Which scams cost Americans the most: FTC fraud report data

In 2025, consumers filed 3 million fraud reports with the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network and reported $15.9 billion in losses. In 2024 the figures were 2.6 million reports and over $12 billion. The FTC told Congress in March 2026 that reported losses have risen every year for six years and are up nearly 430% since 2020, driven largely by more people reporting losses of $100,000 or more.

Source: FTC testimony to the Joint Economic Committee, March 25, 2026. Reported losses are a floor, not an estimate of the whole problem: most people who lose money never report it. Taking underreporting into account, the FTC estimated the overall cost of fraud to consumers in 2024 at as much as $195.9 billion.

The FBI counts separately. Its Internet Crime Complaint Center received 1,008,597 complaints in 2025 with $20.877 billion in reported losses, and people aged 60 and over reported $7.7 billion of that (2025 IC3 Annual Report). The two systems overlap, since the FBI shares data with the FTC, so do not add them together.

The FTC’s most recent full Data Book covers 2024. It ranks fraud categories by how many reports each got, and also shows how much was lost. The two rankings tell very different stories: imposter scams are by far the most common, but investment scams take far more money per victim.

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024. In 2024 the FTC received 2,600,678 fraud reports; 38% reported losing money, for a total of $12,537,194,708 and a median loss of $497.

Inside the imposter category, the 2024 report counts break down like this:

Each has its own guide: imposter scams, tech support scams, romance scams and investment and crypto scams.

How you pay decides how much you can get back. In 2025, the FTC said the largest losses went by bank payment, followed by cryptocurrency, while credit cards were the payment method people named most often. The 2024 detail:

The pattern is not an accident. Scammers push people toward bank transfers, crypto, gift cards and cash because those are hard to reverse. A credit card charge can be disputed under federal law. That gives you a simple rule:

In 2025, a text message was the first contact people reported most often, but social media cost the most:$2.1 billion reported lost to scams that started there, about eight times the 2020 figure (FTC Data Spotlight, April 2026). Of that, $1.1 billion went to investment scams. The 2024 detail, from the Data Book:

Read the “% reporting a loss” column. Most people who get a scam email or text ignore it. When a scam starts on social media, 70% of those who report it lost money, because by the time anyone reports it they have usually been talking to the scammer for a while. Our guide to text message scams covers the most common texts, and how to spot phishing covers email.

Younger adults report losing money more often. Older adults lose more each time. In 2024, 44% of people in their 20s who reported fraud lost money, against 21% of people 80 and over, but the median loss for the over-80s was $1,650, nearly four times that of people in their 20s.

Only 45% of 2024 fraud reports included the person’s age, so treat this as a picture of who reports, not of everyone who is targeted. If you are helping an older relative, the imposter scams guide covers the bank, government and tech support stories that drive the largest losses.

1. Call the company you paid through, now. Your bank or card issuer for a transfer or card payment, the gift card company for gift cards, the crypto exchange or ATM operator for crypto. Ask them to stop or reverse the payment. Speed matters most with wires and bank transfers.
2. Report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and, for anything that happened online, at IC3.gov. Large, recent transfers reported to the FBI can sometimes be frozen by its Recovery Asset Team working with banks.
3. If you gave out your Social Security number or ID, go to IdentityTheft.gov for a recovery plan and freeze your credit.
4. Ignore anyone who offers to recover your money for a fee. The FTC reports that people who lose money to investment scams are often targeted again by fake recovery services.

This page reports what the FTC and FBI published; it is general information, not legal or financial advice.