The Online Scam Numbers Nobody Talks About
(2026 Data)

Before I built TrustCheck, I spent three weeks reading every fraud report I could find. The numbers are worse than most people realise.

Here's the data. All sourced, all verified.

The scale

Online shopping scams produced 384,946 fraud reports in the US in 2024, placing them among the most commonly reported fraud categories in the country.

36.7% of online shoppers have lost money specifically to website scams. Not phishing emails. Not romance scams. Fake online stores.

The median loss per online purchase scam was $114. That's the median — meaning half of victims lost more.

The success rate that should terrify you

84% of people targeted by a fake shopping website engaged with it. Nearly half — 47% — lost money.

Think about that conversion rate. Fake websites convert nearly 1 in 2 visitors into victims. The best real e-commerce sites convert 2–4%. Scam sites convert 47%.

They are better at their job than most legitimate businesses are at theirs. Because they're designed by people who study human psychology and exploit it without ethical constraint.

The AI acceleration

Generative AI-enabled scams grew 456% between May 2024 and April 2025. The Anti-Phishing Working Group found nearly 1.8 million new phishing and fake websites in just the second half of 2024.

At that rate: approximately 10,000 new fake websites every single day.

Traditional red flags — typos, bad design, broken English — are being systematically eliminated by AI tools that cost less than a Netflix subscription.

Who gets hit hardest

People aged 40–69 are the most likely to lose money. People over 70 lose the most per incident — an average of $9,475.

But younger people are catching up. Social media scams — where someone sees a product in an Instagram ad and clicks through to a fake store — disproportionately affect people under 40 who are more comfortable making impulse purchases on mobile.

According to the FTC, shopping scams were the most reported on social media, with more than 40% of people who lost money to a social media-based scam saying it started when they ordered something they'd seen in an ad.

The social media pipeline

U.S. consumers lost $2.1 billion in social media scams in 2025, according to the FTC. The pattern is consistent: an ad appears in a feed, it leads to an unfamiliar website, the person orders, the goods never arrive or are counterfeit.

"Many ads led to unfamiliar websites, while others sent people to sites impersonating well-known brands offering big discounts," the FTC noted. "Most people said they paid for things that simply never arrived."

The gap nobody is filling well

There are free automated tools — ScamAdviser, Google Safe Browsing, URLVoid. They catch sites that have already been reported. They score domains algorithmically.

But algorithms miss things humans catch. A domain registered 30 days ago with no history scores as "unknown" on automated tools. A human checking it sees the stock photos, the fake address, the copied terms from another site, the social media bought in bulk.

That human layer is expensive to provide and hard to scale. It's also irreplaceable. That's the gap TrustCheck fills.