Consumer Fraud Statistics in US 2026 | Scam Reports & Key Facts

Consumer Fraud in the United States 2026

American consumers reported losing more money to fraud in 2025 than in any year on record. The Federal Trade Commission received 3 million fraud reports and consumers reported $15.9 billion in losses, a substantial jump from $12.5 billion in 2024, itself a 25% increase over 2023’s already record-setting $10 billion. That trajectory, more than doubling in just two years, reflects both a growing volume of scam attempts and a troubling shift in effectiveness: fraud is now converting a much larger share of contacts into actual financial losses than it did just a few years ago.

This report covers the full range of consumer fraud statistics shaping the US in 2026, from total reports and losses to the specific scam categories costing Americans the most money, how scammers make contact, which age groups lose the most, and what federal law enforcement data reveals about the newest fraud threats. Every figure below reflects the most current data available, drawn primarily from the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network and the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

Interesting Facts About Consumer Fraud Statistics in US 2026

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network, FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center

The scale of consumer fraud in the US has grown dramatically in just a few years. Reported losses climbed from $5.8 billion in 2021 to $10 billion in 2023, then to $12.5 billion in 2024, and finally to $15.9 billion in 2025, a trajectory the FTC describes as a structural escalation rather than a temporary spike. Crucially, much of this increase isn’t simply more scam attempts landing, it’s scams working more often: the share of fraud reporters who actually lost money nearly doubled, from 27% in 2023 to 38% in 2024, suggesting scammers are converting contacts into losses far more efficiently than before.

Investment scams now account for the single largest category of dollar losses, reaching $7.9 billion in 2025 alone, while imposter scams, criminals posing as government agents, romantic interests, relatives, or well-known businesses, remain the most frequently reported fraud type, generating over 1 million reports. Identity theft compounds the picture further, with 1,135,270 reports filed in 2024, a 9.5% increase over the prior year, and separately, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded $20.9 billion in total cybercrime losses for 2025, a 26% year-over-year increase that captures a broader universe of online crime beyond the FTC’s consumer fraud figures alone.

1. Total Consumer Fraud Reports and Losses in the US 2026

Total Reported Fraud Losses by Year
2021 |███████████                $5.8 billion
2023 |███████████████████         $10 billion
2024 |███████████████████████████ $12.5 billion
2025 |████████████████████████████████ $15.9 billion

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

The FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, which has collected consumer fraud and identity theft reports since 1997, shows an unmistakable acceleration in both the volume and cost of fraud over the past several years. Reported losses reached $5.8 billion in 2021, itself a 70% jump over 2020, then climbed past the symbolic $10 billion mark for the first time in 2023. That figure grew a further 25% to $12.5 billion in 2024, and jumped again to $15.9 billion in 2025, according to FTC testimony before Congress in March 2026, with total fraud reports climbing from 2.6 million to 3 million over that same one-year span.

Testifying before the Joint Economic Committee, FTC official Lois Greisman emphasized that combating fraud remains “the core of the FTC’s consumer protection mission,” noting the agency brought 40 law enforcement actions in fiscal year 2025 targeting schemes ranging from fraudulent business opportunities and investment scams to unlawful robocalls, tech support fraud, and government impersonation. Sentinel’s data isn’t survey-based; it reflects actual unverified reports submitted directly by consumers and by data-sharing law enforcement partners, meaning the true scale of unreported fraud is almost certainly higher than these already substantial totals suggest.

2. Why Fraud Losses Are Rising: Reports vs Loss Rate in 2026

Share of Fraud Reporters Who Actually Lost Money
2023 |███████████████████████████                  27%
2024 |██████████████████████████████████████        38%

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

One of the most important findings buried within the FTC’s 2024 data is that fraud isn’t just growing in volume, it’s getting meaningfully more effective per contact. The share of fraud reporters who indicated they actually lost money jumped from 27% in 2023 to 38% in 2024, nearly doubling in a single year. The FTC’s own March 2025 analysis identified this shift, not simply a rise in total victim contacts, as the primary driver behind the jump in total dollar losses, implying scammers are successfully closing a much larger share of the attempts they make.

The median loss per fraud report stood at $497 in 2024, but that figure masks enormous variation: nearly 125,000 people reported losing more than $10,000 each in a single year. Analysts tracking this shift point to AI-enabled personalization of phishing and impersonation scripts as the most likely mechanical explanation, since language models now let a single fraudster generate thousands of individually tailored messages, referencing a target’s name, employer, and recent activity scraped from public sources, at effectively zero marginal cost, eliminating the grammatical errors and generic phrasing that once made many scam attempts easy to spot.

