shell companies, casinos, real estate, trade, or cryptocurrency.

Counting unit: each transaction in the event ledger, plus enterprise, conspiracy, racketeering, laundering, and facilitation offenses in the statutory ledger.

---

14. Financial, professional, and corporate crime

Include:

• Embezzlement.
• Accounting fraud.
• False financial statements.
• Securities and commodities fraud.
• Insider trading.
• Market manipulation.
• Bank fraud.
• Mortgage and loan fraud.
• Insurance fraud.
• Healthcare billing fraud.
• Bankruptcy fraud.
• Procurement and government-contract fraud.
• Grant fraud.
• Public-benefit fraud.
• Charity and nonprofit fraud.
• Fiduciary fraud.
• Misappropriation of client funds.
• Professional trust-account theft.
• Pension and retirement-plan theft.
• Corporate bribery.
• Commercial kickbacks.
• Bid rigging.
• Criminal antitrust conspiracies.
• Money laundering.
• Structuring and concealment offenses.
• False invoices and sham transactions.
• Customs and import fraud.
• Export-control violations.
• Sanctions violations.
• False certifications to regulators.
• Destruction or concealment of required business records.
• Criminal data-privacy violations.
• Corporate concealment of safety defects, contamination, or unlawful conduct.
• Obstruction of audits, regulators, inspectors, or investigations.

Counting unit: one victim or affected entity per scheme for the event ledger; each transaction, filing, statement, payment, conspiracy, or concealment act may be counted in the statutory ledger.

---

15. Tax and revenue crimes

Include willful criminal conduct involving:

• Tax evasion.
• Deliberate nonfiling.
• False tax returns.
• Concealed income.
• False deductions and credits.
• Offshore concealment.
• Payroll-tax evasion.
• Employment-tax fraud.
• Excise-tax evasion.
• Estate- and gift-tax fraud.
• Customs-duty evasion.
• False refund claims.
• Identity-theft refund fraud.
• Tax-preparer fraud.
• Destruction or falsification of tax records.
• Cash-payroll concealment.
• Use of nominees, trusts, shell entities, or cryptocurrency to conceal taxable income.
• Conspiracy to defraud tax authorities.

The IRS projected a $696 billion gross tax gap for tax year 2022, including nonfiling, underreporting, and underpayment. That is a monetary compliance estimate, not 696 billion crimes, and not every unpaid tax liability involves criminal intent. A crime count must estimate the number of willful taxpayers, returns, schemes, or filing-period offenses.

Counting unit: one taxpayer-return-period or one organized tax-evasion scheme, with separate false filings and transactions recorded in the statutory ledger.

---

16. Wage, labor, and workplace crimes

Include conduct carrying criminal penalties under the applicable jurisdiction:

• Willful minimum-wage violations.
• Willful overtime violations.
• Tip theft.
• Off-the-clock work.
• Unlawful payroll deductions.
• Falsification of hours.
• Off-the-books payroll.
• Payroll-tax evasion.
• Intentional worker misclassification.
• Prevailing-wage fraud.
• Criminal retaliation against workers.
• Forced labor and debt bondage.
• Child-labor crimes.
• Immigration-document coercion.
• Confiscation of worker passports.
• Recruitment fraud.
• Workers’ compensation fraud.
• Occupational-safety crimes.
• Falsification of workplace injury, exposure, inspection, or safety records.
• Knowing exposure of workers to prohibited hazards.
• Obstruction of labor or safety investigations.
• Theft from employee benefit or pension plans.

Labor Department enforcement data record amounts recovered and workers reached, not the complete prevalence of violations. For fiscal year 2025, enforcement recovered more than $259 million for nearly 177,000 employees, representing detected cases rather than the full national total.

Counting unit: one affected worker-pay-period or one employer scheme, depending the statute. Both should be reported because one employer scheme can affect thousands of workers and pay periods.

