Federal regulators have a fresh number for how expensive scams got last year, and it isn’t small. The Federal Trade Commission told Congress this year that consumers filed 3 million fraud reports in 2025 and put their combined losses at $15.9 billion, up from 2.6 million reports and more than $12 billion in losses the year before. That’s roughly a $3.4 billion increase in a single year, even though the number of reports grew by a much smaller share, which points to individual losses getting larger rather than just more people getting targeted. For anyone managing a paycheck, a pension, or a fixed retirement income, the trend matters as much as any single case: reported losses are climbing even as more people learn to recognize a scam pitch.
Investment Scams Produced the Single Biggest Category of Losses
Of the $15.9 billion in reported losses, consumers told the FTC they lost more money to investment scams than to any other fraud type in 2025, $7.9 billion in all. The agency’s Consumer Sentinel Network, which gathers reports directly from consumers and from federal, state, and local partners, has tracked investment fraud as a growing category for several years, and 2025 pushed it further ahead of every other type of scam. These schemes often start with a social media ad, a text message, or a stranger in an online group chat promising outsized returns on crypto or a “guaranteed” trading platform, then stall withdrawals once money is deposited. Because these losses often involve retirement savings, home equity, or money moved into an unfamiliar app or wallet, they tend to be far harder to recover than a disputed credit card charge, which is part of why the FTC keeps urging people to independently verify any investment opportunity before funding an account they didn’t set up themselves.
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Imposter Scams Stayed the Most Reported Fraud for a Sixth Straight Year
While investment fraud took the biggest dollar toll, imposter scams remained the most frequently reported category, a pattern the FTC’s testimony says has held since 2020. Consumers filed more than 1 million imposter-scam reports in 2025, with losses topping $3.5 billion. These are the cases where someone poses as a bank, a government agency, a tech-support desk, or even a family member in trouble, then pressures the target to wire money, buy gift cards, or hand over account access. The volume of reports, tracked through the agency’s Consumer Sentinel Network, is part of why the FTC treats imposter fraud as a persistent enforcement priority rather than a passing trend. Older adults are frequently the target of the government-impersonation variant, where a caller claims to be from the Social Security Administration, a local sheriff’s office, or the IRS and threatens arrest or a lost benefit unless the person pays immediately, a script the agency has flagged repeatedly in its own consumer education material.
The Reports Feed Real Enforcement, Not Just a Statistic
The FTC’s testimony ties these numbers directly to law enforcement output. In fiscal year 2025 the agency brought 40 actions covering fraudulent business opportunities, investment schemes, illegal robocalls, tech-support scams, government and business impersonation, and hidden fees, and it says that work returned more than $1.8 billion in redress to consumers who were harmed. The Sentinel reports consumers file at ReportFraud.ftc.gov are the raw material for that pipeline; the agency also shares them with roughly 2,800 federal, state, local, and international law enforcement partners, even though it doesn’t intervene in individual complaints itself. People who file a report there are given information on next steps for trying to recover their money, and the same data helps the agency spot new scam variants, like a fake job offer or a fresh impersonation script, before they spread more widely.
Enforcement Is Reaching the Companies That Move Scammers’ Money
Part of the FTC’s strategy now targets not just the scammers but the U.S.-based companies that process their payments. The testimony highlighted a settlement with Paddle, a U.K. payment processor operating in the United States through a domestic subsidiary, which agreed to pay $5 million to resolve allegations that it facilitated payment processing for tech-support scammers operating out of Cyprus. The agency describes this as part of a broader push to work with international counterparts while cutting off the financial pipelines that let foreign-based fraud rings collect money from U.S. victims. It’s a sign of where fraud enforcement is heading: scammers increasingly route their operations through payment processors, app platforms, and call centers based outside the reach of a single national regulator, so pressuring the U.S.-linked companies that give them access to the payment system has become as much a part of the FTC’s toolkit as pursuing the scammers directly.
The Commission approved the testimony by a 2-0 vote before it was delivered to the Joint Economic Committee on March 25, 2026, and the underlying figures come from the same Consumer Sentinel Network the agency has used to track fraud trends for years. For households trying to gauge whether scam risk is rising or falling, that’s the number to watch: a $3.4 billion jump in reported losses in a single year, driven largely by investment schemes and sustained imposter fraud.
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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