3. Top Fraud Categories by Dollar Losses in 2026

Top Fraud Categories by Reported Losses, 2025
Investment scams |████████████████████████████████████████  $7.9 billion
Imposter scams   |██████████████████                        $3.5 billion+

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

Investment scams have emerged as the single costliest fraud category by dollar losses, and the trend is accelerating sharply: losses climbed from $4.6 billion in 2023 to $5.7 billion in 2024, a 24% increase, before jumping again to $7.9 billion in 2025. These schemes frequently involve fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms, fake trading apps, or “pig butchering” scams that build a relationship with a victim over weeks before steering them toward a fraudulent investment platform, and researchers note that when investment scams do succeed, 80% of contacts result in an actual financial loss, with a median loss around $10,000 per victim, far higher than most other fraud categories.

Imposter scams, where criminals falsely claim to be a romantic interest, a government official, a relative in distress, a well-known business, or technical support staff, remain the most frequently reported fraud category, generating 845,806 reports in 2024 alone and over 1 million in 2025, with losses reaching $2.95 billion and then $3.5 billion or more respectively. Bank transfer and payment fraud added a further $2.09 billion in 2024 losses, a 13% increase over 2023, while cryptocurrency-related fraud specifically accounted for $1.42 billion, underscoring how frequently digital and hard-to-reverse payment methods now feature in the most costly scam categories.

4. How Scammers Contact Victims in the US 2026

Cumulative and Annual Losses by Contact Method
Social media (cumulative since 2021) |████████████████████████████████████  $2.7 billion
Text messages (2024)                 |██████                                    $470 million
Email (2024)                         |████████                                  $502 million

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

Social media has become the single costliest contact method scammers use, with the FTC reporting $2.7 billion in cumulative losses tied to social-media-originated fraud since 2021, more than any other channel tracked. Text messages have grown into a major vector as well, with losses reaching $470 million in 2024, five times higher than the comparable prior period, and the FTC identifying bogus bank fraud warnings as the single most common form of text-based scam, messages designed to look like a legitimate alert from a victim’s own bank about suspicious account activity.

Email remains a persistent contact method too, accounting for 25% of fraud reports where a contact method was identified, with 11% of those email-originated reports indicating an actual money loss totaling $502 million in aggregate. The FTC has also separately flagged a sharp rise in government impersonation scams specifically demanding cash payments, a tactic distinct from the wire transfers and gift cards more commonly associated with older scam patterns, along with a documented surge in losses tied to Bitcoin ATM machines, both signals that scammers continue adapting their payment collection methods as consumers and financial institutions grow more familiar with earlier tactics.

5. Identity Theft Reports and Trends in the US 2026

Identity Theft Reports Filed with the FTC
2023 |███████████████████████████████████  1,036,845
2024 |████████████████████████████████████████ 1,135,270 (+9.5%)

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

Identity theft reports climbed to 1,135,270 in 2024, a 9.5% increase from 1,036,845 the year before, making it consistently one of the most frequently reported consumer crime categories tracked by the FTC. Credit card fraud has topped the list of identity theft types every year since 2019, with 449,032 reports in 2024 alone, a 7.8% increase from 416,466 in 2023, covering both existing card misuse and fraudulent new account openings using a victim’s stolen information.

Smaller but fast-growing subcategories deserve attention too. Employment identity theft, where criminals use a stolen Social Security number to obtain a job under someone else’s identity, generated 37,556 reports in 2024, up 20% year-over-year, a category researchers link closely to the broader rise in employment scams targeting job seekers, covered in more depth in employment scam statistics. Medical identity theft, while comparatively rare at 10,116 reports, carries outsized consequences since it can corrupt a victim’s health records and lead to incorrect medical treatment down the line, making early detection especially important for this specific category.

6. Fraud and Age: Who Loses the Most Money in 2026

Median Loss When Fraud Occurs, by Age Group
20s     |███████                417
70s     |██████████████         1,000
80+     |██████████████████████ 1,600+

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

Age plays a decisive role in fraud outcomes, though the pattern runs opposite to what many might expect: younger adults report fraud contacts more frequently, but older adults lose dramatically more money per incident when fraud succeeds. FTC data shows people in their 20s reporting a median loss of roughly $417 when fraud occurred, climbing steadily to about $1,000 for people in their 70s, and exceeding $1,600 for those 80 and older, the highest median per-incident loss of any age group tracked. Total fraud losses reported by adults 60 and older grew roughly fourfold between 2020 and 2024, from about $600 million to $2.4 billion, according to FTC data, a trend explored comprehensively in elder fraud statistics covering the specific scam types and financial impact hitting senior Americans hardest.

