FTC consumer fraud reports
What do social-media scam reports tell us?
Reported losses and numbers of reports answer different questions. FTC’s 2025 figures show why that distinction matters.
Data through: 2025 · Evidence checked: 2026-10-06
in losses were reported on fraud reports identifying social media as the contact method in 2025.
Reported monetary losses · U.S. dollars · FTC Consumer Sentinel reporting collection
Source: FTC Data Spotlight, footnote 2, published April 27, 2026. The spotlight does not specify a U.S.-resident-only filter. This is neither the total loss from all scams nor the risk faced by a social-media user.
Reporting gap: FTC did not collect reports during the 2025 government shutdown. Source collection note.
Social media accounted for 28% of included loss reports.
This percentage counts fraud reports indicating a monetary loss. FTC excludes reports without a stated contact method and write-in methods classified as “other.” It does not mean 28% of social-media users were scammed, or that social media accounted for 28% of dollars lost.
2025 · FTC Consumer Sentinel · Included reports with a monetary loss
Source: FTC Data Spotlight, footnote 1. Original Social Usage graphic. Missing contact method and write-in “other” are excluded. These are the five leading methods, not a complete distribution. FTC’s 2025 collection interruption applies.
View the contact-method data table
| Contact method | Share of reports |
|---|---|
| Website or app | 31% |
| Social media | 28% |
| Phone call | 11% |
| 10% | |
| Text | 7% |
Source: FTC, footnote 1. Source-rounded percentages. The omitted contact methods are not reconstructed from a remainder.
Website or app reports (31%) exceeded social-media reports (28%) by 3 percentage points on this reporting base. Yet FTC reports that social media had the largest aggregate dollar loss among contact methods. A category can have fewer reports and a higher combined loss.
Sources: FTC contact shares, footnote 1; FTC opening paragraph, aggregate-loss comparison. The 3-point difference is Social Usage analysis of the two rounded shares. No statistical significance or per-report average is inferred.
Most reported and most costly are different.
FTC identifies shopping scams as the most reported social-media scam in its 2025 analysis. Investment scams had the largest reported aggregate losses. These are separate findings about report frequency and money lost.
Source: FTC Data Spotlight, shopping- and investment-scam paragraphs.
| Scam type | Reported losses | Source reference |
|---|---|---|
| Investment scams | $1.1 billion | FTC: investment-scams paragraph |
| Romance scams | $298 million | FTC: footnote 4 |
These two source-reported amounts are selected categories, not a complete breakdown. They are not added together to estimate all social-media fraud. The source reporting collection, unknown residency filter and 2025 FTC collection interruption apply to both.
A large reported loss is not a platform safety score. This evidence does not supply comparable exposure denominators for Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp or other services. It cannot identify the probability that an individual user will encounter or lose money to a scam.
Keep reporting changes with the annual figures.
FTC provides six annual totals, but the 2025 reporting interruption prevents a clean like-for-like growth calculation here. The totals are source-rounded, unadjusted reported dollars. They do not establish how underlying scam incidence changed.
View the 2020–2025 reported-loss totals
| Reporting year | Reported losses | Collection note |
|---|---|---|
| 2020 | $261 million | No comparable interruption specified in this spotlight |
| 2021 | $789 million | No comparable interruption specified in this spotlight |
| 2022 | $1.2 billion | No comparable interruption specified in this spotlight |
| 2023 | $1.5 billion | No comparable interruption specified in this spotlight |
| 2024 | $1.9 billion | No comparable interruption specified in this spotlight |
| 2025 | $2.1 billion | FTC collection interrupted during government shutdown |
Source: FTC Data Spotlight, footnote 2. Original rounding preserved. No missing reporting-period amount is estimated and no inflation adjustment is applied.
Source and reporting-gap note: FTC, footnote 2.
What this evidence can—and cannot—measure
Reporting collection, geography and uncertainty
Consumer Sentinel includes reports submitted directly to FTC and reports shared by data contributors. It is a reporting collection, not a probability survey of social-media users. Not every scam is reported, so these totals do not measure all incidents or all losses. The number of reports must not be relabeled as a count of unique people.
FTC is a U.S. agency, but its reporting resources also cover international and cross-border reports. This particular spotlight does not specify a U.S.-resident-only filter. We therefore describe the FTC collection rather than call the figures a U.S. population estimate.
The selected source does not supply raw report counts, exact unrounded dollar amounts, confidence intervals or a population sampling design for these figures. Those facts remain unknown.
Sources: Consumer Sentinel Network, report collection; FTC Explore Data, international and cross-border reporting; the selected Data Spotlight.
Definitions and the descriptive calculation
The dollar amounts sum money reported lost on fraud reports identifying social media as the contact method, in the stated reporting year and scam category. They are amounts, not percentages of a population.
The contact-method shares use fraud reports indicating a monetary loss; reports with no contact method and write-in “other” are excluded. The five leading categories are shown exactly as published. We do not infer a missing category, population denominator, number of victims or average loss.
Social Usage calculation: 31% − 28% = 3 percentage points. The inputs have the same year, source, reporting base and exclusions. The result is descriptive; it is not percent growth or a causal estimate.
Source: FTC footnotes 1–2.
Data dates, source dates and review
- Data period
- 2025 reporting year; annual context covers 2020–2025. A report year is not necessarily the year a scam began.
- Source publication
- April 27, 2026, the date displayed on the article. The retained page metadata has an earlier creation date; we use the visible publication date.
- Retrieved / checked
- 2026-10-06 / 2026-10-06
- Review
- Assisted verification of selected source facts, definitions, rights and calculations. No independent human editorial approval is claimed.
Reuse and source credits
Source: United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Selected U.S. Government material is in the public domain; other source material may retain its rights. Social Usage is not affiliated with or endorsed by the FTC.
Selected federal staff-authored facts support this original presentation. The FTC Website Policy has exceptions for third-party material. We do not reuse the agency seal, source graphics, photographs or private consumer reports. This reviewed page offers accessible tables and a citation; CSV downloads, image exports and embeds are not enabled.