Love hurts: Fake romances are the fastest-growing type of scam.
After a brief dip, scams are on the rise again. In July 2026, 21% of consumers said they had personally been the victim of a scam in the past five years, up from 19% in September 2025 and just below the 22% recorded in July 2024.
Among the 31 scam types PYMNTS Intelligence tracks, romance scams climbed fastest as a source of victims’ heaviest losses, up 22% since September 2025. Roughly one in 20 self-victims now name a romance scam as the incident that cost them the most. Identity theft rose 10% to 12.5% and remains the type victims most often name as their costliest, widening a lead it has held since 2024. Blackmail scams fell the most, down 9% to 3.0%, followed by fake debt collection, down 7% to 8.7%.
The costliest scam looks different by generation. Gen Z is the outlier: fake debt collection (8.7%) and blackmail (7.8%) head its list, while identity theft — first or second in every other generation — slips to third. In less than a year, blackmail has displaced money flip scams in Gen Z’s top two. Baby boomers and seniors are the only group to place fake eCommerce and marketplace scams in the top two, effectively tied with identity theft at about 16%.
Scam texts are flooding consumers’ phones.
Scammers are adapting to meet consumers where they spend most of their time and attention, sending more texts and fewer emails. First contact via SMS and text grew 35% since September 2025, reaching 12% of victims, while email-based first contact fell 30% to 13%. A year ago, email outran text by 10 percentage points; today the gap is under 1.5 points.
Scammers adapt their methods to their audience, taking different approaches for different generations. Gen Z victims report SMS or text as the first point of contact at 15%, 32% higher than the average across all victims, and social media at 23%, 31% above average. Baby boomers and seniors, meanwhile, are 15% less likely than the average victim to cite email as the first contact and 35% more likely to cite clicking fraudulent links.
That channel shift gives a sense of where fraud prevention matters most. Tools that defend against text fraud have to work differently than those built for fighting, say, fraudulent link scams.
Most scams cost hundreds; some cost tens of thousands.
The costliest scams are not the most common. Travel scams carry the highest average loss per victim, at $35,272, nearly four times the $9,734 average loss across all scam types. Romance scams follow at $27,587, and investment scams at $14,225. Identity theft, the most cited scam, yields an average loss of just $6,050. Fake debt collection is the least costly scam type, at $2,077 per victim.
That overall average of $9,734 is down 7% from $10,515 in September 2025, but the median loss in a victim’s costliest scam was $404 in July 2026 versus $411 the year before. So, half of all victims lost just a few hundred dollars or less.
The mean is roughly 24 times higher than the median because a small tail of very large losses, the 1.1% of victims who lost $250,000 or more, pulls the average up far past what most people experience.
Who it reaches
Scam victimization skews young. Millennials report the highest rate, at 26%, followed by Gen Z at 24%, both well above the 15% rate among baby boomers and seniors. Older consumers are catching up quickly, though: victimization among baby boomers and seniors rose 1.9 percentage points since September 2025. Younger consumers also carry a disproportionate share of the losses, with Gen Z and Millennial victims together accounting for an estimated $314 billion of the $521 billion in total generation-level losses that PYMNTS Intelligence estimates.
Losses happen fast
Forty-three percent of victims made or authorized a payment within one hour of first contact in July 2026, and 63% paid within the day. Still, there are those who take longer: 18% of victims took two weeks or more to pay.
The realization of what has happened also usually comes quickly: 35% of victims realized their money was gone within 30 minutes of the first transaction, and 60% realized within a day.
Fake eCommerce and marketplace scams are fastest, with 79% of victims paying within a day and a median payment time under an hour, similar to fake debt collection and gift card scams.
Romance scams, meanwhile, go slower: only 16% of victims pay within a day, and the median time to payment is two weeks or more. Investment scams also unfold gradually, with just 37% paying within a day. Product and urgency-based scams rush a victim to pay before they can think it through, while romance and investment scams take weeks to build trust first, which helps explain why romance losses hit so hard when they finally come.
