Catfishing Statistics 2026

$40,126. That is the average romance-fraud loss reported to the FBI in 2025 — and almost nobody actually loses it. That average is two different crimes stacked on top of each other, and the thing that decides which one you are in is not your age, your platform or your intelligence. It is the payment rail you get asked to use.

This page traces a single romance-scam dollar end to end: where the conversation starts, what the ask sounds like, how the money physically leaves your bank, where it lands, and what fraction ever comes back. Every figure is sourced. Where we have derived something ourselves, we say so and show the arithmetic.

$929,287,469 was reported lost to confidence and romance fraud in 2025 — about $1,768 every minute, around the clock.

How much money is lost to catfishing and romance scams?

Americans reported $929,287,469 in confidence and romance fraud losses to the FBI in 2025, across 23,159 complaints — a 38.3% jump in dollars on the year. The Federal Trade Commission, counting the same crime a different way, logged 55,604 romance-scam reports and $1.16 billion in losses in just the first nine months of 2025.

Those two agencies do not agree, and they are not supposed to. We deal with that properly in the methodology section. Start with the FBI series, because it is the only one published as clean, comparable full-year totals.

Romance fraud reported to the FBI, 2024 vs 2025

Measure	2024	2025	Change
Confidence/romance complaints	17,910	23,159	+29.3%
Reported losses	$672,009,052	$929,287,469	+38.3%
Average loss per complaint	$37,521	$40,126	+6.9%
Share of all IC3 complaints	2.08%	2.30%	+0.22pp
Share of all IC3 losses	4.05%	4.45%	+0.40pp

Source: FBI IC3 Annual Reports, 2024 and 2025. Average loss and share figures are CatfishFinder calculations from the published totals.

For scale, the whole of internet crime reported to the FBI has been compounding hard. Losses went from $4.2 billion in 2020 to $20.877 billion in 2025 — a 37.8% compound annual growth rate over five years, on 1,008,597 complaints.

Source: FBI IC3 Annual Report 2025

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Where does a catfishing scam actually begin?

Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform — not a dating app. The FTC found that Facebook produced more reported scam losses than any other social platform in 2025, with WhatsApp and Instagram a distant second and third.

This is the single most out-of-date assumption in the public conversation about catfishing. People still picture a fake Tinder profile. The data has moved: the catfish is now usually upstream of the dating app, in a friend request or a stray direct message.

Where romance-scam contact began

Origin of contact	2022 (FTC)	2025 (FTC)	Shift
Social media platform	40%	~60%	+20pp / +50% relative
Dating website or app	19%	Not separately published	—
Moved to WhatsApp, Google Chat or Telegram	~40% of detailed reports	WhatsApp is the #2 loss platform	Rising

Sources: FTC Data Spotlight, February 2023 (2022 data); FTC Data Spotlight, April 2026 (2025 data).

The reason is structural. A dating app is an adversarial environment with a trust budget; both people know a stranger is a stranger. A social platform is not. A message that arrives beside your family photos and your old school friends borrows credibility from everything around it. If someone has appeared in your notifications from nowhere, a username consistency check across platforms is the cheapest first move you can make.

Pew Research puts a floor under how routine this has become. Among Americans who have ever used a dating site or app, 52% say they have come across someone they think was trying to scam them. Among men under 50 it is 63%, and among men who used a dating app in the past year, 72%.

52% of Americans who have used a dating site or app say they have already met someone they believed was a scammer. Among men under 50 it is 63%.

What does a catfish actually ask for, and when?

The most common romance-scam lie is a medical, legal or safety emergency — cited in 24% of the 8,070 detailed 2022 FTC reports the agency keyword-analyzed — followed by three lies tied at 18% each. The pattern is remarkably stable across years: the ask is never framed as an ask. It is framed as a crisis you can solve, or a favour, or an opportunity.

