When the Federal Trade Commission published its annual fraud report in March 2025, one number jumped off the page: $12.5 billion in consumer losses for 2024, up 25% from the prior year. That figure alone would have been alarming. But buried in the data was something worse. The total number of fraud complaints barely budged. What changed was how much money each successful scam extracted. In 2023, roughly 27% of people who filed with the FTC reported actually losing money. By 2024, that share had climbed to 38%. Criminals were not casting a wider net. They were landing bigger fish.
Now, private-sector research is filling in the picture further. A May 2025 analysis from cybersecurity firm F-Secure estimates that nearly 40 million Americans were targeted by scams and that per-victim losses roughly doubled compared to the previous year. Separately, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported $16.6 billion in total cybercrime losses for 2024, with cryptocurrency fraud and AI-powered schemes among the fastest-growing categories. As of mid-2026, nothing in the public data suggests the trend has reversed.
Investment fraud is driving the surge
Of the FTC’s $12.5 billion total, investment scams accounted for $5.7 billion, making them the costliest fraud category by a wide margin. A large share of that damage traces to a specific scheme type that law enforcement calls “pig butchering,” or sha zhu pan. The playbook is methodical: a stranger initiates contact through a dating app, LinkedIn, or even a wrong-number text message. Over weeks or months, they build trust, then steer the target toward a fake cryptocurrency trading platform that displays fabricated gains. Victims deposit more and more money before discovering the platform is a shell and the “profits” never existed.
The FBI’s IC3 report singled out pig-butchering operations as a primary driver of crypto-related complaints. Many of these networks operate from compounds in Southeast Asia, staffed in some cases by trafficking victims forced to run the scams. The Department of Justice secured several indictments and asset seizures tied to these operations in late 2024 and early 2025, but investigators have acknowledged that enforcement is outpaced by the volume of new schemes.
AI and crypto have rewritten the rules
Two technologies are reshaping fraud faster than defenses can adapt. Artificial intelligence has made scams dramatically more convincing. Deepfake audio can now clone a voice from a few seconds of publicly available audio, turning a “grandchild in trouble” call from a clumsy impersonation into something that fools even cautious listeners. AI-generated text and images allow criminals to build professional-looking investment platforms, draft flawless phishing emails in any language, and fabricate celebrity endorsements that circulate on social media.
Cryptocurrency, meanwhile, functions as the escape route. Once funds convert to digital assets, they can move through layered wallets and across borders in minutes. Unlike a wire transfer routed through a regulated bank, a crypto transaction has no built-in recall mechanism. For victims, this combination is devastating: AI lowers the cost of launching a believable scam, and crypto raises the cost of recovering stolen money to something close to impossible.
What the 40-million figure actually tells us
F-Secure’s estimate that nearly 40 million Americans were targeted deserves careful framing. The number comes from the company’s own consumer research, not from a federal database. The same report states that fraud “reaches more than half of all consumers,” which would imply well over 100 million adults encountered scam attempts of some kind. The gap between “received a scam message” and “lost money” is enormous, and F-Secure has not publicly detailed how it bridges the two.
Neither the FTC nor the FBI has endorsed the specific claim that average per-victim losses doubled. Readers should treat F-Secure’s figures as industry modeling: useful for identifying directional trends, but not directly comparable to the government’s complaint-driven tallies. The federal numbers themselves almost certainly undercount total fraud, since many victims never file a report with any agency. But the FTC’s $12.5 billion and the FBI’s $16.6 billion remain the most documented baselines available.
Shame and confusion keep the real number hidden
Underreporting is the dark matter of fraud statistics. Victims of romance scams frequently avoid filing complaints because they feel humiliated. Older adults targeted by imposter schemes sometimes fear that admitting they were deceived will prompt family members to question their independence. Younger victims who lose money on fake crypto platforms may assume no agency can help, or may not even realize the platform was fraudulent until months later.
Others simply do not know where to report. The FTC, the FBI’s IC3, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, state attorneys general, and local police all accept complaints, but there is no single intake point. The result is a patchwork of partial data that no single agency can stitch together into a complete picture. Private firms try to fill the gap with surveys and modeling, but those methods carry their own margins of error. What the combined evidence makes clear is that $12.5 billion is a floor, not a ceiling.
How to protect yourself (and why reporting still matters)
The defensive advice from federal agencies has not changed much, but the urgency behind it has. The single most effective habit is verification: if anyone contacts you requesting money or sensitive information, whether they claim to be a relative, a government official, or a company representative, end the conversation and reach out to that person or organization directly using a number you find on your own. Scammers rely on urgency to short-circuit this step.
For investment opportunities, the Securities and Exchange Commission maintains a free tool called Investor.gov where consumers can verify whether a broker or platform is registered. Any opportunity that promises guaranteed returns, especially in crypto, is almost certainly fraudulent. On the technical side, enabling multi-factor authentication on financial accounts and using a password manager remain among the highest-impact steps an individual can take.
Reporting matters even when recovery feels unlikely. Filing with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and with the FBI at ic3.gov feeds the databases that investigators use to identify patterns, build cases, and allocate resources. The FBI’s IC3 has noted that timely reports of wire fraud have, in some cases, allowed agents to freeze funds before they left the banking system. A complaint that feels pointless to one victim may be the data point that connects a larger network.
Losses are outrunning every system built to stop them
The core problem, visible in every dataset from 2024, is a mismatch of speed. Fraud losses are scaling faster than the institutions designed to prevent or recover them. The FTC pursues civil enforcement. The FBI investigates criminal networks. Banks flag suspicious transactions. But none of these mechanisms operate at the pace of a crypto transfer that settles in minutes or a deepfake voice call that takes seconds to deceive. By the time a victim recognizes what happened, the money has often crossed multiple wallets and international borders.
Viewed from mid-2026, the 2024 data looks less like a spike and more like a new baseline. Congress has held hearings on AI-enabled fraud and crypto-facilitated money laundering, but no comprehensive legislation has reached the president’s desk. The CFPB has pushed banks toward broader reimbursement for certain scam-related losses, though the scope of those protections remains contested. Until the speed of enforcement catches up to the speed of the scams, the financial burden will continue to fall hardest on the people least equipped to absorb it: retirees on fixed incomes who wire savings to fake tax offices, young investors lured by fabricated trading platforms, and families who pick up the phone and hear a voice they trust asking for help that will never arrive.
