Americans lost an estimated $148.2 billion to online scams and crimes in 2025, up 25.8 percent from 2024, a per household loss of $1,009, according to an updated report from the Consumer Federation of America, or CFA, an advocacy organization.
This “true” cost of scams is more than seven times higher than what was reported to the FBI in 2025, the CFA said in its analysis. In addition, more than half of all reported losses involve cryptocurrency, which increased 21.93 percent since 2024, with $11.4 billion in reported losses and an estimated true cost of $80.7 billion. AI-enabled fraud, measured for the first time this year, added another $6.3 billion.
The $148 billion estimate is more than the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, information, which recorded just $20.8 billion in reported losses for 2025 – which shows the scale of harm that goes unreported to authorities.
Seniors, age 60 plus, continue to be the largest targeted group of people and saw an increase of more than 60 percent in reported losses, averaging $38,500 per reported incident. The under-20 age group remains the smallest, but saw a 198 percent increase in reported losses from 2024.
“This update shows that the troubling trend of rapidly increasing scam losses continues while tech companies are too often allowed to avoid accountability,”Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the CFA, said in a statement.
Winters said the good news is that policymakers are beginning to respond, from new lawsuits and the SCAM Act proposed in Congress, to growing momentum in state legislatures across the country.
However, he said, more action is needed.
Social media platforms are one main way people are scammed. Meta’s platforms account for the top three spots: Facebook, 57 percent; Instagram, 22 percent; and WhatsApp, 8 percent; according to the Better Business Bureau.
The Global Anti-Scam Alliance found that 81 percent of all scam attempts in the United States occurred on platforms with a direct-message function.
The CFA has sued Meta for failing to protect users from scam advertisements, alongside a separate civil prosecution by Santa Clara County, Calif., and a 2025 lawsuit from the U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General.
In Congress, lawmakers introduced the SCAM Act, which would require platforms to verify advertisers and act against fraudulent content.
The CFA’s updated analysis finds that consumers in four states – California, Texas, Florida, and New York – still suffer the greatest projected losses, which account for more than one third of nationwide scam damages.
Social media platforms, most commonly associated with online scams, profit from scam content on their platforms:
- Reuters reported that internal Meta documents projected about 10 percent of its 2024 revenue – about $16 billion – would come from ads promoting scams and banned goods. 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.
- The New York Times reported that 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.
- The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta allows suspicious advertisers to accrue up to 32 automated “strikes” for financial fraud before it bans their accounts.