---

17. Public corruption and criminal abuse of authority

Include:

• Bribery.
• Kickbacks.
• Extortion under color of official authority.
• Theft or misuse of public funds.
• Procurement corruption.
• Contract steering.
• Patronage schemes that violate criminal law.
• Election and campaign-finance crimes.
• Vote buying.
• Ballot or petition fraud.
• Criminal conflicts of interest.
• Honest-services fraud.
• Falsification or destruction of public records.
• Obstruction of inspectors, auditors, courts, or investigators.
• Police theft, assault, extortion, evidence planting, falsification, and criminal civil-rights violations.
• Custodial abuse.
• Prison and jail corruption.
• Judicial bribery.
• Jury corruption.
• Prosecutorial corruption.
• Customs, licensing, zoning, tax, and regulatory corruption.
• Sale of confidential government information.
• Misuse of official databases.
• Criminal concealment of public hazards, misconduct, or deaths.

Counting unit: one corrupt payment, benefit, victim, contract, or official act in the statutory ledger; one overall scheme in the event ledger.

---

18. Crimes against the justice process

Include:

• Perjury.
• False statements.
• False police reports.
• Evidence fabrication.
• Evidence destruction or tampering.
• Witness tampering.
• Jury tampering.
• Retaliation against witnesses or victims.
• Obstruction of justice.
• Harboring fugitives.
• Aiding an escape.
• Accessory-after-the-fact offenses.
• Bail violations.
• Probation and parole violations that constitute crimes.
• Failure to register where criminalized.
• Criminal contempt.
• Escape.
• Unlawful communication with jurors or witnesses.
• Destruction, concealment, or alteration of court and investigative records.
• Interference with service of process.
• Bribery of witnesses, jurors, police, prosecutors, judges, or corrections personnel.
• Filing forged documents or fraudulent liens.

Many of these offenses have no ordinary victim who would answer a household crime survey.

---

19. Environmental, natural-resource, wildlife, and animal crime

Include:

• Illegal hazardous-waste handling and dumping.
• Illegal discharge into water.
• Criminal air-pollution violations.
• Falsification of emissions or discharge records.
• Tampering with pollution-monitoring equipment.
• Concealment of spills or releases.
• Unlawful pesticide use.
• Illegal asbestos removal or disposal.
• Illegal wetlands destruction.
• Illegal logging.
• Illegal mining.
• Illegal fishing.
• Poaching.
• Wildlife trafficking.
• Trafficking protected plants or animals.
• Illegal importation of wildlife products.
• Criminal destruction of protected habitat.
• Illegal extraction of water, minerals, timber, or other public resources.
• Animal cruelty.
• Animal fighting.
• Commercial breeding or transport crimes.
• Food-chain and agricultural contamination offenses.
• Environmental crimes committed by corporations, contractors, farms, vessels, mines, or government entities.

Counting unit: one illegal release, extraction, shipment, animal victim, or facility episode. Because some statutes make each day of continuing violation a separate offense, facility-days should also be shown in the statutory ledger.

---

20. Healthcare, pharmaceutical, and consumer-safety crimes

Include:

• Healthcare billing and coding fraud.
• Billing for nonexistent services.
• Kickbacks and unlawful referrals.
• Controlled-substance diversion.
• Prescription fraud.
• Pill-mill operations.
• Counterfeit, adulterated, contaminated, or misbranded drugs.
• Medical-device fraud.
• Falsified clinical, laboratory, or safety data.
• Patient abuse and criminal neglect.
• Illegal organ sales.
• Unlicensed medical practice.
• Professional credential fraud.
• Food adulteration.
• Deliberate concealment of contaminated food or products.
• Product-counterfeiting crimes.
• Criminal concealment of dangerous product defects.
• Tampering with consumer products.
• False safety certifications.
• Criminal violations involving nursing homes, hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, insurers, manufacturers, and distributors.

Counting unit: one patient, payer, prescription, claim, shipment, or dangerous-product episode, while identifying claims belonging to the same scheme.

