Online Scams May Be Costing Americans 7 Times More Than Reported

The fake package text. The too-good-to-be-true investment offer. The stranger in your DMs who quickly starts asking for money. Online scams have become a routine part of everyday internet use, and a new report estimates they may be costing Americans nearly $150 billion a year. Americans lost an estimated $148.2 billion to online scams and cybercrime in 2025, according to a new report from the Consumer Federation of America. That’s nearly 26% more than in 2024 and roughly three times the losses recorded four years earlier. The exact amount is impossible to know, and that is partly the point of the report. Americans reported approximately $20.9 billion in losses to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center last year. The Consumer Federation of America estimates the true total is more than seven times higher because most victims never report their losses to law enforcement. The organization based that calculation on a 2017 federal survey that found only around 14% of financial fraud victims reported the crime to police. Applying that reporting rate to the FBI’s 2025 figures produces the much larger $148.2 billion estimate. That doesn’t mean every American household lost money to a scam last year. But it does suggest the official figures capture only a fraction of the problem — and that even the FBI’s more conservative estimates show scam losses are climbing rapidly. Crypto scams dominate More than half of the losses reported to the FBI involved cryptocurrency. Victims reported losing nearly $11.4 billion in crypto-related incidents, up about 22% from the previous year. The Consumer Federation of America estimates the true cost could be closer to $80.7 billion. Crypto is especially useful to scammers because payments can be difficult to reverse, and funds can be quickly moved through multiple wallets. Many victims are first targeted through fake investment opportunities, social media ads, dating apps or messages from scammers posing as businesses or government agencies. Investment fraud was the most costly category in the FBI’s data, accounting for more than $8.6 billion in reported losses. Compromised business email and tech support scams followed at roughly $3 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively. AI is making familiar scams easier The FBI also measured AI-related crime for the first time in 2025, recording 22,364 complaints and $893 million in associated losses. Using the same underreporting calculation, the Consumer Federation of America estimated AI-enabled losses at approximately $6.3 billion. That doesn’t mean AI has created an entirely new $6.3 billion category of fraud separate from existing schemes. An AI-generated voice clone, for example, may also be classified as an impersonation scam. Instead, the figure provides an early indication of how generative AI is being incorporated into familiar types of fraud. Scammers can now cheaply create convincing profiles, personalized messages, fake documents and cloned voices at scale, allowing them to launch thousands of tailored attempts until a victim responds. Older adults continue to lose the most People 60 and older reported nearly $7.75 billion in losses to the FBI, a 59% increase from 2024. The average reported loss for that age group was $38,500, and more than 12,000 complainants said they lost over $100,000. Younger people aren’t immune, though. Reported losses among people under 20 nearly tripled in one year, although that group still accounted for the smallest total losses. These figures come as scam attempts have become almost unavoidable in online life. The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a nonpartisan research organization run by The Associated Press and the University of Chicago, published a poll in June that found that 58% of US adults encounter suspected scams every day, while 92% receive them at least monthly. A lot of those scams are showing up on social media, especially Facebook, Whats