The lies that come immediately before the ask

Lie	Share of detailed reports	What it is doing
I or a family member is sick, hurt, or in jail	24%	Creates urgency and makes hesitation feel cruel
I can teach you how to invest	18%	Reframes the transfer as your idea and your gain
I am in the military, far away	18%	Explains why you can never meet or video call
I need help with an important delivery	18%	Makes you a participant, not a donor

Source: FTC Data Spotlight, Romance scammers favorite lies exposed, February 2023 (based on 8,070 2022 romance-scam reports that indicated a dollar loss and carried a narrative of at least 2,000 characters).

Note the second row. "I can teach you how to invest" is not really a romance-scam lie at all — it is the hinge where a romance scam becomes an investment scam, and where the numbers on this page stop tracking the crime. More on that below.

The occupational cover stories exist for one reason: to make the absence of a face permanent. Military deployment, offshore rigs, contract engineering abroad, surgical work with an international NGO. Each one supplies a standing, sympathetic excuse for never appearing on a video call. If a stated job is doing that much work in a conversation, the number attached to the person is usually the weakest link — which is what a reverse phone consistency check is for.

How does the money physically leave your account?

Gift and prepaid cards were the single most common way romance-fraud money moved in 2025 at 31% of transactions, followed by cryptocurrency at 25% and wire transfer or ACH at 21%. This is where the whole page turns, because those rails carry wildly different amounts of money.

Source: FBI IC3 Annual Report 2025

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Source: FTC Data Spotlight, February 2023 (2022 data)

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That is the spine of this page. There is no average romance-scam victim. There are two populations wearing one statistic:

	The gift-card path	The crypto and wire path
Share of transactions (2025)	31%	46% combined
Median reported loss	$700	$10,000-$10,079
Typical framing	Emergency, favour, small crisis	Investment, trading account, gold
Reachable by the FBI kill chain	No	Wire/ACH only (21% of all)
Realistic recovery odds	Near zero	Partial, and only within days

The practical value of this split is that the ask tells you which crime you are in before the money moves. A request for iTunes or Amazon cards for a hospital bill is the low-value path. A walkthrough of a trading app you have never heard of, with a small early withdrawal that works, is the high-value one. If someone has moved you from friendly conversation to a platform recommendation, treat it as a financial decision, not a relationship one — and run their contact details through an email consistency check before you fund anything.

Who loses the most money to catfishing?

Americans aged 60 and over filed 20.0% of all FBI internet-crime complaints in 2025 but accounted for 37.1% of the losses — $7.75 billion of $20.877 billion. Their average reported loss, $38,501, was 1.86 times the all-ages average of $20,699.

FBI IC3 complaints and losses by age group, 2025

Age group	Complaints	Reported losses	Average loss (derived)
Under 20	31,254	$67,102,440	$2,147
20-29	112,069	$563,103,982	$5,025
30-39	153,293	$1,742,438,917	$11,367
40-49	167,066	$2,957,773,418	$17,704
50-59	124,820	$3,676,138,586	$29,451
60+	201,266	$7,748,911,371	$38,501

Source: FBI IC3 Annual Report 2025. Average-loss column is a CatfishFinder calculation.

Pew's 2025 survey of 9,397 US adults sharpens this. Only 15% of Americans aged 65 and over say they have ever lost money to an online scam or attack — the lowest of any age band. The highest is 18 to 29-year-olds, at 26%. Older adults are not scammed more often. When they are scammed, it costs vastly more.

The same survey found 84% of Americans think adults 65 and over are extremely or very likely to fall victim, against 22% who say that of under-30s. Public perception has the incidence pattern precisely backwards.

Americans aged 65+ are the least likely age group to report ever losing money to an online scam (15%) — yet 84% of the public believes they are the most vulnerable.

Where does the money go after it leaves?

UNODC estimates that cyber-enabled fraud cost victims in East and Southeast Asia between $18 billion and $37 billion in 2023 — with the majority attributed to organized crime groups operating out of Southeast Asia. These are not individuals working from a bedroom. They are industrial compounds, staffed substantially by trafficking victims.

