Social media scams caused over two billion dollars in losses to consumers last year
Social media scams have become a significant issue in the United States, with consumers reporting losses of $2.1 billion in 2025. The Federal Trade Commission highlighted that Facebook is the leading platform for these scams, resulting in higher losses compared to other social media sites. The trend is alarming, particularly as Facebook remains widely used among various age groups, including vulnerable older adults.
- ▪Consumers reported $2.1 billion in losses from social media scams in 2025.
- ▪Facebook was identified as the biggest source of reported losses from scams.
- ▪Nearly one in three fraud victims stated that the scam originated on a social platform.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 4 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Consumers lost 2.1B to social media scams in 2025, FTC reports — cybersecurity
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/social-media-scams-caused-over-two-billion-dollars-in-losses-to-consumers-last-year/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Apr 2026 13:21:18 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-04-28T13:29:31.935Z |
| Last seen | 2026-04-28T13:29:31.935Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | J7Lo_BPQldHE · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Social media is now America’s most expensive scam hotspot. According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), consumers reported $2.1 billion in losses from platform-based fraud in 2025, a number that has grown eightfold in five years. Nearly one in three fraud victims said the con started on a social platform. Why is Facebook such a big target? Facebook stood out as the biggest source of reported losses. The FTC said scams that started on Facebook led to higher losses than those originating on any other social media platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram well behind. Losses linked to Facebook-originated scams also exceeded those tied to schemes that began via text messages or email.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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