By Carter Pape, American Banker
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Scam victims report to their bank, not the government.
When Americans reported a scam last year, most went to a bank, credit union or payment app. Federal agencies such as the FTC and the FBI learned of only a small share, leaving the government with a fraction of the full picture.
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 “United States of Scams,” a report Gallup and the nonprofit Stop Scams Alliance released last month. It draws on a survey of 5,173 U.S. adults. The money scammers stole last year, it estimates, runs several times higher than Washington’s tally.
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 fight in Washington over whether banks should get legal cover to share the data they see about scams and whether banks need to cover more of what customers lose to these scams.
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 March testimony by FTC leadership before a congressional committee.
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.