Text scam losses rise to $470 million
Scam texts are getting more costly, even though people are more aware that suspicious links can be dangerous.
A text looks like a package update, a bank alert, a toll notice, or a job offer. It lands in the same place as messages from real people, so your guard drops for one second.
Reported losses from text-started scams rose from $86 million in 2020 to $470 million in 2024.
- fake delivery, bank, toll, job, and wrong-number texts match normal daily life
- AI can make scam messages cleaner and more believable
- texts create urgency in a private channel
- links can send people to fake pages that look official
Your phone is now a front door. The safest habit is to leave the text, open the real app or website yourself, and check from there.
Behind the numbersOpen
Observed values are reported as FTC-linked text scam loss figures: $86M in 2020, $131M in 2021, $327M in 2022, $373M in 2023, and $470M in 2024. The FTC's 2025 release states that consumers reported losing $470M in 2024 to scams that started with text messages and that this was five times higher than 2020 even though report volume declined. Georgetown Law's Tech Institute summarizes the annual FTC-linked series. These are reported losses only; unreported losses are not included. Projection is an editorial direction call, not an FTC forecast.