UNODC's own caveat matters: it says the number of people working in the regional fraud industry, willingly or otherwise, cannot be estimated with certainty. What it can document is reach — nationals of more than 50 countries have been identified inside these operations, recruited largely through fake job advertisements. The FBI describes the same infrastructure in its 2025 report, noting that cryptocurrency investment scams are "largely perpetrated by organized criminal enterprises based in Southeast Asia using victims of human trafficking as forced labor."

Two things follow from that, and both matter to anyone currently in a conversation they are unsure about.

First, the person typing may be coerced. That does not make the money any less gone, but it does explain the operational consistency victims describe — the scripts, the shift patterns, the sudden handoffs to a "colleague," the near-identical crisis stories arriving from supposedly unconnected people.

Second, the destination is jurisdictionally out of reach. The US Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia stood up a Scam Center Strike Force in 2025 specifically to pursue compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Burma. FBI-led Operation Level Up has reduced potential losses by more than $500 million since 2024. That is real, and it is prevention rather than recovery — warning people mid-scam, before the transfer.

Can catfishing victims get their money back?

The FBI's Recovery Asset Team froze $679,013,183 in 2025 across every crime type combined — less than the $929,287,469 lost to romance fraud alone. The team ran 3,900 Financial Fraud Kill Chain incidents against $1.16 billion in attempted theft, a 58% success rate on the cases it took.

The FBI's own elder-fraud kill-chain breakdown reinforces this. Of the 642 FFKC incidents involving victims aged 60 and over in 2025, the top three crime types were tech support and account takeover (360), business email compromise and real estate (104) and investment (64). Romance fraud does not appear — not because it is rare, but because by the time it is reported there is nothing left to freeze.

The practical rule: recovery odds are a function of hours, not effort. If a bank wire has left in the last day or two, calling the bank and filing at ic3.gov immediately is genuinely worth doing. If the money went as gift cards or crypto, treat anyone who contacts you offering to recover it as a second scam — the FBI notes recovery-scam targeting of prior victims explicitly.

Why do FTC and FBI catfishing statistics disagree?

Because they measure different populations with different definitions, and adding them together double-counts. This is the single most abused figure in the catfishing literature, and getting it right changes the headline conclusion.

The three problems with every romance-scam number you will read

1. FTC "romance scams" and FBI "confidence/romance" are not the same category. The FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network aggregates consumer complaints from the FTC itself plus partners including AARP's Fraud Watch Network, the Better Business Bureau and state attorneys general. IC3 collects complaints filed directly with the FBI. A victim who files with both appears in both. The FBI logged 23,159 romance complaints in 2025; the FTC logged 55,604 in nine months. Neither is wrong. Summing them to "78,763 victims" is.

2. Comparison periods get mixed, and that manufactures a fake decline. The claim that romance-scam losses collapsed in 2024 is everywhere, and it rests on a $823 million figure that press coverage has described both as a full-year 2024 total and as a first-nine-months total. Both cannot be true, so here is the resolution: $823 million is the full-year 2024 total in the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book. The nine-month framing belongs to a different year entirely — the $1.16 billion across 55,604 reports covers the first nine months of 2025. Set the full years side by side and the sequence is $1.3 billion in 2022, $1.14 billion in 2023, $823 million in 2024. That is a real decline in reported dollars, but it is not the collapse the headlines imply, because 2025 is already running well ahead of 2024 on a partial year.

Year	FTC reported romance-scam losses	Period	Notes
2019	$493 million	Full year	Baseline on the current all-Sentinel basis
2020	$730 million	Full year	All-Sentinel basis
2021	$1.3 billion	Full year	All-Sentinel basis
2022	$1.3 billion	Full year	~70,000 reports; median $4,400
2023	$1.14 billion	Full year	64,003 reports; median $2,000
2024	$823 million	Full year	Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024
2025	$1.16 billion	First 9 months	55,604 reports; +22% on 2024 period

Sources: 2019-2022 figures are FTC Data Spotlight, February 2023, footnote 1 (all Consumer Sentinel sources, IC3 reports included). 2023 figures are the FTC Data Spotlight of February 2024. 2024 figures are the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024. 2025 figures are FTC Consumer Sentinel data reported Q4 2025. One caution when comparing years: the 2024 total sits inside a wider FTC category reshuffle, so the 2022-to-2024 fall is partly real and partly a counting change.