---

21. Vehicle, road, and transportation crimes

Include:

• Undetected impaired driving.
• Reckless driving.
• Vehicular assault and homicide.
• Hit-and-run.
• Street racing.
• Road-rage assaults and threats.
• Vehicle-title fraud.
• VIN alteration.
• Odometer fraud.
• Staged collisions.
• Insurance fraud involving vehicles.
• Commercial-driver log falsification.
• Hours-of-service violations carrying criminal penalties.
• Cargo theft.
• Transportation of contraband.
• Aviation, maritime, rail, and trucking safety crimes.
• Falsification of vehicle inspection or emissions records.
• Unlawful transport of hazardous materials.
• Taxi, rideshare, towing, repair, and rental fraud.

Counting unit: one driving trip or collision episode, plus separate victims and fraudulent records where applicable.

---

22. Immigration, document, customs, and border crimes

Include criminal—not merely civil—conduct involving:

• Human smuggling.
• Passport fraud.
• Visa fraud.
• Immigration-document fraud.
• Identity-document trafficking.
• Counterfeit or stolen documents.
• False statements in immigration proceedings.
• Unlawful reentry where criminally prohibited.
• Harboring offenses.
• Employer document fraud.
• Forced use or confiscation of immigration documents.
• Customs smuggling.
• False customs declarations.
• Duty evasion.
• Trafficking prohibited goods.
• Concealment of persons or contraband at borders.

Unlawful presence by itself should not be automatically counted as a crime when the applicable law treats it as a civil violation.

---

23. National-security and transnational offenses

Include:

• Espionage.
• Theft or unlawful retention of classified information.
• Foreign-agent registration crimes.
• Material support for terrorism.
• Terrorist financing.
• Terrorism conspiracies and attempts.
• Sabotage.
• Proliferation offenses.
• Export-control violations.
• Sanctions evasion.
• Transnational money laundering.
• Cyberespionage and state-directed computer intrusion.
• Theft of defense or critical-infrastructure technology.
• Trafficking military or dual-use items.
• International bribery.
• Piracy and maritime crime.
• War crimes and torture offenses within the jurisdiction of the counting system.

Counting unit: one operation, target, transaction, or victim, with separate conspiracies, transfers, and intrusions recorded in the statutory ledger.

---

24. Inchoate, accomplice, and criminal-enterprise offenses

Include:

• Criminal attempt.
• Conspiracy.
• Solicitation.
• Aiding and abetting.
• Facilitation.
• Accessory-before-the-fact conduct.
• Criminal enterprise and racketeering.
• Gang participation offenses.
• Continuing criminal enterprise.
• Possession of criminal tools.
• Preparation offenses expressly criminalized by statute.
• Financing, directing, recruiting for, or managing criminal activity.

These are frequently absent from victimization surveys because the planned offense may never be completed or known to the intended victim.

---

25. Minor, local, and public-order crimes omitted from major national totals

Include only conduct classified as criminal in the relevant jurisdiction:

• Criminal trespass.
• Criminal mischief.
• Disorderly conduct.
• Public intoxication.
• Unlawful discharge of weapons.
• Illegal dumping.
• Unlicensed criminal sales.
• Criminal nuisance violations.
• Graffiti.
• Vandalism.
• Illegal gambling.
• Prohibited possession.
• Curfew violations where criminal.
• Criminal violations of health, fire, housing, building, or licensing codes.
• Local ordinance crimes.
• Repeated minor theft or vandalism that victims cease reporting.

Civil infractions and regulatory violations should not be labeled crimes unless criminal penalties and legally required elements apply.

---

Populations and settings especially likely to be missed

A complete estimate must deliberately add crimes involving:

• Children below the age covered by household surveys.
• People in prisons, jails, detention centers, hospitals, nursing homes, residential treatment facilities, and other institutions.
• Unhoused or transient people outside ordinary household samples.
• People who fear immigration, employment, family, gang, institutional, or financial retaliation.
• People who do not recognize that they were victimized.
• Deceased or missing victims who cannot answer a survey.
• Businesses, nonprofits, religious organizations, schools, hospitals, and government agencies.
• Computer systems and online accounts with no human respondent.
• Foreign victims harmed by U.S.-based offenders and U.S. victims harmed by foreign offenders.
• Victims who report only to banks, insurers, employers, online platforms, medical personnel, regulators, or consumer agencies.

