Americans Lost Billions to Scams and Tax Fraud
Left 50%
Center 0%
Right 50%
1 left · 0 center · 1 right
What happened
The U.S. Government Accountability Office estimated in a report released Friday that the United States may be losing more than $300 billion a year in tax revenue to fraud. Separately, the FBI recorded $20.9 billion in reported losses to internet-enabled crime in 2025, 26 percent higher than the prior year and the highest figure the bureau has recorded, with people over 60 reporting $7.7 billion of that total, averaging $38,500 each; the Federal Trade Commission notes that most victims never file a report, and it said scams originating on social platforms cost Americans $2.1 billion last year, eight times the 2020 figure and more than any other contact method. The Treasury Department estimated Americans lost at least $10 billion in 2024 to scam operations in Southeast Asia, a 66 percent increase, operations described as based in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos; Juniper Research estimated that financial institutions spent roughly $21 billion on fraud prevention in 2025, and the FBI’s Financial Fraud Kill Chain froze $679 million of $1.16 billion in attempted theft last year. In December 2024, the outgoing Biden Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued the operator of the Zelle payment network and three of its largest participating banks over scam losses; the suit was dismissed with prejudice three months later. In October, the United States and the United Kingdom jointly sanctioned 146 individuals and entities tied to Cambodia’s Prince Group, the Justice Department indicted the group’s chairman, and prosecutors moved to seize 127,271 Bitcoin in the largest forfeiture in Justice Department history, while the Scam Center Strike Force has seized more than $401 million for return to victims and the FBI’s Operation Level Up has warned more than 8,000 Americans mid-scam.
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Omitted — what each side leaves out
Unpacked
The two sides are covering different crimes and different losers, so a reader of one would badly misread the scale. Left-leaning coverage in Bloomberg reports a Government Accountability Office estimate that tax fraud may cost more than $300 billion a year in lost tax revenue. Right-leaning coverage never cites that estimate. It instead reports that Americans lost $20.9 billion to internet-enabled crime, with the losses treated as money taken from consumers rather than from the Treasury.
Right-leaning coverage leads with crime being down, then warns against a reflex to "force domestic institutions to cover the costs." Left-leaning coverage never mentions banks, reimbursement, or overseas compounds.
Does the tax-fraud estimate include those internet scams, or are the Treasury and individual victims paying separate bills?
Bottom line
A Bloomberg reader sees only the GAO's $300 billion tax-fraud estimate. A Fox News reader sees only consumer internet scams, and the two never appear together.
The receipts — 4 facts one side's coverage lacks
- Americans reported losing $20.9 billion to internet-enabled crime in 2025
- A CFPB lawsuit against the Zelle network operator and three banks over scam losses was dismissed with prejudice
- Treasury estimated Americans lost at least $10 billion in 2024 to scam operations in Southeast Asia
- People over 60 reported $7.7 billion in internet-enabled crime losses
The Left View
Left-leaning coverage, through Bloomberg’s account of the GAO report, frames fraud as a fiscal problem: a vast annual loss of federal tax revenue rather than a consumer-crime wave. It treats the watchdog’s estimate as the defining measure of harm and presents tax fraud as a drain on public collections at a national scale.
The Right View
Fox News frames nearly all conventional crime as down in the latest FBI data while calling internet-enabled crime the exception that is “up — way up.” It distinguishes hacks from scams in which victims are “persuaded to voluntarily send money to overseas bad actors,” arguing those transfers look legitimate to automated systems and that “the money leaves the country.” The piece says American banks are “already the most active force in the fight against both fraud and scams,” points to their prevention spending and the kill-chain freezes, and calls dismissal of the CFPB’s Zelle suit “the right outcome.” It argues reimbursement mandates “would raise the cost of banking and payment services” while “leaving foreign criminals with their stolen funds,” and it presents the Prince Group sanctions, the Bitcoin seizure, Strike Force recoveries, and Operation Level Up warnings as evidence that a “source-focused approach has shown progress.” It says Congress has been “conspicuously absent from this fight and derelict in duty,” that social-media firms have a “civic responsibility” to take down fraudulent ads “instead of earning revenue from them,” and that “the thief is not in Charlotte or San Francisco but in a compound on another continent.”
Our Take (balanced)
The left’s strongest argument is the GAO’s estimate of more than $300 billion a year in lost tax revenue, which, if accurate, makes uncollected federal taxes the largest fraud loss on the table. The right’s strongest argument is that the FBI’s record internet-crime figure is driven by overseas persuasion scams rather than bank-security failures — supported by Treasury’s Southeast Asia total, the FTC’s finding that social platforms now generate more scam losses than any other contact method, and banks’ role in freezing a large share of attempted theft through the kill chain — so shifting the tab onto domestic institutions would not stop the money from leaving. The central unresolved tension is that the two sides are not measuring the same harm: one treats fraud as taxes the government is not collecting, the other as consumer money sent abroad after contact on phones and social media, and neither source reconciles which ledger, or which set of actors, defines the problem.
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