Note what the first four rows show once they are put on one basis. The FTC's own 2019 romance-scam total is often quoted as $201 million; on the basis the FTC uses today, which folds in IC3-sourced reports, the same year is $493 million. Neither figure is wrong. Quoting the small one against a recent big one, as a lot of coverage does, manufactures growth that is partly just a change in what got counted.

3. The biggest undercount is definitional, not statistical. When a catfish moves a victim onto a fake trading platform, the resulting complaint is usually filed as investment fraud. IC3 recorded $8,648,617,756 in investment-fraud losses in 2025 — 9.3 times the romance-fraud total — and describes the method plainly: scammers "initiate contact through text messages, social media sites, advertisements, or dating applications" before moving to a messaging platform. Cryptocurrency investment fraud alone hit $7.2 billion.

So the $929 million romance-fraud figure is a floor, not a measurement. An unknown but clearly large slice of that $8.6 billion investment bucket began as a fabricated relationship. Anyone quoting romance-scam totals as the cost of catfishing is quoting the smaller half of the crime.

The share of catfishing that never gets reported at all

Pew Research found that only 26% of Americans who lost money to an online scam or attack ever told law enforcement. Three-quarters did not. Reporting scales with damage: 42% of those whose finances were hurt a great deal or a fair amount reported it, against just 16% of those hurt a little or not at all.

Group	Told law enforcement
All who lost money to an online scam	26%
Finances hurt a great deal / fair amount	42%
Finances hurt some	24%
Finances hurt a little / not at all	16%

Source: Pew Research Center, Online Scams and Attacks in America Today, July 2025 (n=9,397 US adults).

Pew also captured the confidence gap that keeps this working. 71% of US adults say they know a fair amount or a great deal about avoiding online scams. 21% have already lost money to one. Certainty is not protection.

What does this mean if it is happening to you right now?

One number does most of the work here: 14.4x, the gap between the median gift-card loss and the median crypto loss. The ask predicts the damage. You do not need to work out whether someone is real in the abstract. You need to notice which of the two paths a conversation has stepped onto.

Working backwards through the money trail on this page:

• If contact came from a social DM rather than a dating app, you are in the 60% majority, not an unusual case. The message borrowing credibility from your feed is the norm now, not a red flag in itself — but it means no platform trust-and-safety team has vetted this person.
• If the conversation moved to WhatsApp or Telegram fast, that step showed up in around 40% of detailed FTC reports even back in 2022, and WhatsApp is now the second-highest loss platform. The move exists to leave the environment where reporting tools work.
• If there is a permanent structural reason you cannot see their face — deployment, an oil rig, an overseas contract — that excuse appeared in 18% of reports as its own category.
• If the ask is an emergency (24% of reports), you are on the lower-value path. Median $700. Still theft, still worth reporting.
• If the ask is an investment (18% of reports), you are on the path with a median of about $10,079, near-zero recovery, and a strong chance the loss will not even be counted as a romance scam.

None of this requires you to accuse anyone. It requires consistency checking, which is cheap and can be done quietly: does the phone number line up with the claimed history, does the email address have any age to it, does the username exist anywhere before this year. Our free verification checker runs those checks, and phone and email checks are the two that most often produce a clear answer fastest.

If money has already gone: file at ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov the same day, and call your bank first if it left by wire or ACH — that is the only rail where the FBI's 58% freeze rate is available to you, and it decays by the hour. And treat anyone who approaches you offering recovery services as the second scam, because that is what the FBI's own data says they usually are.

Frequently asked questions about catfishing statistics

How much money was lost to catfishing in 2025?

Americans reported $929,287,469 in confidence and romance fraud losses to the FBI IC3 in 2025, across 23,159 complaints. The FTC, using a different and broader complaint pool, recorded $1.16 billion across 55,604 romance-scam reports in the first nine months of 2025 alone. The two figures cannot be added together, because a victim who files with both agencies appears in both datasets.

