U.S. Consumer Fraud
2024 Data Report

Over the past five years, the IC3 has received more than 4.2 million complaints, with cumulative reported losses of approximately $50.5 billion. The average daily complaint volume has grown from roughly 2,000 per month at the IC3’s inception to over 2,000 per day.

The trajectory is unmistakable: reported losses have nearly quadrupled from $4.2 billion in 2020 to $16.6 billion in 2024, while complaint volume has remained relatively stable — indicating that each successful attack is becoming significantly more damaging.

The FBI recorded 193,407 phishing and spoofing complaints in 2024, making it the most common attack type by volume. Phishing-related losses surged to $70 million, up 274% from $18.7 million in 2023 — despite total phishing complaints actually declining from 298,878 the prior year. This suggests attackers are shifting to higher-conversion, lower-volume campaigns.

The FTC reports that email was the most common contact method used by scammers for the second consecutive year, followed by phone calls and text messages. Scams originating on social media resulted in $1.9 billion in losses, with 70% of those contacted through social platforms reporting financial loss.

Consumers lost more money through bank transfers and cryptocurrency combined than through all other payment methods combined, reflecting how scammers have adapted to move funds through channels that are harder to reverse.

Federal reporting systems do not currently isolate “AI-generated” or “AI-facilitated” fraud as a standalone statistical category.

However, multiple federal advisories issued in 2024 and 2025 warn that generative AI is being used to enhance phishing, impersonation, and investment scams — increasing the personalization, linguistic quality, and credibility of fraudulent messages at scale.

AI does not create new scam categories. It increases scale, personalization, and credibility within existing categories. This distinction matters for both detection strategy and policy response.

Adults over 60 were the most affected demographic in 2024, filing the highest number of IC3 complaints and suffering the greatest aggregate financial losses at nearly $4.8 billion. Cryptocurrency investment scams were particularly devastating for this group, with over $2.8 billion in reported losses.

The FTC separately found that younger adults (ages 20–29) reported losing money to scams more frequently than adults over 70 — challenging the assumption that fraud is exclusively an older-adult problem. However, when older adults do fall victim, their per-incident losses tend to be significantly larger.

Despite these enforcement successes, the $561 million recovered represents approximately 3.4% of the $16.6 billion in reported losses. The FTC secured $319 million in consumer refunds during 2024. These figures underscore a fundamental reality of consumer fraud: prevention is significantly more effective than recovery.

The gap between losses and recoveries — coupled with systemic underreporting — illustrates why scalable detection tools are a necessary complement to law enforcement action. Intervening before a transaction occurs is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempting recovery afterward.

This brief synthesizes publicly available data from two primary federal sources:

ZeroScam does not editorialize, extrapolate, or model estimates beyond what these agencies have published. Where figures differ between IC3 and FTC reporting (which use independent collection methodologies and are not directly comparable), both are cited with attribution. No proprietary data or internal analytics are included in this brief.

ZeroScam is a web-based scam detection platform that helps individuals analyze suspicious messages in real time. The platform combines message-level analysis with privacy-first safeguards to identify manipulation techniques commonly used in phishing, impersonation, and social engineering attacks.

ZeroScam operates with a privacy-first architecture: no message content is stored after analysis, no accounts are required for basic use, and no personal data is collected beyond what is necessary to operate the service. The platform is accessible directly from any web browser.