AI Scams Trick Millions of Americans, Cost $68 Billion

Key points

• Around 6% of U.S. Adults, roughly 15 million people, were scammed out of money last year.
• AI or deepfakes were involved in 12% of those scams.
• Americans lost $68 billion to scams last year, nearly four times what was reported to the FTC.
• Severe financial hardship hit 21% of victims; moderate hardship hit 46%.

Six percent of U.S. Adults lost money to scams last year. That figure comes from a Gallup and Stop Scams Alliance survey of 5,173 adults conducted in January and February, and it lands at roughly 15 million people. Twelve percent of those victims said AI or deepfakes were involved.

The total loss: $68 billion. Ken Westbrook, founder and CEO of the Stop Scams Alliance, put that in terms worth absorbing. "These guys aren't called organized crime for nothing," he told NBC News. "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."

As we reported on 3 July, a joint AP and FRONTLINE investigation found that U.S.-built tools are helping criminals run fraud at industrial scale. This survey puts a dollar figure on what that scale looks like domestically.

How are these scams affecting people?

Financially, they're brutal. Severe hardship struck 21% of respondents; moderate hardship hit another 46%. The survey also found higher victimization rates among lower-income adults, people of color, and those without bachelor's degrees.

One victim told Gallup she was contacted by scammers after posting about her missing cats online. They posed as the sheriff's department, then transferred her to someone claiming to be a vet who needed around $780 for emergency surgery. Her husband called the police directly and learned she'd been deceived. The emotional damage compounds the financial: the survey found that the majority of respondents said being scammed hurt their mental health and well-being.

Fraudulent websites were the most common vector, reported by 40% of respondents. Phone, text and email each appeared in nearly half of all scams, with 50% involving two or more methods. Payment apps including Zelle and PayPal were the most common way scammers collected money.

Should the U.S. Be measuring this more carefully?

Yes, and it isn't. The FTC publishes complaint data yearly, but the Gallup survey captured nearly four times the losses that victims reported to the agency. The gap exists because most victims never file a formal report. Westbrook told NBC News that the unmeasured scale is precisely why the U.S. Isn't allocating sufficient resources to the problem. The UK and Australia run annual scam surveys; the U.S. Does not.

The survey's AI finding deserves a note of caution too: participants self-reported whether AI was involved, and the survey itself acknowledges that victims may not be able to detect it. The 12% figure is a floor, not a ceiling. Watch whether the Stop Scams Alliance pushes for federal survey funding; that's the structural fix this data is clearly designed to demand.