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 —…

A federal court in Arizona has temporarily shut down a sprawling credit-repair network the Federal Trade Commission accuses of taking in nearly $200 million by posing as debt collectors and creditors. The FTC alleges the operation, doing business as Credit Glory since at least 2016, bought paid search ads that intercepted people already looking up…

More than 800 people, many of them retirees, thought they had found a way into some of the most sought-after private companies in the country before Wall Street ever got the chance to buy in. The Securities and Exchange Commission alleges that what they actually got were shares marked up by tens of millions of…

An investor searching for a financial adviser online has no easy way to spot a name built purely on paper. That gap is what the Securities and Exchange Commission says 38 entities exploited, filing paperwork with the agency designed to look like proof of legitimacy without a licensed adviser, a real office, or a working…

A caller who says they represent a familiar retailer or bank flags a purchase the customer does not recognize, then offers to connect the call to Social Security or its watchdog to straighten things out. According to the Social Security Administration’s Office of the Inspector General, that single moment — the “transfer” — is the…

Millions of taxpayers spent this year’s filing season trying to figure out exactly what the Working Families Tax Cuts law was worth to their own return, and the Internal Revenue Service says some of the online calculators built to answer that question are not run by anyone the agency trusts. The fake versions promise a…

If someone calls claiming to be from the IRS, Social Security, Medicare, or the local sheriff and tells you to pay a debt or a fine with gift cards, a wire transfer, or cryptocurrency, you can stop listening right there. It is a scam — every time, no exceptions. No real government agency collects money…

The phone rings, and it is your grandchild — crying, saying there has been a car accident or an arrest, and begging you to send money right away and not to tell anyone. The voice sounds exactly right. That is the trap. Scammers are now using cheap artificial-intelligence tools to clone a familiar voice from…

Peer-to-peer payment apps like Zelle and Venmo move money the way handing over cash does: fast and, in most cases, final. That is why people who are tricked into sending money to a scammer are often shocked to learn their bank will not simply reverse it the way it would a fraudulent credit-card charge. The…

Losing money to a scam is bad enough. Federal consumer regulators are now warning that for many victims, the con does not end there. In an August 3, 2026 consumer alert, the Federal Trade Commission described a follow-up hustle it calls “the worst of the absolute worst”: recovery scams that deliberately target people who have…