When the Federal Trade Commission tallied fraud complaints for 2025, one statistic stood out above the rest: roughly one in three Americans who reported losing money to a scam said it started on social media. Not a phone call. Not a phishing email. A post, a direct message, or an ad on a platform they use every day.
The agency laid out those findings in an April 2026 data spotlight, confirming that social media has overtaken every other contact method as the top channel for fraud in the United States. Total reported losses for the year reached $15.9 billion, up from more than $12 billion in 2024, a jump of roughly 33 percent. The FTC shared those figures during testimony before the Joint Economic Committee on March 25, 2026, noting that the agency received about 3 million fraud complaints over the course of the year.
Because those numbers depend entirely on people choosing to file reports, the real cost is almost certainly far higher.
How social media became the top fraud channel
Social media offers scammers something no robocall or spam email can replicate: built-in trust. A fraudulent investment pitch looks more convincing when it sits alongside posts from friends, carries polished graphics, or features a fabricated endorsement from a public figure. Paid advertising tools let bad actors micro-target potential victims by age, interest, and location for just a few dollars a day. And the speed of content sharing means a single scam post can reach thousands of people before anyone flags it.
The FTC’s spotlight identifies social media as the single most common way scammers made first contact with victims in 2025. Social media losses have climbed steadily for several years in the agency’s historical data, but the scale of the 2025 increase underscores how thoroughly fraud has migrated to the places where Americans spend the most screen time.
Federal law enforcement data reinforces the pattern. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center has documented billions of dollars in annual cyber-enabled losses, with investment fraud and schemes promoted through cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence tools acting as major drivers. The bureau’s figures cover all internet-facilitated crime, not just consumer fraud funneled through the FTC’s intake system. But the overlap is telling: social media serves as a primary launchpad for the investment scams and AI-generated deceptions the FBI has flagged, giving criminals both massive reach and a veneer of social proof.
The scams hitting hardest right now
The FTC’s April 2026 spotlight does not break out losses by individual platform, but the agency’s broader complaint data and prior reports point to several categories that dominate social media fraud.
Investment scams, particularly those involving cryptocurrency, consistently rank among the costliest. Victims are often lured through direct messages or group chats with promises of guaranteed returns, then guided to fake trading platforms that display fabricated gains until the scammer drains the account.
Online shopping fraud is the most frequently reported type. Ads for deeply discounted products lead to websites that either deliver nothing or ship cheap knockoffs.
Romance scams remain devastating on a per-victim basis. A growing subset, sometimes called “pig butchering,” blends a fake romantic relationship with a fraudulent investment scheme, grooming the victim emotionally before steering them toward bogus crypto platforms. The FBI has specifically warned that AI tools now allow scammers to generate convincing fake photos, video calls, and written messages, making it harder for targets to spot the deception before significant money changes hands.
Impersonation scams round out the list. Fraudsters pose as government officials, well-known companies, or even friends and family members whose accounts have been cloned. Social media makes impersonation especially effective because users tend to trust content that appears within their own feed or network.
What platforms and regulators have not yet answered
Several important questions remain unresolved. The FTC has not released platform-specific loss breakdowns for 2025, so it is not yet possible to say whether Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or another service carries the largest share of fraud dollars. Without that detail, evaluating which platform-level defenses are actually working, whether stricter ad screening, identity verification for advertisers, or automated scam detection, is largely guesswork.
Demographic data is also incomplete. Prior FTC spotlights have indicated that younger adults report social media scams more frequently while older adults tend to lose larger amounts per incident, but the April 2026 release does not update those patterns with fresh numbers. Policymakers and platforms are left without the granularity they need to target prevention, whether toward retirees vulnerable to investment pitches or younger users drawn in by influencer-promoted schemes.
On the enforcement side, the FTC’s March 2026 testimony addressed general anti-fraud coordination with federal partners and consumer education campaigns but did not announce targeted actions against specific platforms or advertising networks. It also did not detail how much of the agency’s active casework now traces back to social media leads. That makes it difficult to gauge whether enforcement is keeping pace with the migration of fraud online.
Then there is the AI question. The FBI has highlighted artificial intelligence’s role in generating fake identities and convincing investment pitches, but neither agency has published data isolating AI-driven fraud as a share of total losses. Until that breakdown exists, it is impossible to say how much of the 2025 spike reflects genuinely new tactics versus a simple increase in the volume of schemes that have existed for years.
How to protect yourself and report fraud
The FTC’s practical advice has not changed much, but the urgency behind it has. The agency recommends treating any unsolicited investment opportunity, romantic overture, or unbelievable deal encountered on social media with immediate skepticism, especially if the person or company pressures you to act quickly or asks for payment in cryptocurrency, gift cards, or wire transfers.
A few steps can reduce your exposure before a scam ever reaches you:
- Tighten privacy settings so strangers cannot message you directly or see your full profile.
- Be wary of anyone you have never met in person who steers a conversation toward money or investments.
- Reverse-image-search profile photos when something feels off.
- Report suspicious ads and accounts directly to the platform. Even if the response is slow, those reports help train the automated systems that flag fraud at scale.
If you have already lost money or suspect a scam, the FTC directs victims to file complaints at reportfraud.ftc.gov. Identity theft cases can be reported through identitytheft.gov, and unwanted robocalls tied to scam operations can be flagged at donotcall.gov. Filing a report does not guarantee recovery, but it feeds the enforcement database that the FTC and partner agencies use to build cases, spot emerging patterns, and coordinate with financial institutions to freeze funds. If you paid by credit or debit card, contact your bank immediately to dispute the charge; for cryptocurrency payments, recovery is far more difficult, though the FTC recommends reporting to the platform used for the transaction.
Why the fraud migration is far from over
Nothing in the FTC’s 2025 data suggests this trend is about to reverse. Social media usage continues to grow, AI tools are becoming cheaper and more accessible to criminals, and the platforms themselves have yet to demonstrate that their fraud-detection systems can keep up. Reported losses have increased year over year for at least five consecutive years, and the gap between what gets reported and what actually happens remains wide.
Whether regulators push for new rules around ad transparency and platform liability, or whether the burden continues to fall primarily on individual users, will shape the next chapter. As of May 2026, those decisions are still taking shape, and the scammers are not waiting.
Paul Anderson is a finance writer and editor at The Financial Wire. He has spent seven years writing about investment strategies and the global economy for digital publications across the US and UK. His work focuses on making sense of economic policy, cost-of-living issues, and the stories that affect everyday Americans.
