Fraud reports to the FTC rose from 137,306 in 2001 to 2.6 million a year by 2024, per the FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book 2024. Scroll down for the full record. Every number below comes from public reports.
Scroll the record ↓Each is drawn from a public report listed under Sources. Pick one to jump to it.
Source: FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book 2024, reports by type
In the first year of the FTC's published Sentinel record, the FTC logs a third of a million complaints across every category, and fraud is 137,306 of them. Most scams still arrive by post or landline.
As email and online shopping grow, scams move online. Fraud reports pass a million a year and stay above that level.
During the lockdowns people spent more of their lives online, and scammers followed them. Reports jump from 1.9M to 2.5M in a single year and do not fall back afterwards.
Report volume levels off, but reported losses nearly tripled in four years, from $5.8B in 2021 to $15.9B in 2025. The number of reports has stopped growing, but the amount lost per report has grown.
Fake invoices and payroll changes sent by email get their own category in the FBI's reports, covering the spoofed boss and the vendor with "new bank details." The reported total was small then.
A decade later the total reported across ten years is $17.1B, an eleven figure sum. Generative AI is now used to write the emails.
Florida reports the most fraud per head of any state, with Georgia close behind; the District of Columbia reports more than either. The Dakotas report the least. The scams are similar in every state, but how often people report them varies.
Even the lowest state on the map logged 676 reports for every 100,000 people, and those are only the scams people reported.
Each dot is a thousand people who told the FTC what they lost. Half of them lost under five hundred dollars, so most of the dots sit at the low end.
Losses over ten thousand dollars are the ones that can empty an account. There were a hundred and twenty five thousand of them in one year.
This is Deloitte’s count for the United States in 2023, the first year anyone tried to count AI written scams separately.
The same analysts expect it to more than triple by 2027. Because this part is a forecast, the chart draws it more faintly. Carmen was built for this problem.
Every figure on this page, with the report and page it came from.
Fraud reports to the FTC, 2001 to 2024. Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, reports by type, page 9. Fraud, identity theft and other categories, by year.
Business email compromise losses, 2015 to 2025. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, IC3 annual reports, reported losses by crime type, each year's report.
Reports per 100,000 people, by state. FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, fraud and other reports by state, page 20.
What people lost. FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024, fraud reports by amount lost, page 10. One dot is a thousand reports.
Generative AI fraud losses, projected to 2027. Deloitte Center for Financial Services, Generative AI is expected to magnify the risk of deepfakes and other fraud in banking, 2024. This is a projection. Deloitte publishes 2023 and 2027 only; the chart draws the years between as a smooth curve.
Figures are as published. Where a report has been revised, the latest edition is used.