The main types of online scam, how each one is structured, the payment methods that give them away, and how to check whether an offer is real.
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Americans reported losing about $16 billion to fraud in 2025, the highest figure on record. The categories that account for most of it are surprisingly few, and each has a recognisable structure.
Fake unpaid-toll messages drove a 40% rise in government impersonation reports to the FTC in 2025. The amounts are trivial by design — you are not evaluating a transaction, you are clearing an annoyance.
The FBI's 2025 report included artificial intelligence for the first time in the IC3's near-25-year history — 22,364 complaints and roughly $893 million. AI has not invented new scams; it has removed the tells that used to expose the old ones.
A tech support scam sells you a problem and then sells you the fix. What makes it unusually damaging is that the victim personally installs the software that hands over control of their computer.
Shopping scams are the most frequently reported social media scam. More than 40% of people who lost money to a scam on social media in 2025 said they had ordered something they saw in an advertisement.
Investment fraud accounts for nearly half of all scam-related losses reported to the FBI. The reason is structural — every other scam takes money once, and this one takes it repeatedly while showing you a balance that grows.
Job scam losses tripled between 2020 and 2023, and the growth is almost entirely one variant — the task scam, where an app shows your earnings rising and then asks you to deposit money to release them.