The Federal Trade Commission’s latest tally of what Americans said they lost to fraud in 2025 lands at roughly $16 billion, the highest calendar-year figure the agency has published. Of that total, $3.5 billion traces to imposter scams — schemes where someone pretends to be a bank, a government agency, or a familiar company — making impersonation the single most reported type of fraud for a fifth consecutive year. Both figures come from the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, the database that compiles fraud complaints people file directly with the agency and with dozens of partner organizations, and they describe what consumers said happened to them, not an estimate of fraud across the whole population.
A record year in the FTC’s own count
The FTC published these totals on June 15, 2026, as its annual accounting of calendar-year 2025 Consumer Sentinel data, not as a response to any single new event. The precise figure behind the headline number is $15.9 billion in reported losses across roughly 3 million fraud reports, up from $12.5 billion and 2.6 million reports in 2024 — a jump of about 25% in dollars lost in a single year. Reported losses have climbed every year since 2020, when the total stood under $6 billion.
Within that total, the FTC’s imposter-scam release states that people reported losing $3.5 billion to impersonation schemes in 2025, with reported losses in that category nearly tripling since 2020. Imposter scams accounted for nearly one in three fraud reports last year, more than any other category, and the costliest single sub-type was businesses impersonating banks — the kind of scam that typically opens with a fake account-security alert designed to convince someone to move money to “protect” it.
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Investment schemes cost the most, imposters get reported the most
Report volume and dollar losses tell different stories. In prepared testimony to the Joint Economic Committee on March 25, 2026, the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection stated that investment scams, not imposter schemes, produced the largest reported losses of any fraud category in 2025: more than $7.9 billion, or roughly half of all reported fraud losses, with an average individual loss above $10,000. Imposter scams drew more reports overall — over 1 million of them in 2025 — but a typical imposter-scam report involves a far smaller dollar amount than a typical investment-scam report, which is how the two categories can each lead a different ranking at the same time. Within imposter scams specifically, business impersonators accounted for close to $1 billion in reported 2025 losses and government impersonators for about $920 million, up from $789 million in 2024.
Bank transfers and cryptocurrency carry the biggest losses
The same congressional testimony broke out how people said they paid. In 2025, consumers reported the highest aggregate dollar losses on payments sent by bank transfer, followed by cryptocurrency — a pattern the FTC has also documented for older adults specifically in earlier reports, tying bank-transfer and cryptocurrency losses mostly to investment scams and to scammers impersonating well-known businesses. Credit cards, by contrast, were the payment method identified most often across fraud reports generally, meaning more people said they paid a scammer by card than by any other method, even though the typical dollar amount tied to a single card payment runs far lower than a single bank-transfer or cryptocurrency payment.
The FTC’s own numbers cut two ways by age
The FTC’s most detailed breakdown of fraud by age comes from a separate report, Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025, published December 1, 2025 and built on full-year 2024 Sentinel data — one year behind the 2025 total above, and labeled here by its own year rather than blended into it. That report describes a pattern the agency has found consistently for years: adults under 60 report actually losing money to fraud at a higher rate than adults 60 and older. Older adults file plenty of fraud reports of their own, but a much larger share of theirs describe a scam they spotted or were targeted by without sending any money, rather than one that cost them a dollar.
Yet when older adults did lose money in 2024, they lost far more per incident. The combined median individual loss for people 60 and older was $900, up from $650 the year before, and for people 80 and older it reached $1,650 — higher than any other age group measured. Contact method mattered too: phone calls produced the highest median individual loss for older adults, at $2,210, even though social media generated more total reports and more combined dollars lost for that age group overall. The FTC’s report frames this as older adults being somewhat more likely to spot and avoid a scam, but losing considerably more on the ones that do succeed.
What “reported” does and doesn’t measure
Every figure above describes reported losses — what consumers chose to tell the FTC or one of its data-sharing partners, not a survey of everyone who was actually defrauded. The FTC’s own research suggests that is a small slice of the real total: applying its assumed underreporting rates to 2024 data, the agency estimated the true cost of fraud to all consumers that year, adjusted for underreporting, at $195.9 billion, versus $12.5 billion actually reported, and put the true cost to older adults alone as high as $81.5 billion against $2.4 billion reported. The FTC treats its own headline numbers the same way: a floor built from people who filed a report, not a ceiling on how much fraud actually occurred.
Every number in this accounting starts with someone choosing to describe what happened to them, either directly to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov or through one of the nearly 180 outside organizations — state attorneys general, banks, and companies including Western Union and MoneyGram among them — that feed reports into the same Consumer Sentinel Network the agency draws these totals from.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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