Fraud in the USA
If you feel like everyone is trying to scam you, you’re not alone
I rent the house where my family used to live, located a couple hours away from where we live now. Recently, I listed the property on Zillow when it was time to swap old tenants for new ones. The day after the new people moved in, I got a phone call from them. Another family had shown up, expecting to move in. This other family had seen the house listed for rent on Facebook Marketplace for far below the market value. They met a man outside of the property, but didn’t go in. They signed a lease agreement, and sent the man a few thousand dollars through Cash App for a deposit, first month of rent, and heaven knows what else. Sadly, they got scammed.
This poor family clearly made some mistakes, but it goes without saying that no one deserves this kind cold-hearted financial abuse.
This is, unfortunately, only one of many newfangled ways people have come up with to steal money from others in the digital age. In addition to various forms of real estate fraud, there are elaborate call center phone scams designed to persuade victims to send gift cards as payment, the classic Nigerian Prince 419 email scam, the more recent flurry of crypto scams, romance and job scams, the fake check overpayment Craigslist scam (I have a story about that one too), and many other incarnations of fraud that the FBI can tell you about. Today, you sometimes even hear about the grifters getting grifted.
Maybe because we do so little business in person now, it is easier than ever to get conned. But then again maybe not, because fraudsters can also use personal connections to their advantage through affinity fraud.
The point is, it does feel like it’s everywhere lately, and the data backs that feeling up.
The Federal Trade Commission is very interested in how much fraud is committed, where it happens, by what means, to what age groups, and et cetera. They have kept data on this for years. You can find all the raw data here in their datasets, or more recent data in a nice graphical output in their Consumer Sentinel Network here.
Using both those resources, I compiled the data from the last decade on the number of frauds reported, and the amount lost. Here’s how it turned out:
From this you can see that yes, there has been an uptick in the number of frauds reported in the past few years. But even more striking is the exponential increase in the amount of money people have lost from fraud over the past decade. The number of incidents seemed to peak during the pandemic, when personal interactions were at an all time low. But even now in 2023, they are still projected to be quite high.
So from this, it seems that scammers are figuring out ways to squeeze more dollars out of their grifts than ever before.
So watch out. And don’t forget what you’ve probably heard a million times: if it’s too good to be true…
Robert Lawrence writes about science and data. You can find his published work at: www.robertlawrencephd.com
