Consumer Fraud Losses Quintupled Since 2020, FTC Says

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) received 3 million fraud reports from consumers in 2025, and those consumers reported $15.9 billion in losses, an official told a congressional committee Wednesday (March 25).

Those figures were up from 2.6 million fraud reports and $12 billion in losses in 2024, Lois Greisman, associate director of the FTC’s Division of Marketing Practices, said in a prepared statement delivered before the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee.

American consumers’ losses to fraud could be much higher, because not all victims report their losses to the FTC, Greisman said. The overall cost of fraud in 2024 may have been as high as $195.9 billion, according to an FTC estimate.

Reported fraud losses increased in each of the past six years, and they have risen by nearly 430% since 2020, Greisman said.

“This trend is largely driven by a sharp increase in the number of consumers reporting large losses of $100,000 or more,” Greisman said.

In 2025, the most reported form of fraud was imposter scams, while the top form of fraud by aggregate losses was investment scams.

“Notably, approximately half of the total reported fraud losses for 2025 are attributable to investment scams,” Greisman said.

In terms of payment method used to send funds to scammers, credit card payments were the most frequently used method, while bank payments were the method that accounted for the highest aggregate losses.

The contact method most often used by scanners was a test message, while the method accounting for the largest aggregate reported losses was social media.

“The FTC makes its analysis of CSN [Consumer Sentinel Network] data available to the public in many ways, including by issuing ‘Data Spotlights,’ which alert the public to emerging fraud trends, and publishing interactive data dashboards on Tableau Public, so that stakeholders and the public can observe fraud trends throughout the year,” Greisman said.

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Financial Scams and Consumer Trust” found that more than 8 in 10 reported scams involve impersonation; nearly two-thirds of victims send money within 24 hours; and younger, affluent and college-educated consumers face the highest scam exposure.