Americans lost an estimated $68 billion to scams in 2025, with 15 million people (about 6 percent of U.S. adults) personally falling victim, according to a new poll.
The results, disclosed by Gallup and the Stop Scams Alliance, found an additional 4 percent of adults lived in a household where someone else was scammed, putting roughly one in 10 U.S. households on the receiving end of a successful scam last year.
The findings come from a nationally representative survey of 5,173 adults conducted by web and mail between Jan. 8 and Feb. 18. It has a margin of error of 1.6 percentage points.
"These guys aren't called organized crime for nothing. They're actually organized, and they're using their organization to start attacking us with scale now to a tune of $68 billion, which is like the annual revenues of Delta Airlines. It's like a Fortune 500 company. It's huge," Stop Scams Alliance founder and CEO Ken Westbrook told NBC News.
The $68 billion is an estimate based on the survey data. Although the average loss per scam was $5,578, the majority of scams, 56 percent, cost the victim $500 or less. A handful of large scams raised the average.
Twelve percent of successful scams involved artificial intelligence or deepfakes, researchers reported. In fact, they claimed the figure is likely an undercount because AI manipulation can be hard to detect.
Among scam-affected households, 21 percent described the experience as creating a severe financial hardship, and another 25 percent described moderate hardship. The emotional damage is broader still: 28 percent reported a very negative mental health impact, with another 45 percent reporting a moderately negative one.
Notably, 65 percent of people who lived through a household member being scammed but were not the direct victim themselves still reported a negative impact on their own well-being, according to Gallup.
Victimization is not evenly distributed. Adults without a bachelor's degree were scammed at nearly twice the rate of degree-holders (7 percent vs. 4 percent), and Black (8 percent) and Hispanic (9 percent) adults reported higher rates than white adults (5 percent). Age, however, made no difference.
The headline numbers may still understate the real damage, because the survey relies on victims recognizing and reporting that they were scammed. Separate polling has consistently found that few scam victims actually report the crime, often citing shame or the belief that nothing can be done, PBS News reported.
