$8 Billion, 144,041 People, and a Median Loss of $10,560: Investment Fraud's Terrible Year

The Numbers New York Published

The New York State Division of Consumer Protection issued a consumer warning in August 2026 citing Federal Trade Commission data on the previous year.

144,041 consumers reported more than $8 billion in investment scam losses during 2025 — a 38% increase over 2024. The median reported loss was $10,560, and investment fraud was the FTC’s costliest fraud category for the year.

Each of those figures says something different, and the median says the most.

Why $10,560 Is the Important Figure

Aggregate loss totals invite a certain distance. Eight billion dollars is a policy number. It suggests a phenomenon happening at a scale that includes people very unlike you.

The median does the opposite. It says that a typical victim — the one in the middle, not the outlier who lost a retirement account — lost $10,560.

That is not a sum that marks someone as reckless or unusually wealthy. It is an emergency fund. It is a car. It is a home repair, a semester, a deposit. For a large share of American households it represents most or all of their accessible savings.

It also tells you what the scam is calibrated for. These operations are not built to find a handful of people with millions. They are built to convert an ordinary person’s savings, at volume — 144,041 times, from the reports alone, in a category where underreporting is severe because the shame is acute.

What AI Actually Changed

New York’s warning is specific about the role of artificial intelligence, and it is worth separating the real mechanisms from the general alarm.

Voice cloning and fabricated video let fraudsters impersonate identifiable financial figures. A short clip of a well-known investor endorsing a platform is now producible from public footage, and it appears as a paid advertisement in a feed where the surrounding content is legitimate.

Polished advertising at scale is the quieter change. The historical friction in investment fraud was producing convincing marketing in volume — different creatives, different languages, different demographics. Generative tools removed that constraint. The result is that the amateurish giveaway most people were taught to look for has been eliminated as a category.

Fake applications with fabricated balances complete the picture. Victims encounter professional-looking platforms displaying returns, portfolio balances and trading activity that correspond to nothing. The engineering effort here is real and the output is convincing on every screen a consumer can see.

The scale of the underlying advertising problem is visible in the response: platform security teams removed more than 45,000 deceptive deepfake ad campaigns in 2026, and Australian regulators dismantled 3,106 fraudulent cryptocurrency investment platforms in a single financial year.

The Withdrawal That Works

New York’s warning names the technique that does more work than any other, and it deserves emphasis because it inverts the standard advice.

Some operators permit small initial withdrawals to establish credibility before pressing targets to deposit larger amounts.

The instinct to “test it with a small amount first” is sound in most contexts and actively dangerous here. The test is anticipated. Letting a new depositor withdraw a few hundred dollars is a marketing expense with a known return, and it converts a cautious person into a confident one at precisely the moment the operation wants to escalate.

The sequence is close to standard: small deposit, visible gain, successful withdrawal, congratulations, opportunity requiring a larger position, and then — always — the fees. Withdrawal fees. Tax clearance. Anti-money-laundering compliance charges. Liquidity releases. Each fee is charged against money the victim believes they own, and each one is pure extraction.

Protecting Yourself

Confirm the promoter, then the firm, then the destination — in that order. New York’s guidance is to verify who is promoting the investment, verify the company and the investment itself, and establish exactly where your money will go before transferring anything. All three are checkable in about ten minutes.

Check the register yourself. In the US, search BrokerCheck (FINRA) and the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure, and your state securities regulator. Never use a link the promoter provides — cloned sites impersonating registered firms are standard practice.

Treat a celebrity or expert endorsement as evidence of nothing. Given current tooling, a video of a recognisable person promoting a platform is more likely to be synthetic than genuine. Legitimate financial products are not marketed this way.

Any guaranteed return is a lie. There is no exception, no matter the asset class, the technology, the arbitrage story, or the credentials attached.

An unsolicited approach is disqualifying on its own. A message in a WhatsApp or Telegram group, a social media ad, a “wrong number” text that becomes a friendship, a new romantic connection with a trading tip. No legitimate investment reaches you this way.

Successful small withdrawals prove nothing. Understand this as a designed feature and it stops being reassuring.

Any fee required to release your own funds means the funds do not exist. Real platforms deduct from the balance. They never require an inbound payment to permit a withdrawal.

Check where the money actually lands. If the receiving account name differs from the firm’s, or funds route to a personal account, a third-country processor, or a crypto wallet address, stop there.

Take the pressure as the signal. Closing windows, limited allocations, expiring bonus tiers. Urgency exists to prevent verification, which is the only thing that would end the transaction.

If you are in one, stop paying today and report immediately. File with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the FBI at ic3.gov, and the SEC or CFTC as applicable, and contact your bank or exchange the same day. Recovery is genuinely possible while funds remain in the first receiving account.

Refuse the second scam. Victim lists are sold. The call offering to recover your losses for an upfront fee is a separate business built on the wreckage of the first, and the FTC has warned about this wave repeatedly.

A 38% annual increase in a category already the costliest on the FTC’s list is not a plateau. And the median tells you who is absorbing it: not institutions, not the wealthy, but 144,041 ordinary people who each lost about ten thousand dollars they needed.