Online scams: the main types and how each one works
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.
The short answer
- People reported losing about $16 billion to fraud in 2025 to the FTC alone, the highest on record and up roughly 25% year on year.
- Investment fraud is the single largest driver of losses; imposter scams are the most frequently reported.
- Nearly 30% of people who reported losing money said the scam started on social media, accounting for $2.1 billion.
- The payment method is the clearest tell - gift cards, wire transfers and cryptocurrency are demanded because they cannot be reversed.
- Most scams follow the same arc - unexpected contact, a plausible story, a small commitment, then an escalating request.
People reported losing about $16 billion to fraud in 2025 — the highest figure the FTC has recorded, and roughly 25% more than the year before. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center separately logged more than a million complaints and nearly $21 billion in losses.
Those totals sound unmanageably large until you look at the composition. A small number of scam types account for most of the money, and each of them has a structure you can learn once.
Where the money actually goes
Two findings from that data reshape how to think about the risk.
The first is that social media is now the costliest way scammers reach people — surpassing phone, text and email. Nearly 30% of people who reported losing money said the scam started there, and reported losses have risen eightfold since 2020. Every age group under 80 lost more money to social media than to any other contact method.
The second is that loss and frequency are different questions. Imposter scams are reported most often. Investment scams take the most money, because a victim is led to "invest" repeatedly over weeks rather than losing once.
The main categories
Investment scams
The largest driver of losses, and the pattern behind most large individual losses. A relationship forms — often via social media, a messaging group, or what appears to be a romance — and turns into investment advice. A convincing platform shows growing returns. Small withdrawals succeed, which builds confidence. Larger deposits follow. Then withdrawal requires a "tax" or "fee", and the money was never there.
$1.1 billion was reported lost in 2025 to investment scams originating on social media alone — more than half of all social-media scam losses.
Imposter scams
Someone claims to be your bank's fraud team, a government agency, a delivery company, or your own chief executive. The FTC recorded $3.5 billion in reported losses in 2025, and government-impersonation reports rose 40%, driven heavily by fake unpaid-toll texts.
→ How impersonation scams work
Shopping scams
The most reported social media scam type. More than 40% of people who lost money to a scam on social media said they ordered something they saw in an ad — from clothing to car parts to puppies. The goods never arrive, or arrive as something unrecognisable, and the "store" is a template site that existed for three weeks.
Job and task scams
A generic text or WhatsApp message offers online work with no specifics. The "job" is repetitive tasks — liking videos, rating images — in an app that shows your commissions accumulating. Then you must deposit money to unlock the next set and withdraw your earnings. FTC reporting tracked job scam losses rising from $90 million in 2020 to $286 million in 2023, with task scams growing from under 1% of job scam reports to nearly 39% by mid-2024.
Tech support scams
A pop-up, call or email warns of a virus or a compromised account, and asks you to install remote-access software so a "technician" can fix it. What follows is either a fake refund overpayment or direct access to your accounts.
AI-assisted scams
The FBI's 2025 report included a section on artificial intelligence for the first time in the IC3's near-25-year history: 22,364 complaints and roughly $893 million in losses. Cloned voices, fabricated video of public figures, and synthetic identity documents make old scams substantially more convincing.
The structure they share
Almost every scam above follows the same four beats. Recognising the arc is more useful than memorising the variants.
- Unexpected contact. A message, ad, call or friend request you did not initiate.
- A plausible story. Something you were half-expecting, or that flatters, frightens or interests you.
- A small commitment. A reply, a click, a tiny payment, a short call. The purpose is not the value — it is establishing the relationship.
- The escalating request. Larger sums, or the one thing they actually wanted, arriving once you are invested enough to want the story to be true.
The single most reliable tell
Before analysing the story, look at how you are being asked to pay.
| Payment method | What it means |
|---|---|
| Gift cards | Fraudulent, essentially without exception |
| Cryptocurrency to a stranger | Irreversible by design; the FTC found crypto is the preferred method for job scams |
| Wire transfer | Very difficult to recall once sent |
| Payment app to someone you have not met | No buyer protection |
| Credit card on a known retailer | Chargeback rights, real recourse |
Legitimate organisations do not care how you pay. Scammers care enormously, because their entire business depends on the payment being unrecoverable. A story you cannot evaluate plus a payment method you cannot reverse is the whole scam, expressed in one sentence.
If it has already happened
Report it, and quickly — recovery odds fall by the hour. In the US, report to the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and the FBI at ic3.gov; in the UK, to Action Fraud. Contact your bank or card issuer immediately if money moved.
It is also worth knowing that reported fraud is a small fraction of actual fraud. One study cited in the FTC's own analysis found only about 4.8% of people who experienced mass-market consumer fraud complained to a government body or the BBB. Reporting is genuinely useful — it is how patterns like the toll-text surge get identified at all.
Learn to spot them under pressure
Reading about a scam and recognising one mid-conversation are different skills. Our drills put you inside real scam scenarios and let you find the turn.
Try it freeFrequently asked questions
- What is the most common online scam?
- By report volume, imposter scams — someone pretending to be a bank, a government agency, a business or a person you know. They were the most-reported fraud category to the FTC for the ninth year running in 2025, making up nearly one in three fraud reports.
- Which scam causes the biggest financial losses?
- Investment fraud. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report attributes nearly 49% of all scam-related losses to it, and the FTC found $1.1 billion lost to investment scams that began on social media alone. Individual losses are far larger than in other categories because victims are led to invest repeatedly over months.
- How can I tell if something is a scam?
- Check the payment method first. Any request for gift cards, wire transfer, cryptocurrency or a payment app to a stranger is fraudulent in essentially every case, because those methods were chosen for being irreversible. Then check whether the contact was unexpected and whether you are being hurried.
- Can you get money back after being scammed?
- Sometimes, and speed is the deciding factor. Card payments have chargeback rights and bank transfers can occasionally be recalled if reported within hours. Gift cards, cryptocurrency and completed wire transfers are usually unrecoverable — which is exactly why scammers insist on them.
- Why did scam losses increase so much?
- Partly reach and partly tooling. Social media lets a scammer contact billions of people cheaply and target them by age and interests using ordinary advertising tools, and reported losses to social-media-originated scams rose eightfold between 2020 and 2025. Generative AI has separately made convincing text, voices and video cheap to produce.
Sources
- FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025 — Federal Trade Commission, 2026
- New FTC Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams — Federal Trade Commission, 2026
- Cryptocurrency and AI Scams Bilk Americans of Billions — Federal Bureau of Investigation, 2026
- Paying to get paid: gamified job scams drive record losses — Federal Trade Commission, 2024
About the author
Cybersecurity & Digital Literacy
Subash Poudel builds SafeSurf IQ, a digital literacy platform that teaches people to recognise scams by putting them in front of real ones. He writes the online-safety reference material here, working from primary reporting — FBI IC3, the FTC, Verizon's DBIR, NCSC and Ofcom — rather than secondhand summaries.
- Founder and engineer, SafeSurf IQ
- Writes and reviews the platform's phishing, scam and privacy curriculum
- Works from primary incident and fraud reporting, cited on every article
Last reviewed . Figures are checked against the primary sources listed above at each review.
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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.
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