More consumers aren’t reporting scams because they’re not sure how to.
Most scam victims, 58%, report the incident to their bank, and that share held roughly flat from 2025 (57%). However, the share who didn’t report it at all grew 26% in the same period to 11% of victims.
The largest obstacles are tied to factors that banks have some control over. The single most common barrier is consumers’ lack of awareness that reporting is even an option, cited by 28% of non-reporters in both 2025 and 2026. The share who didn’t report because they found the experience too emotionally draining reached 23% of non-reporters, up 23% from a year earlier. Those who said they got no clear guidance on how to file a report reached 18%, up 26% — the fastest growth of any barrier. Those who doubted their financial institution would actually solve the issue reached 16%, up 21%. The only obstacle that decreased was the share not reporting because they thought doing so was too time-consuming, which fell 17% to 11%.
Of course, consumers can’t get their money back if they don’t report the incident. Forty-two percent of victims who reported the scam to their financial institution recovered all of their stolen funds in July 2026, essentially flat versus 41% in September 2025.
Fewer consumers recovered all funds when they reported through channels outside the bank, with that share falling to 20% from 27% last year. Unsurprisingly, non-reporters were least likely to recover all their stolen funds, doing so just 8.1% of the time.
While reporting to a bank does not guarantee a refund, 79% of all victims who recovered any money got it back through their financial institution, making the bank the most consistent channel by far.
Some financial scam victims are far less likely to report
Notably, romance scam victims are the most likely to not report: 40% told no one at all, nearly four times the 11% average across all victims, possibly reflecting the shame and secrecy that often accompany scams built on fake relationships. Victims of job listing scams (18%), gift card scams (18%) and money flip scams (15%) also stay silent at above-average rates. By contrast, victims of travel scams (1.7%) and identity theft (4.3%) are the least likely to stay quiet.
Non-reporting rates have little to do with the value of funds lost: Roughly 12% of victims who lost between $500 and $5,000 stayed silent, compared with just 8.6% of those who lost more than $5,000.
How a financial institution handles scams determines victims’ loyalty.
A scam does not push victims away from digital banking; it pushes them away from the institution that handles it badly. For instance, 55% of scam victims cut back on answering unfamiliar phone calls, 53% on opening emails from unknown senders and 50% on accepting social media requests from strangers.
Some consumers showed similar decreases in trust in their financial institution, but not nearly as many. Across five measures of institutional trust included in the survey, victims cut back only 1.5 times as often as they increased those behaviors. Nearly all of that pullback comes from people moving money out of the account tied to the scam, with 44% of victims doing so less often or stopping altogether. Only 22% of victims reduced banking activity, while 21% increased it. Notably, trust in digital channels actually grew following scams: Consumers are more likely to use online and mobile banking more post-incident than to cut back.
Still, 17% of scam victims say they already switched financial providers because of being scammed, with that share rising to 25% among those who lost more than $5,000. Additionally, 28% of victims say they are somewhat or very likely to switch their primary account within the next 12 months (41% among victims who lost more than $5,000).
Among those who are likely to switch, 31% say they’d do so because of concerns about how well their institution protects them from fraud, and 30% point specifically to how the institution handled or would handle a fraud or scam issue. In other words, it’s rarely the scam itself that costs a bank its customer. It’s more often related to the bank’s response.
Read More
PYMNTS Intelligence is the leading provider of information on the consumer trends driving innovation in consumer finance, digital payments and financial inclusion. To stay up to date, subscribe to our newsletters and read our in-depth reports.
Methodology
The Fraud Economy is a PYMNTS Intelligence exclusive series examining how fraud and scams reach U.S. consumers and how financial institutions respond. This edition draws on a survey of 9,524 U.S. consumers, fielded in July 2026. Of those, 2,222 said they had been the victim of a scam in the past five years and went on to answer detailed questions about the scam with the largest financial impact on them. This report covers personal victimization only. Scam-level findings rest on the 1,913 respondents, or 86.1% of victims, who said their most costly scam in the past five years happened to them personally.
