- Key insight: Banks and payment apps, not Washington, function as the country's de facto national scam-reporting system, holding a loss picture several times larger than the government's.
- What's at stake: The reporting gap is evidence in the live fight over whether banks should get data-sharing safe harbors or be made to reimburse more scam losses.
- Supporting data: Gallup estimates $68 billion in 2025 scam losses against the $15.9 billion consumers reported to the FTC, though its projection carries a wide $33 billion to $114 billion confidence range.
Overview bullets generated by AI with editorial review.
Americans told the federal government they lost about $16 billion to scams in 2025. They actually lost closer to $68 billion, a new survey estimates, and most of the people who reported a scam took it to a bank or a payment app, not to the government.
That gap is the central finding of "
Victims reported only 13% of scams to federal law enforcement or the Federal Trade Commission, or FTC, the survey found. Respondents took 55% of their scam reports to a bank, credit union or other financial institution, and 25% reported them to a payment app.
About seven in eight scams never reached a federal agency at all. That makes banks and payment companies the first place most scam losses surface and the closest thing the country has to a national scam-reporting system.
The catch is that almost nothing a bank sees travels any further. The reports that land at a bank rarely reach the national systems law enforcement uses to track scams.
The findings feed a
What the FTC counts
The FTC's estimate of $16 billion in total losses to scams comes from consumer complaints. In 2025, consumers filed 3 million fraud reports with the agency and said they lost $15.9 billion, up from about $12 billion the year before, according to
Consumers reported more than 1 million imposter scams, making it the most commonly reported category of scam. Investment scams took $7.9 billion, making it the most costly.
Those figures capture only what people formally report to the FTC or to the state attorneys general, law enforcement agencies and nonprofits such as the Better Business Bureau that feed an FTC complaint database known as
The FTC and the FBI have
A soft number shows a real gap
The $68 billion is a projection, not a count. Gallup built it by taking the share of adults who said they were scammed (5.8%), multiplying by the U.S. adult population of about 267 million, and applying an average individual loss of $4,371.
By similar math, an estimated 15.1 million people fell victim to a scam in 2025.
Gallup's $68 billion is the center of a wide estimate. It calculated that actual total losses are likely between $33 billion and $114 billion, accounting for the inherent imperfections of surveys. (This range is a so-called 95% confidence interval.)
In other words, the findings suggest that the FTC's scam data likely undercounts real losses by a factor of at least 2 and potentially as much as 7.
The study does have an interested backer. A coalition of banks, payment networks and technology companies funded it, including JPMorganChase, the American Bankers Association's charitable foundation, Navy Federal Credit Union, Feedzai, Meta and AT&T.
All of them have a stake in the argument that scams are a shared problem and that banks should not absorb the cost alone.
Gallup says the conclusions from the survey are its own.
Aaron Klein, a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution who studies payments policy, said a study's backers should not decide how its findings are read.
"I judge work by the quality of the research not by the sponsor," he said, and urged readers to do the same. He added that the law around scams is unsettled, and that consumers, banks and payment networks "deserve more clarity from Congress and regulators."
A survey without banks behind it produced a lower estimate, but one still far above the government's count. Americans lost about $37 billion to scams over the prior year, according to the
The alliance produced the report with Iris Powered by Generali, an identity-protection company, rather than with a bank coalition.
The $37 billion estimate from GASA's survey sits in the lower range of Gallup's confidence interval but is still more than double what consumers reported to the FTC.
The two surveys used different methods but landed in the same range, said Nils Mueller, who directs the North America chapter of GASA.
Government tallies such as the FTC's are "widely understood to be too low" because they count only what victims report through official channels, Mueller told American Banker. Surveys such as Gallup's and GASA's, he said, "provide more insights into the actual amount lost."
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Why the reports go to banks
Victims sent funds through a payment app such as Zelle, PayPal or Cash App in 42% of scams, through a credit or debit card in 31%, and by wire or direct bank payment in 10%, according to the Gallup report.
Scammers impersonated a bank or credit union employee in 15% of scams, second only to fake tech-support agents.
When victims report a scam, they get a better experience going to a bank compared to going to anyone else, the Gallup survey found: 34% were satisfied with the outcome when they went to a financial institution versus 19% for payment apps or federal authorities.
Victims who skip the federal agencies mostly do it on purpose. Among those who didn't report a scam, 75% didn't think it would help them recover their money, and 64% didn't think it would stop future scams.
Most people (58%) weren't sure where to report at all.
Victims report scams to banks and payment platforms in most countries, not just the United States, "for the simple reason that their primary motivation is to recover their losses," Mueller said.
Financial institutions are the first or second most common place people report a scam in most of them, he said.
What banks owe, and what they're owed
The reporting gap serves as evidence in two arguments banks are already having. It strengthens the case for the data-sharing safe harbors the industry wants, and it complicates the push to make banks reimburse more scam losses.
The data-sharing safe harbors would let banks push what they learn about scams into federal and cross-industry systems without taking on new liability, protected by a legal shield that allows them to share consumer information for this purpose without fear of privacy-related litigation.
On the matter of reimbursements, 66% of scam victims in the survey recovered none of their money, and 46% said the scam caused severe or moderate financial hardship for their household. Households earning under $80,000 reported greater hardship in the aftermath of a scam.
These hardships and the rarity of reimbursement have helped drive
Regulators already require banks to cover some of those losses under federal rules on disputed electronic payments known as
Navy Federal Credit Union was one of the Gallup study's funders. Like many banks and credit unions, it "is generally not liable for scam losses" but stays a "partner in security" with its members, Carrie Foran-Sepulveda, the credit union's vice president of fraud and physical security strategy, told American Banker.
As for what would change if that changed, "shifting liability won't stop scams," she said. "The real need is greater resources toward deterring scams, so that law enforcement can convict active criminals and recover the stolen funds."
The credit union also "supports legislation for information sharing protections" that would let banks move scam data across sectors, Foran-Sepulveda said.
Toward a national fix
The survey results show that banks would play a central role in sharing scam information across the industry were the proper measures in place, according to Ken Westbrook, founder and chief executive of the Stop Scams Alliance, which commissioned the Gallup polling.
Banks "could become the best scam-reporting system in the country," he told American Banker, but they "do not share that data with national-level systems," and nothing requires them to keep records of the claims they deny.
Westbrook favors the safe harbor idea, modeled on a voluntary arrangement in the United Kingdom in which banks feed aggregate fraud figures to the trade group UK Finance.
On the other matter, he said the alliance has "never taken a position" on shifting scam loss liability onto banks.
Republicans on the House Financial Services Committee, in a
(The report was written by the committee's majority under Chairman French Hill of Arkansas without Democratic co-sponsors.)
The party also proposed a single federal system for reporting scams to replace the patchwork of agencies victims face now.
It did not back making banks pay for more scam losses. Where it floated new liability, it aimed at the tech and telecom platforms where scams often begin.
Most Americans want someone to act. In Gallup's survey, 82% of adults said the government is doing too little to prevent scams, a majority in both parties.
Whatever gets done will likely cite data the banks hold that the government mostly does not.
