Kati Daffan

It is absolutely an industry, a very complex, always evolving, very competitive industry.

My name is Katie Daffin, and I'm an assistant director at the FTC's Division of Marketing Practices, which is where we really run the fraud program at the Federal Trade Commission.

We are seeing such large increases in reported consumer losses to fraud.

And the primary driver of that is with investment, romance and imposter scams.

And so, Daffin estimates, in 2024, in the U.S., Between $31.3 billion and $195.9 billion was lost to fraud.

If we make a really conservative assumption, we get $10.1 billion lost by older adults and $31.3 billion overall lost.

But if we assume instead that what we're seeing in our database only reflects 2% of losses from consumers who lost under $1,000 and 6.7% of losses for consumers who lost $1,000 or more, that's when you get the estimated loss of $195.9 billion.

It's really astronomical.

We've been able to return billions of dollars to consumers over the years.

The FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection has a number of different litigating divisions.

There are folks who focus on privacy and identity protection, folks who focus on financial practices.

The Division of Marketing Practices is focused on this more fraud and scam work.

We always do our law enforcement.

We always do policy work to try to make things harder for scammers.

We're always trying to follow the scammers from one scam to the next.

We can see sometimes how either the scammers who are on the fringes of something we just took down will go and start their own thing, or they'll team up with another company we've seen on the margins that is now scamming.

stepping forward to fill a gap after we shut down a scam.

But over time, one thing that we've had more and more success at doing is spurring industry to develop technological solutions to combat fraud.

I was involved in our first competition under the America Competes Act,

where we were trying to address the proliferation of robocalls after the phone system merged with the internet to create that massive problem.