Fake package text. A very good offer to be true. A stranger in your DMs who immediately starts asking for money. Online scams have become a common part of everyday Internet use, and a new report estimates that they could cost Americans nearly $150 billion a year.
Americans will lose an estimated $148.2 billion to online scams and cybercrime by 2025, according to a new report by the Consumer Federation of America. That’s about 26% more than in 2024 and nearly three times the loss recorded four years earlier.
The exact amount is impossible to know, and that’s partly the point of the report. Americans reported about $20.9 billion in losses to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center last year. The Consumer Federation of America estimates that the true number is seven times higher because many victims do not report their losses to law enforcement.
The organization based that figure on a 2017 federal survey that found only about 14% of financial fraud victims reported the crime to the police. Applying that reporting rate to the FBI’s 2025 estimates yields a much larger estimate of $148.2 billion.
That doesn’t mean every American family lost money to a scam last year. But it suggests that official statistics capture only a fraction of the problem — and that even the FBI’s most conservative estimates show fraud losses are rising rapidly.
Crypto scams rule
More than half of the losses reported to the FBI involved cryptocurrencies. Victims reported losing nearly $11.4 billion in crypto-related incidents, up nearly 22% from last year. The Consumer Federation of America estimates that the actual cost could be closer to $80.7 billion.
Crypto is especially useful for fraudsters because payments can be difficult to reverse, and funds can be moved quickly through multiple wallets. Many victims are first targeted by fake investment opportunities, social media ads, dating apps or messages from scammers posing as businesses or government agencies.
Investment fraud was the costliest category in the FBI data, accounting for more than $8.6 billion in reported losses. Business and tech support email scams accounted for nearly $3 billion and $2.1 billion, respectively.
AI makes common scams easier
The FBI also measured AI-related crimes for the first time in 2025, recording 22,364 complaints and $893 million in related losses. Using the same underreporting figure, the Consumer Federation of America estimated AI-enabled losses at about $6.3 billion.
That’s not to say that AI has created a new $6.3 billion fraud category separate from existing systems. An AI-generated voice clone, for example, could be categorized as an impersonation scam. Rather, the figure provides a first indication of how productive AI is being put into general forms of fraud.
Scammers can now create convincing profiles, personalized messages, fake texts and fake voices on average, allowing them to launch thousands of parallel attempts until the victim responds.
Older adults continue to lose more
People age 60 and older reported nearly $7.75 billion in losses to the FBI, a 59% increase from 2024. The average loss reported in that age group was $38,500, and more than 12,000 claimants claimed to have lost more than $100,000.
However, young people are not immune. Reported losses among people under the age of 20 nearly tripled in one year, although that group still accounted for the smallest number of losses.
These figures come as fraud attempts have become almost inevitable in online life. The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, a non-profit research organization run by the Associated Press and the University of Chicago, published a survey in June that found that 58% of American adults experience suspicious scams every day, while 92% experience them at least monthly.
Most of those scams are seen on social media especially Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, all of which are under Meta.
The Consumer Federation of America says stopping the scams will require more than educating people to spot suspicious messages. It wants social media companies to verify advertisers, remove fake content and accept greater responsibility when their platforms repeatedly deliver victims to fraudsters.
In the meantime, all unsolicited messages asking for money, cryptocurrency, verification code or instant action should be treated with caution, even if they appear to be from someone you know. If a message, phone call or online offer asks for money or personal information, verify it with a website, phone number or account you already know is legitimate.
