House Committee Report Calls Fraud Scams a National Crisis

The House Financial Services Committee released a report "Fighting Back," calling for a coordinated national response on financial fraud scams. 

The report stated that the FTC received more than 3 million fraud reports in 2025, with $15.9 billion in reported losses, up 28 percent from 2024 and about 18 times since 1997. The report found that losses likely reached about $196 billion once unreported cases are estimated. The report noted nearly 75 percent of Americans were the attempted targets of some type of online scam and that about 15 million were victimized in 2025.

The report stated that fraud is now an organized, international industry noting that Southeast Asian scam centers in Burma, Laos, and Cambodia run up to 150 industrial-scale operations staffed by as many as 300,000 trafficked laborers. The report added that Latin American cartels expanded into fraud as a supplement to drug revenue.

Criminals reach victims mostly by text, followed by email and phone calls increasingly implementing AI voice cloning. The report estimated that the costliest schemes are investment scams at $7.9 billion causing half of all reported losses, followed by imposter scams and romance scams. The report found that no group is immune as younger adults are now hit at nearly twice the rate of seniors.

The report urged a whole-of-ecosystem approach across government, banks, technology platforms, and telecom firms.