Americans are losing an estimated $119 billion every year to online scams, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America, or CFA.
This “true” cost of scams is more than seven times higher than what was reported to the FBI in 2024, and comes as Americans reported losing $16.6 billion to online scams, a 33 percent increase from the previous year.
The total $119 billion figure adjusts the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, data from 2024 to estimate a more comprehensive cost to individuals each year.
The report also identifies Meta’s platforms – Facebook at 57 percent, Instagram at 22 percent, and WhatsApp at 8 percent – as the top three online platforms associated with scams, according to the Better Business Bureau. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance has also found that 81 percent of all scam attempts in the United States occurred on platforms with a direct message function.
Social media platforms failing to stop online scams
The report highlights that social media platforms, including Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram, are the platforms most commonly associated with online scams, drawing on investigative reporting to illustrate how these companies profit heavily from the presence of scam content on their platforms:
- Internal Meta documents estimated 10 percent of its 2024 revenue – about $16 billion – would come from ads promoting scams and banned goods, Reuters reported. The investigation also reported that Meta directed its own staff not to take action that would threaten more than 0.15 percent of the company’s revenue.
- Meta allowed scammers to run over 150,000 political advertising scams involving deepfakes and misleading paid content, which earned the company more than $49 million over a seven year period, according to The New York Times.
- Meta allows suspicious advertisers to accrue up to 32 automated “strikes” for financial fraud before it bans their accounts, a Wall Street Journal article reported, in which Meta was called “a cornerstone of the internet fraud economy.”
“The devastating scale of losses represents a crisis that demands swift and unflinching attention, as people increasingly feel unsafe online,” CFA Director of AI and Privacy Ben Winters, said in a statement.“These statistics show that action across the economy – increasing platform liability, shutting down data brokers, improving reporting mechanisms, regulating generative AI, and beefing up consumer protection enforcement resources – are not only exciting ideas but mandates for a safe future.”
Large states have more than a third of scam losses
The report finds that consumers in four states – California, Texas, Florida, and New York – suffered the greatest projected losses, which accounts for more than one third of nationwide scam damages. Estimated annual losses in top states include:
- California: $18.1 billion in annual losses, more than twice as much as any other state in part because of its population, concentration of wealth, large immigrant communities, and sizable elderly population.
- Texas: $9.7 billion in annual losses, owing to the state’s rapid population growth, business sector, large elderly population, and rural communities without access to support services.
- Florida: $7.7 billion in annual losses, as a result of the state’s high concentration of elderly and retiree population who are targeted with complex, highly-specific scams.
- New York: $6.5 billion in annual losses, owing to scams that target New York City’s status as the financial center of the country and diverse immigrant communities within the state.
Smaller states disproportionately suffering from scams
While larger states lead the nation in total annual losses, residents from some of the smallest states are estimated to bear a much heavier burden relative to their population: in 2024, Nevada, $588 per resident; Wyoming, $530; and the District of Columbia, $2,965. D.C. experienced the highest per-capita scam and cybercrime losses.
Criminals targeting Americans with a wide variety of different scams
The most frequent scams are investment scams, $46.6 billion; followed by email targeting scams, $19.7 billion; tech support scams, $10.4 billion; nonpayment and delivery scams, $5.6 billion; romance scams, $4.7 billion; and government impersonation scams, $2.9 billion.
