The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said today that Americans lost a record $12.5 billion to fraud last year, a 25% increase over the previous year.
Consumers reported that investment scams resulted in the highest losses, totaling around $5.7 billion with a median loss of over $9,000 and exceeding all other fraud categories. The second largest reported loss was linked with imposter scams, amounting to $2.95 billion in 2024.
Younger people have also reported losing money to fraud more often than people over 70, as 44% of all reports filed last year came from consumers between 20 and 29.
Job scams and fake employment agency losses have also jumped significantly in recent years, with the number of reports nearly tripling and losses growing from $90 million to $501 million within just four years between 2020 and 2024.
“People lost over $3 billion to scams that started online, compared to approximately $1.9 billion lost to more ‘traditional’ contact methods like calls, texts, or emails. However, people lost more money per person (a median of $1,500) when they interacted with scammers on the phone,” the FTC said.
“For the second consecutive year, email was the most common way that consumers reported being contacted by scammers. Phone calls were the second most commonly reported contact method for fraud in 2024, followed by text messages.”
The FTC added 6.5 million consumer reports to the Consumer Sentinel Network (Sentinel) secure online database in 2024, with over 118.960 reports of investment fraud schemes and 845,806 reports of imposter scams.
However, it’s important to note that the data shared by the FTC reflects only a fraction of the actual harm scammers inflicted last year since the vast majority of frauds are never reported.
Fraud victims can file identity theft reports at IdentityTheft.gov and report incidents at ReportFraud.ftc.gov.
After being included in the FTC’s Sentinel database, their reports are available to approximately 2,800 federal, state, local, and international law enforcement professionals, helping fraud investigators track down scammers and making it easier to discover trends.
A full breakdown of reports received in 2024, including state and metropolitan area statistics, can be found on the FTC’s data analysis site at ftc.gov/exploredata.
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