How crimes disappear from the statistics

Crimes are undercounted when they are:

• Never detected.
• Detected but not recognized as criminal.
• Recognized but not reported.
• Reported to a private organization rather than police.
• Reported but not recorded.
• Recorded under a noncriminal or lesser classification.
• Recorded locally but not submitted to a national system.
• Entered into a specialized database but omitted from general crime totals.
• Collapsed into one “series” or continuing incident.
• Lost because the victim population is outside the survey frame.
• Omitted because the offense has no individual complainant.
• Excluded because no current national prevalence survey exists.
• Counted in dollars, victims, complaints, arrests, or defendants rather than criminal events.
• Divided among agencies whose records are never reconciled.

Fraud illustrates this fragmentation: FTC data consist of unverified consumer reports; IC3 counts complaints submitted to the FBI; BJS uses separate identity-theft and fraud supplements; banks and payment companies retain additional private records. None alone is a complete count.

Categories most likely to dominate a broad event total

The largest numerical components are likely to be:

1. Illicit drug transactions.
2. Attempted and completed fraud and scams.
3. Attempted and completed unauthorized computer access.
4. Identity and payment-account misuse.
5. Unreported theft, assault, domestic violence, and sexual offenses.
6. Business theft, fraud, and cybercrime.
7. Tax, payroll, wage, and employment violations satisfying criminal statutes.
8. Illegal gambling and other high-frequency illicit-market transactions.
9. Environmental, consumer-safety, and regulatory crimes counted per victim, transaction, release, or violation day.
10. Inchoate offenses—attempt, conspiracy, solicitation, and facilitation—that never appear as completed victimizations.

The defensible approach is therefore not to exclude these categories. It is to estimate every one using a declared unit, preserve low/central/high scenarios, and maintain both a nonduplicative event total and a broader statutory-offense total.

Good job. Now put an estimated number per year for each.

U.S. annual working estimate

Using one underlying victimization, illicit transaction, unlawful trip, criminal disappearance, or criminal scheme as one event, the central estimate is:

2.49 billion criminal events per year

The modeled range is 1.20 billion to 6.48 billion events annually. Adding separately chargeable attempt, conspiracy, solicitation, facilitation, and accessory offenses gives a central statutory-offense count of 2.74 billion, with a modeled range of 1.25 billion to 7.98 billion.

“Uncounted” here means absent as a distinct event from ordinary national police-crime totals. Some events appear in specialized databases, private records, surveys, regulatory files, or market estimates. The low and high values are scenario bounds, not statistical confidence intervals.

Anchor type:
A = direct national survey or arithmetic from one; B = published prevalence or monetary anchor converted under an explicit rule; C = rough scenario based on detected cases, specialized records, and undercount multipliers.