Researchers attribute this age-loss gradient to a combination of factors: older victims are more likely to have substantial retirement savings, home equity, or investment accounts that scammers can target for a single large transfer, and they’re also disproportionately targeted by more elaborate, higher-touch scams, including romance schemes and government or bank impersonation, that build trust over an extended period before requesting money, rather than the smaller, higher-volume scams more commonly aimed at younger targets. Older consumers also reported $159 million in losses specifically to tech support scams in 2024, a category that continues to disproportionately affect this demographic even as awareness campaigns have expanded in recent years.

7. FBI IC3 and Cybercrime Losses in the US 2026

FBI IC3 Total Cybercrime Losses
2024 (implied prior year) |████████████████████████████         ~$16.6 billion
2025                      |████████████████████████████████████  $20.9 billion (+26%)

Source: FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2025 Annual Report

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) operates alongside the FTC as a second major federal fraud-tracking system, capturing a somewhat different and complementary slice of online crime. IC3’s 2025 Annual Report documented $20.9 billion in total cybercrime losses, a 26% increase over the prior year, crossing the $20 billion threshold for the first time. Business Email Compromise, a sophisticated form of fraud where criminals impersonate executives or vendors to redirect wire transfers, accounted for over $2.9 billion of that total in 2025 alone, remaining one of the most financially damaging categories IC3 tracks.

For the first time, IC3’s 2025 report broke out AI-facilitated fraud as its own standalone category, documenting 22,364 complaints and $893 million in attributed losses, though the bureau explicitly cautioned this figure represents an undercount, since most victims don’t recognize when artificial intelligence was involved in an attack targeting them. Consistent with the FTC’s own age-based findings, IC3 recorded Americans 60 and older filing over 200,000 complaints in 2025 with $7.7 billion in reported losses, the highest total dollar figure of any single age group despite people in their 30s and 40s submitting a larger raw number of complaints overall.

8. State-by-State Fraud and Identity Theft Rates in the US 2026

States With Highest Per-Capita Fraud Reports (2024)
Florida | Georgia | Delaware | Nevada | Maryland

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network

Fraud and identity theft rates vary considerably by state when measured per capita rather than by raw report volume. The FTC’s 2024 data identifies Florida, Georgia, Delaware, Nevada, and Maryland as the five states with the highest per-capita fraud report rates, while Florida, Georgia, Nevada, Texas, and Delaware top the list specifically for identity theft reports per 100,000 residents. Florida appears at the top of both lists, and separate analysis has found Florida residents face over five times the identity theft risk of residents in South Dakota, the state with among the lowest per-capita reporting rates in the country.

Metropolitan area data reinforces this geographic concentration further, with the Miami–Fort Lauderdale and Atlanta–Sandy Springs metro areas consistently ranking first and second nationally for per-capita identity theft complaints across multiple consecutive years. Researchers attribute this state and metro-level clustering to a mix of factors, including larger retiree populations in states like Florida that make attractive targets for the high-loss scam categories detailed earlier in this article, alongside varying levels of state consumer protection enforcement and financial institution fraud monitoring across different regions.

9. Emerging Fraud Trends: AI and Synthetic Identity in the US 2026

FTC's "Other" Identity Theft Category Growth (Catch-All for Emerging Fraud Types)
Q1 2024 |███████████████████████                    baseline
Q1 2025 |█████████████████████████████████████████   +79% year-over-year

Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Network, Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), Recorded Future

The FTC’s catch-all “Other” identity theft category, which captures fraud types that don’t yet fit the agency’s established classifications, has shown sustained, uninterrupted growth since 2022, jumping 79% in the first quarter of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024. Analysts treating this category as a leading indicator point to synthetic identity fraud, where criminals combine a real Social Security number, often belonging to a child or deceased person, with a fabricated name and address to create an entirely new identity that can pass standard verification checks, as one of the most likely contributors to this unclassified growth, a threat explored in detail in synthetic identity fraud statistics.

Compounding this trend, credential theft surged 160% in 2025, with 1.8 billion logins stolen from 5.8 million infected devices, according to threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, a shift driven increasingly by infostealer malware that silently harvests credentials directly from individual devices rather than large centralized database breaches. The Identity Theft Resource Center separately confirmed a record 3,322 data compromise events in 2025, a 79% increase over five years, with an additional 780 compromises in the first quarter of 2026 alone generating nearly 140 million victim notifications, underscoring how the sheer volume of exposed personal data continues expanding the raw material available to fraudsters regardless of whether any individual consumer has been directly targeted before.

Disclaimer: This research report is compiled from publicly available sources. While reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, no representation or warranty, express or implied, is given as to the completeness or reliability of the information. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions, losses, or damages of any kind arising from the use of this report.

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