Watchdog says FBI should lead coordinated anti-scam strategy

A federal inspector that provides auditing and investigative services for Congress said in a report this week that the three U.S. agencies that lead efforts against consumer scams lack a cohesive strategy for fighting scams, so the FBI should take charge to coordinate such a strategy.

The 116-page report from the Government Accountability Office, released Tuesday, included numerous other findings and recommendations for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Federal Trade Commission and FBI, each of which have their own strategy and initiatives for fighting scams.

The lack of coordination between agencies fighting scams means reduced impact of these preventive efforts, inefficient use of resources due to overlapping activities, missed opportunities for intelligence sharing and action, and difficulties in developing a comprehensive understanding of the scam problem, according to the report.

The GAO acknowledged a 2024 statement by the American Bankers Association, Bank Policy Institute, Consumer Bankers Association and National Bankers Association that called for a national anti-scam strategy, as "current federal activities are disjointed and uncoordinated with no overarching strategy," according to the statement.

The GAO also said it spoke to officials from one of the world's largest financial institutions, which it did not name. Those officials also indicated the need for a comprehensive, government-wide strategy and said there is a need for a lead agency to help coordinate efforts and prevent fragmentation.

This call echoes recommendations previously made in a Consumer Bankers Association op-ed for American Banker, which warned of a "national crisis" driven by industrial-scale scam operations leveraging spoofed caller IDs, AI-powered deception, and cryptocurrency platforms to drain victims' finances. That article, citing the Identity Theft Resource Center, reported that 16% of scam victims said they had considered suicide, underscoring the human toll of unchecked fraud.

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Among the 16 recommendations in the report, the first was that the director of the FBI should "lead a U.S. government effort to develop and implement a government-wide strategy to counter scams and coordinate related activities." The director should collaborate with the director of the CFPB, the chair of the FTC, the secretary of the Treasury and other agencies as well, GAO said.

Lack of scam data

One of the tangible consequences of this lack of coordination is that no single, government-wide estimate of the total number of scams and related financial losses exists, according to the GAO report.

This lack of overarching data prevents the government from adequately measuring the impact of scams, even as it is known that scams "are a growing problem in the United States and around the world in both scope and sophistication," reads the report.

The CFPB provides a search function for its complaint database, including an option to specifically filter for complaints tagged as "fraud or scam." This data indicates that, in March, the bureau received 630 such complaints related to money transfer, virtual currency or money service products, about 25% more than a typical month over the past two years.

The FTC reported last month that 2.6 million consumers collectively reported losses of $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, though the agency's definition of "fraud" in that report includes what other entities typically call "scam."​

The FBI, through its Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, reports total losses to a variety of internet crimes. Not all of these crimes are scams, and not all of them are consumer targeted. For example, when the FBI reported that it received 880,000 reports of internet crime in 2023, with total potential losses reaching $12.5 billion, those figures included reports about business email compromise, investment scams, ransomware and other cybercrimes.

The GAO recommended that each of the agencies should explore ways to harmonize data collection to better identify scams. Additionally, in the complaint forms the agencies make available to consumers, they should collect data on scam type, dollar loss amount, payment method and other data fields.

The agencies should also collaborate to report an estimate of the total number of complaints about scams the U.S. government has received and the total associated financial losses, according to the report.

Lack of a common definition

Compounding the data challenges is the absence of a common definition of what constitutes a scam. The GAO report noted that federal agencies and stakeholders use varying terms — such as fraud, scam and cyber-enabled crime — when discussing the same or related ideas, which complicates efforts to measure the scope of the problem and compare data across agencies.

For example, the FTC defines and categorizes imposter scams differently than the FBI, according to the GAO, and the CFPB does not define the different types of imposter scams that the FTC and FBI include in their reports.

The FTC also uses fraud and scam interchangeably and does not distinguish between them.

The Federal Reserve established a scams definition and classification work group in spring 2023, which included payments and fraud experts from various disciplines but not the CFPB, FBI or FTC. The group published an operational definition of scams in September 2023: "the use of deception or manipulation intended to achieve financial gain."