#	Crime category	Low	Central	High	Counting unit and anchor
1	Concealed killings and crime-linked disappearances	1,000	5,000	15,000	Victim or disappearance; C
2	Unreported assault and battery	2.40M	2.75M	3.10M	Unreported victimization; A
3	Sexual offenses	3.0M	8.0M	15.0M	Criminal sexual-victim year; B
4	Child, elder, and dependent-person abuse or neglect	4.0M	8.0M	15.0M	Victim-year after removing overlaps; B
5	Threats, stalking, harassment, and intimidation	2.4M	8.0M	20.0M	Targeted course of conduct; B/C
6	Trafficking, kidnapping, and unlawful confinement	25,000	100,000	500,000	Victim or confinement episode; C
7	Unreported personal and household-property crime	8.0M	8.89M	10.0M	Unreported victimization; A
8	Theft and property crime against businesses and organizations	29M	73M	146M	Theft event; B
9	Fraud, scams, and identity crime	25M	50M	100M	Victim-scheme episode; B
10	Unauthorized computer access and other cybercrime	5M	15M	50M	Compromised account, device, system, or targeted attack episode; C
11	Illegal drug-market transactions	0.94B	1.88B	4.70B	Completed retail transfer; B
12	Weapons and explosives offenses	250,000	1.0M	5.0M	Standalone acquisition, transfer, manufacture, or possession episode; C
13	Other illicit markets and organized crime	50M	250M	1.0B	Illegal-market transaction or operator/customer session; C
14	Financial, professional, and corporate crime	500,000	2.0M	8.0M	Scheme or transaction cluster; C
15	Criminal tax and revenue offenses	200,000	2.3M	14M	Taxpayer-period or organized scheme; C
16	Criminal wage, labor, and workplace violations	1.0M	3.0M	10M	Affected worker-year; C
17	Public corruption and criminal abuse of authority	5,000	25,000	100,000	Corrupt act or scheme; C
18	Perjury, evidence offenses, obstruction, and witness intimidation	100,000	500,000	2.0M	Justice-process episode; C
19	Environmental, wildlife, natural-resource, and animal crime	100,000	500,000	5.0M	Release, extraction, shipment, animal victim, or facility episode; C
20	Healthcare, pharmaceutical, food, and consumer-safety crime	1.0M	5.0M	25M	Fraudulent claim, treatment, prescription, shipment, or product episode; C
21	Impaired driving and other serious road and transportation crimes	120M	150M	250M	Unlawful driving trip; B
22	Criminal immigration, smuggling, document, customs, and border offenses	200,000	1.0M	5.0M	Smuggling, document, entry, or customs episode; C
23	National-security and transnational offenses	2,000	20,000	200,000	Operation, illegal transfer, or transaction; C
24	Attempts, conspiracies, solicitation, facilitation, and accessory offenses	+50M	+250M	+1.50B	Additional statutory offenses; excluded from base total
25	Minor local and public-order crimes omitted from major totals	5.0M	20M	100M	Criminal event after excluding all categories above; C
	Underlying-event total, excluding row 24	1.197B	2.489B	6.484B
	Statutory-offense total, including row 24	1.247B	2.739B	7.984B

How the estimates were calculated

Violence and household property

The 2024 National Crime Victimization Survey estimated 9.6 assaults not reported to police per 1,000 people aged 12 or older and 66.4 unreported property victimizations per 1,000 households. Applying those rates to its respective population bases of 286,373,220 people and 133,888,000 households gives:

$$9.6\div1{,}000\times286{,}373{,}220 =2.75\text{ million assaults}$$ $$66.4\div1{,}000\times133{,}888{,}000 =8.89\text{ million property victimizations}$$

“Battery” is included within the assault estimate rather than counted a second time.

The low and high bounds allow for sampling uncertainty, people outside the household-survey population, victims under age 12, and events that respondents did not disclose.

Sexual offenses

The CDC’s 2016–2017 annualized survey estimated that 9.497 million women and 5.439 million men experienced contact sexual violence in a 12-month period, for a combined survey ceiling of approximately 14.94 million victim-years. The high scenario uses roughly that total. The central estimate is reduced to 8 million to remove events that would not meet a criminal statute in every jurisdiction and to allocate child-caregiver and physical-assault overlaps to other rows.

Child, elder, stalking, trafficking, and missing-person cases

The CDC reports that at least one in seven children experiences abuse or neglect in a year. Applied to the 2024 child population of 73.1 million, that is approximately 10.4 million child victim-years. The Justice Department cites approximately 5 million elder-abuse or neglect victims annually, with only one in 24 cases reported. The model assigns physical violence to row 2, sexual abuse to row 3, and financial exploitation to row 9, leaving 8 million primarily neglect, abandonment, unlawful restraint, and other dependent-person abuse events in row 4.

BJS estimated 3.4 million stalking victims in 2019, of whom only 29% reported to police. That produces an unreported stalking floor of roughly 2.4 million. The central 8 million adds criminal threats, intimidation, cyberstalking, swatting, witness threats, and comparable conduct not included in the stalking survey.

