FTC Recorded $12.5 Billion in Fraud Losses, Industry Puts It Two to Three Times Higher

The FTC recorded approximately $12.5 billion in reported consumer fraud losses for 2024. Industry research puts 2025 identity fraud alone at $27.3 billion and the combined figure with scams at around $38 billion.

These are not competing estimates of the same quantity. One counts what people told a federal agency. The other models a national total from survey responses about experience.

The ratio between them — somewhere between two and three — is, roughly, how much fraud never reaches an official record. That is a more interesting finding than either figure, and neither publisher frames it that way.

Card fraud gets reversed by the issuer, so there is no reason to file. Small losses are not worth the process. Scam victims frequently feel responsible and do not want to describe what happened. And for many categories there is no agency whose remit obviously covers it.

Every one of those is a rational individual decision producing a systematically wrong national picture.

This database repeatedly prefers official or mandatory data over industry estimates — the healthcare register at 25-0630, the financial reporting obligations at 25-0616, the FTC filings at 25-1013.

That preference is right on reliability and wrong on completeness. Mandatory data is accurate about what it captures and silent about everything outside its trigger. The survey research this desk discounts is measuring something the official data structurally cannot see.

Graded medium, and the grade applies to the modelled figures rather than to the gap, which exists under any reasonable estimate.