Thirteen agencies fight scams; none can say how big the problem is
Summary
Americans reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, according to the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network -- up more than $2 billion from the year before. GAO counts at least 13 federal agencies working to prevent, detect, and respond to scams, and found that none of them was aware of a government-wide strategy to guide that work, nor could GAO identify one on its own. In April 2025, GAO recommended the FBI lead the creation of one, and asked CFPB, the FBI, and FTC to collaborate on a single, government-wide count of how many people are affected and how much they lose. As of GAO's January 2026 update, no such shared estimate exists: the FBI says producing one isn't its job, FTC's own broader consumer-fraud estimate isn't the coordinated figure GAO asked for, and CFPB hasn't addressed the recommendation at all.
Thirteen agencies, no shared plan
The agencies working on scams include the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the and the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys within the Department of Justice, the , and the Department of the Treasury, among others. Each has its own mandate and authority, and each -- per -- largely carries out its scam-related activities independently: consumer education, complaint collection, investigations, enforcement. Some coordination exists at the margins, such as the 's Consumer Sentinel Network, a complaint-sharing database with 46 contributing agencies including the . But no single document or initiative ties the overall effort together. In its April 2025 report, recommended the Director of the lead a U.S. government-wide effort to build that strategy, in collaboration with , , Treasury, and others. The agreed to lead it.
View data as table
| 2020 | 5,165,295 |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 6,136,404 |
| 2022 | 5,317,751 |
| 2023 | 5,548,815 |
| 2024 | 6,471,708 |
Where the money actually goes
The scale of what a coordinated strategy would be managing is not small. 's Consumer Sentinel Network took in 6.47 million total consumer reports in 2024, of which 2.6 million were fraud reports. Investment-related fraud caused the single largest dollar loss of any category -- $5.7 billion from just 118,960 reports, with a median individual loss of $9,196, by far the highest of any major category. Imposter scams, where someone poses as a government official, a relative, or a familiar business, generated the most reports of any fraud type -- 845,806 -- and $2.95 billion in losses. Younger adults, ages 20 to 29, reported losing money more often than older adults did. But when people 80 and older did lose money, their median loss was nearly four times higher than what people in their 20s typically lost.
View data as table
| Investment Related | 5,697 |
|---|---|
| Imposter Scams | 2,952 |
| Business and Job Opportunities | 751 |
Nobody can agree on how big the problem even is
's April 2025 report made 16 recommendations to , the , and . Four of them, aimed at each of the three agencies, asked them to collaborate on harmonizing their data, publishing their own complaint and loss estimates, building one shared government-wide estimate, and adopting a common definition of what counts as a scam. The agreed to the first two and refused the last two, arguing that a law-enforcement agency shouldn't be the one producing loss estimates and that a single legal definition would clash with each agency's distinct statutory mandate. neither agreed nor disagreed with any of the four. did not respond to this specific set of recommendations at all. The Department of Justice separately estimated in 2015 that only 15 percent of fraud victims ever report the crime to law enforcement -- meaning every agency's number, however it's calculated, almost certainly understates the true toll.
View data as table
| Concurred | 2 |
|---|---|
| Did not concur | 2 |
A model that's already working elsewhere
Australia built the kind of coordinated response is asking for: a National Anti-Scam Centre that pools data and intelligence across government, law enforcement, industry, and consumer groups. The Australian government reported a 13.1 percent decline in reported scam losses from 2022 to 2023 after the center's efforts took hold. In the U.S., as of 's January 2026 testimony, , the , and had each described plans to respond to 's recommendations -- a multi-agency working group, funding requests, data-alignment reviews -- but none of the three specified whether any of it was actually under way, or when it might start. says it will keep monitoring.
The takeaway
- Thirteen agencies work the same problem with no shared plan. found none of them aware of a government-wide strategy for countering scams, and recommended the build one nearly a year before this report -- with no confirmed start date as of 's latest check.
- The government can't say how big the problem is because its own agencies don't count it the same way. The 's 2023 tally (589,355 complaints, $10.55 billion in losses) and 's separate figures use different methods and definitions; 's request for one shared, government-wide estimate has been met with a refusal from the , silence from , and a non-answer from .
- The dollars concentrate where the coordination gaps are widest. Investment fraud alone cost Americans $5.7 billion in 2024 -- the single largest category -- while older victims, who lose money less often than younger people, lose far more per incident when they do.
Federal coordination and recommendation-status figures are from -26-108842, a January 14, 2026 testimony before the Senate Special Committee on Aging that summarizes and updates 's April 2025 report -25-107088. Fraud-loss and report-volume figures are from the 's Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 (published March 2025), covering calendar year 2024. Both were read directly. Sentinel data is based on unverified consumer reports, not a scientific survey, and its 40.2 percent fraud-report share and other percentages are 's own published figures rounding to one decimal place; this piece's more precise recomputations from the same underlying counts are noted as such.
Sources(2) ▾
- U.S. Government Accountability Office (testimony before the Special Committee on Aging, U.S. Senate), Consumer Protection: Expeditious Actions Needed to Implement a Government-wide Strategy and Related Efforts to Counter Scams (2026-01-14) — Statement of Seto J. Bagdoyan, Director, Forensic Audits and Investigative Service, summarizing and updating 's April 2025 report -25-107088. Direct fetch from gao.gov returned a 403 (Akamai block on non-browser requests); downloaded instead via the Wayback capture below. Read in full: Highlights, Background, the section on 13 federal agencies' fragmented scam-countering activities and the absence of a government-wide strategy, the section on scam-complaint data limitations and competing estimates (/IC3 and figures), the full description of 's 16 April 2025 recommendations and the four core data/definition recommendations to //, each agency's October-November 2025 status update, and 's closing assessment. gao.gov · original document
- Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 (2025-03-01) — Direct fetch from ftc.gov returned an automated-request block page; downloaded instead via the Wayback capture below. Read in full: Introduction, Inside the Numbers, Executive Summary, the Visual Snapshot, Number of Fraud/Identity Theft/Other Reports by Year, Report Categories, Report Type breakdown, Top 10 Fraud Categories by loss, and the age-based loss breakdown. ftc.gov · original document
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Americans reported losing $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024. At least 13 federal agencies have some role in preventing, detecting, or responding to the scams behind those losses. According to , none of those 13 agencies was aware of a government-wide strategy guiding their work, and couldn't find one either. The agencies don't even agree on how to count the problem: the 's own internal estimate for 2023 was 589,355 scam complaints and $10.55 billion in losses, using different criteria than the 's separate tally for the same period. asked three agencies to fix that by building one shared number. A year later, none exists.