Americans are losing at least $119 billion every year to scams, according to a new estimate from the nonprofit Consumer Federation of America, a consumer advocacy group.
There is no formal U.S. government estimate of how widespread scams are; some indicators show they have steadily risen for years. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center solicits victims to report their losses but admits its figures are a gross undercount, given that many people don’t want to or know to share that information with the agency.
For 2024, the most recent year for which data is available, the FBI found $16.6 billion in reported losses, beating the previous record, $12.5 billion, in 2023.
The CFA looked at multiple estimates of how frequently scams go unreported — in particular, an extensive 2017 study from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics that found that the government hears of about 14% of scams — to create a ballpark minimum figure of how much people are actually losing.
Ben Winters, the CFA’s director of AI and privacy, said it shows a staggering amount of money is lost to scammers.
“We used the most conservative and sort of most evidence-based estimation of underreporting, which was from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. So we took that figure and extrapolated it out for the scam losses that are reported throughout the country,” he said. “We wanted to be on as solid footing as possible.”
By far the most widely reported and economically devastating scams, according to the FBI survey, are investment scams. They include so-called pig butchering, in which scammers often send texts pretending to come from wrong numbers, then spend months cultivating fake online romantic relationships or friendships with victims. The goal is to spend as much money as possible in bogus cryptocurrency “investments.”
Whereas the public reported $6.6 billion to the FBI in investment scam losses in 2024, the real figure is closer to $46.6 billion, the CFA said.
The future of pig butchering scams is unclear. Many operations have run out of compounds in southeast Asia staffed with human trafficking victims. While law enforcement has shut down some of those compounds, scammers are also increasingly leveraging AI to streamline their operations, requiring less human labor to trick victims out of their savings at scale.
Winters said one major policy recommendation to cut down on scams would be to regulate the data broker industry. Largely unconstrained by federal law, data broker companies package and sell people’s personal information, some of which ends up in scammers’ hands.
In 2021, the data broker Epsilon Data Management settled with the Justice Department and paid victims $127.5 million after it was accused of selling elderly people’s information to scammers.
“You can buy a list, really cheap, of people to target with your investment scam. And you can target people that have shown addictive tendencies or have a lot of credit,” Winters said.
“We think restricting and banning data brokers to the extent possible would be a really strong move in terms of protecting people,” he said. “That’s where we’re seeing some of the most sensitive, targeted scams.”