The National Human Trafficking Hotline identified 21,865 victims in 11,999 cases during 2024. The 100,000 central scenario applies an approximately 4.6-to-1 hidden-case multiplier and includes unlawful confinement that never reaches the hotline.

NCIC contained 93,447 active missing-person records at the end of 2024, but that is a multiyear backlog, not an annual murder count. During 2024, 533,936 records were entered; circumstances were supplied for only 48% of them, including 2,366 noncustodial-parent abductions and 293 stranger abductions. Scaling the 2,659 coded abductions for the missing circumstance data gives about 5,500 possible crime-linked disappearances, which is the basis for the rounded 5,000 central estimate in row 1. It also allows a limited allocation for concealed deaths, while nonfatal trafficking and confinement are primarily placed in row 6.

Business theft

Retail shrink was estimated at $112.1 billion in 2022, with internal and external theft accounting for approximately 65%, or about $72.9 billion. The event estimates use different average loss assumptions:

$$\$72.9\text{B}\div \$2{,}500=29\text{M}$$ $$\$72.9\text{B}\div \$1{,}000=73\text{M}$$ $$\$72.9\text{B}\div \$500=146\text{M}$$

This row covers physical theft and employee property theft. Consumer fraud, cybercrime, accounting fraud, and innocent inventory errors are allocated elsewhere.

Fraud and identity crime

A recent Federal Reserve survey found that 20% of adults experienced financial fraud or scams during the preceding year. Applied to a recent adult population of about 267 million, that gives approximately 53.4 million fraud victim-years. The central model rounds this down to 50 million to allow for shared accounts and overlap with cybercrime; the high scenario allows for multiple frauds against the same person. BJS previously found that only about 7% of identity-theft victims reported their incident to law enforcement.

Computer access and cybercrime

BJS estimated that about 2% of 263 million people aged 16 or older experienced completed misuse of an email or social-media account in 2021—roughly 5.3 million people. Attempted identity theft was expressly excluded. The central 15 million adds unauthorized access to business systems, malware, data theft, ransomware, insider misuse, and compromised devices while excluding financial fraud already assigned to row 9. BJS was still developing broader NCVS cybercrime measures in 2026.

The base total does not count every automated login attempt or network packet. Microsoft reported more than 600 million identity attacks per day worldwide, which would exceed 219 billion attack signals annually. There is no reliable U.S. allocation or one-to-one mapping between those signals and legally distinct criminal attempts, so they are excluded from the 2.49-billion total. A technical-attempt count would therefore be much larger than the human-scale event estimate.

Drug transactions

RAND’s last comprehensive U.S. expenditure benchmark estimated annual 2016 spending, in 2018 dollars, of approximately:

• $24 billion for cocaine;
• $43 billion for heroin;
• $27 billion for methamphetamine.

That is $94 billion, excluding marijuana because the marijuana estimate mixed legal and illegal state markets. RAND reported a median street-level purchase of approximately $20 for these drugs. RAND also stated in a later report that 2016 remained the latest year with a comprehensive total for the four principal markets.

The transaction scenarios are:

$$\$94\text{B}\div \$100=940\text{M sales}$$ $$\$94\text{B}\div \$50=1.88\text{B sales}$$ $$\$94\text{B}\div \$20=4.70\text{B sales}$$

The central $50 average is above the reported $20 median because a mean should include larger purchases. Each exchange is counted once—not separately as a sale, purchase, possession, conspiracy, and later use.

Weapons and other illicit markets

ATF documented nearly 230,000 trafficked firearms in investigations covering 2017–2021, while the FBI estimated 153,161 weapons-law arrests in 2019. Row 12 models the substantially larger number of undetected standalone illegal transfers, acquisitions, manufacturing acts, and possession episodes, but excludes weapons conduct already made part of a drug or violent event.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimated 2017 consumer spending of $4 billion on illegal prostitution and $11 billion on illegal gambling. A separate gaming-industry study estimated that Americans wagered more than $510 billion annually with illegal or unregulated operators. Using $10,000, $2,000, and $500 of gambling handle per operator/customer session produces approximately 51 million, 255 million, and 1.02 billion sessions. Row 13 rounds these values and also accommodates fencing, counterfeit markets, illegal prostitution not involving trafficking, and other illicit commerce. Legal gambling, lawful sex work where applicable, and conduct that is merely unregulated rather than criminal are excluded.