What is the average amount lost in a romance scam?

The average reported loss per FBI romance-fraud complaint in 2025 was $40,126, which is 1.94 times the $20,699 average across all internet crime types. But the median is far lower — the FTC recorded a median of $2,218 in Q3 2025. The gap exists because gift-card scams carry a median loss of about $700 while cryptocurrency scams carry a median of about $10,079, and averaging them produces a figure almost no individual victim experiences.

Do most catfishing scams start on dating apps?

No. Nearly 60% of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform, according to FTC data. Facebook produced more reported losses than any other social platform, with WhatsApp and Instagram second and third. In 2022 the social-media share was 40%, so it has risen by half in three years while dating apps have become the smaller channel.

Are older adults really the most common catfishing victims?

They are the most expensive victims, not the most common ones. Pew Research found that 15% of Americans aged 65 and over have ever lost money to an online scam — the lowest rate of any age group — compared with 26% of 18 to 29-year-olds. But FBI data shows the 60-plus group accounted for 37.1% of all 2025 internet-crime losses while filing only 20.0% of complaints, with an average loss of $38,501.

What percentage of romance scam victims report the crime?

Roughly a quarter. Pew Research found that 26% of Americans who lost money to an online scam or attack told law enforcement, while 74% did not. Reporting rises with severity: 42% of those whose finances were badly hurt reported it, against 16% of those barely affected. If romance fraud follows that pattern, the true US victim count is plausibly between 89,000 and 285,000 a year against 23,000 to 74,000 reports.

Can you get money back after a romance scam?

Rarely, and it depends entirely on the payment method. The FBI's Recovery Asset Team froze $679 million in 2025 with a 58% success rate, but the process only works on wire transfers and ACH — 21% of romance-fraud transactions. Gift cards, cryptocurrency and peer-to-peer payments make up 71% and are effectively unrecoverable. Speed matters more than anything else: contact your bank and file at ic3.gov the same day.

Where does romance scam money actually end up?

A large share ends up in organized scam compounds in Southeast Asia. UNODC estimates that cyber-enabled fraud cost victims in East and Southeast Asia between $18 billion and $37 billion in 2023, most of it attributed to organized crime groups in Southeast Asia, with nationals of more than 50 countries identified working inside the compounds. The FBI describes cryptocurrency investment scams as largely run by organized criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia using forced labour.

Sources

• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center — 2025 Internet Crime Report — complaint and loss totals, confidence/romance figures, age breakdowns, payment-transaction mix, Recovery Asset Team results.
• FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center — 2024 Internet Crime Report — 2024 confidence/romance complaint count and losses.
• FTC Data Spotlight — Reported losses to scams on social media eight times higher than in 2020 (April 2026) — 2025 social-media origin share and platform ranking.
• FTC Data Spotlight — Romance scammers favorite lies exposed (February 2023) — top lies, contact origin, median loss by payment method.
• FTC — Romance Scams Hit Record High, $547 Million Reported Lost in 2021 — 2019 and 2021 baseline figures.
• FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024 — complaint aggregation methodology and category definitions.
• FTC — New Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams (April 2026).
• Pew Research Center — Online Scams and Attacks in America Today (July 2025, n=9,397) — loss incidence by age, law-enforcement reporting rates, perceived vulnerability.
• Pew Research Center — The Experiences of U.S. Online Daters — share of dating-app users encountering suspected scammers.
• UNODC — Inflection Point: Global Implications of Scam Centres, Underground Banking and Illicit Online Marketplaces in Southeast Asia (April 2025) — regional fraud loss range, number of nationalities identified inside scam compounds.
• FTC Consumer Sentinel data reported Q4 2025 — 2025 nine-month romance-scam reports, losses and Q3 median.

Derived statistics on this page — average loss per complaint, share-of-complaints versus share-of-losses premiums, the annualized 2024 comparison, the recovery-rail netting and the victim-count range — are CatfishFinder calculations from the sourced totals above. Where two sources use different vintages or periods, we have said so rather than blending them silently.