Scams are a growing threat on social media, FTC says

The past year was a big one for scammers on social media, the US Federal Trade Commission said Thursday, with 95,000 consumers reporting they’d been defrauded in schemes initiated on social sites — more than twice the number from 2020. Consumers reported a combined total of $770 million lost to scams, the agency said, about one quarter of all reported fraud losses from 2021.

“The data suggest that social media was far more profitable to scammers in 2021 than any other method of reaching people,” the FTC said in a blog post. Scams starting on social media have risen rapidly in the last five years. In 2017, 5,000 people reported $42 million lost to scams originating on social media. In 2021, nearly 18 times the money was lost and nearly 19 times as many people fell victim to such scams, the FTC said.