Financial, tax, labor, healthcare, and regulatory crime

Financial institutions filed 4.7 million Suspicious Activity Reports in fiscal year 2024. A report is an indicator rather than proof of crime and multiple reports may concern one scheme. The central estimate therefore converts that volume into approximately 2 million distinct hidden financial or corporate schemes after excluding consumer fraud, tax, healthcare, labor, and public-corruption cases placed elsewhere.

The IRS projects a $696 billion annual gross tax gap for tax year 2022. Because ordinary mistakes, late payments, and civil noncompliance are not automatically crimes, the tax row uses explicit criminal-intent assumptions:

Scenario	Assumed criminal share	Tax per scheme	Estimated schemes
Low	5%	$200,000	174,000, rounded to 200,000
Central	25%	$75,000	2.32 million
High	50%	$25,000	13.92 million

These percentages are model assumptions, not IRS findings.

An original study of minimum-wage violations found 2.4 million affected workers in ten large states and inferred more than $15 billion in national annual losses. Row 16 counts only the assumed willful subset capable of satisfying criminal law, not every wage dispute or civil violation.

CMS reported approximately $96 billion in improper payments across major health programs for fiscal year 2025, while emphasizing that insufficient documentation is generally not evidence of fraud. The central healthcare model treats 5% of that value as criminal and assumes approximately $1,000 per fraudulent claim or claim cluster:

$$\$96\text{B}\times5\%\div \$1{,}000 \approx4.8\text{M}$$

That is rounded to 5 million. The low and high scenarios use criminal shares of roughly 1% and 25%.

Road crime

The CDC estimates that U.S. adults made approximately 125 million alcohol-impaired driving trips in 2020. The central 150 million adds a limited allowance for drug-impaired driving, serious reckless driving, hit-and-run, and other criminal transportation episodes, while avoiding a separate addition for conduct already included in the alcohol figure.

Categories with the weakest national measurement

Federal sentencing data for fiscal year 2024 recorded only 353 bribery or corruption cases, 650 administration-of-justice cases, 134 environmental cases, 18,333 immigration cases, and 225 national-defense cases. Those federal dispositions provide detected lower anchors, not national prevalence totals. Rows 17–19, 22, and 23 apply broad multipliers to account for state and local jurisdiction, cases resolved outside federal court, undiscovered violations, and criminal conduct without an individual complainant. These are among the least certain rows.

Likewise, the FBI estimated approximately 10.1 million arrests in 2019, including substantial numbers for DUI, drunkenness, disorderly conduct, weapons violations, drug violations, liquor laws, and “all other offenses.” The central 20-million figure for row 25 represents additional minor criminal events not arrested and not assigned to another row. Civil infractions are excluded.

Addition of the central estimates

The central total divides into three blocks:

$$173.745\text{M}$$

for interpersonal, property, business, fraud, and human-scale cybercrime;

$$2.281\text{B}$$

for drugs, weapons, other illicit markets, and criminal driving trips; and

$$34.345\text{M}$$

for financial, tax, labor, corruption, justice-process, environmental, healthcare, border, national-security, and local offenses.

Therefore:

$$173.745\text{M}+2.281\text{B}+34.345\text{M} =\boxed{2.48909\text{ billion}}$$

Approximately 75.5% of the central estimate consists of illegal drug transactions. Drugs, other illicit markets, and criminal driving together account for approximately 91.6%. The billion-scale result therefore does not depend on pretending that every unresolved missing person is a murder or that ordinary theft alone reaches a billion. It results primarily from repeatedly occurring illicit transactions and unlawful driving episodes that police statistics do not enumerate individually.