What Happened
The Federal Trade Commission released new data saying social media scams produced $2.1 billion in reported losses in 2025. Nearly 30% of people who reported losing money to a scam said the scam started on social media. The FTC said reported losses from social media scams were about eight times higher than in 2020 and greater than losses tied to any other contact method scammers used to reach consumers.
The details read like a guided tour through the internet’s least charming business model. The FTC said people reported losing more money to scams that started on Facebook than on any other social platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram a distant second and third. In 2025, reported losses tied to Facebook alone exceeded reported losses from text or email scams. That is quite an achievement for a product that began as a way to see photos from people you barely remember from high school.
The scam types were exactly what anyone with an inbox, a feed, and a working sense of dread would expect. Shopping scams were the most commonly reported social media scam, often starting with ads for clothes, makeup, car parts, puppies, or suspiciously cheap brand-name goods. Investment scams caused the biggest dollar losses, accounting for $1.1 billion, more than half the total social media scam loss figure. Romance scams also thrived, with nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to romance scams saying the fraud started on social media.
Why This Matters
This is not just “don’t click weird links” anymore. Social platforms gave scammers the same targeting infrastructure legitimate advertisers use: age, interests, behavior, shopping habits, social graph, and a polished ad system that can make a fake store look more competent than a real local business. The FTC noted that scammers can hack accounts, exploit public posts, create fake profiles, and buy ads cheaply enough to reach people at massive scale.
That means the scam does not always look like a scam. It looks like a promoted deal, a friendly investment group, a message from someone whose account got hijacked, a dating conversation, or a brand you recognize with one letter quietly swapped in the domain. The platform context does half the con’s work. If it appears between your cousin’s vacation photos and a real store’s ad, your brain may file it under normal internet clutter instead of active fraud attempt.
The stupid part is that platforms keep selling precision attention while society treats the resulting fraud like individual user error. Yes, people need better privacy settings and more skepticism. But when a machine is built to target human vulnerabilities for profit, scammers will rent the machine.
The Real Stupid Part
Social media spent years promising connection and delivered a casino lobby where the slot machines know your birthday, divorce status, hobbies, favorite dog breed, and whether you clicked on a retirement article at 1:12 a.m. Then everyone acts surprised when criminals use that same map to find lonely people, worried people, bargain hunters, new investors, job seekers, and grandparents trying to buy a gift.
The FTC’s advice is practical: limit who can see your posts and contacts, never let someone you only met on social media direct investment decisions, and search a company name with words like scam or complaint before buying. That is useful. It is also depressing that modern citizenship now requires treating every puppy ad like a possible international incident.
The most offensive part is not that scammers lie. Scammers have always lied. The offensive part is how professional the lie can look when the platform hands them lighting, targeting, checkout vibes, testimonials, and access to billions of people. The feed is not just where scams appear. It is the showroom. And in 2025, according to the FTC, that showroom helped separate people from $2.1 billion they were brave enough to report.
Sources
FTC: New data show people have lost billions to social media scams
FTC Data Spotlight: Reported losses to scams on social media eight times higher than in 2020