Phase One Working Group Outputs

Task Force Staff | Resources | 5.23.2025

Increasingly, criminals are taking advantage of American financial systems as well as our social media, telecommunications, and retail platforms to manipulate consumers into handing over hard-earned dollars to fund transnational criminal enterprises. In July 2024, the Aspen Institute Financial Security Program launched a National Task Force on Fraud and Scam Prevention to bring together leaders from across sectors and generate recommendations for a national strategy to combat this growing threat. 

Three hundred leaders have joined the Task Force from more than eighty institutions, representing relevant government agencies, consumer organizations, and private sector actors in financial services, retail, telecommunications, tech, and social media. 

Over the past six months, Task Force members convened in working groups to tackle this escalating issue. Their insights shed light on critical challenges and opportunities for improvement across various sectors. A breakdown of their key observations follows. 

Cross-Cutting Themes

  1. Companies are investing meaningfully to combat scams. But success requires collective action–across industry sectors and with government support–at such a scale that scams become difficult and unprofitable, leading to their decline. 

  2. Reducing instances of scams requires timely and efficient sharing of actionable data and intelligence to identify bad actors before they’ve harmed users and prosecute those who succeed.

  3. Legal and regulatory concerns prevent many providers from implementing existing scam prevention and information sharing best practices.

  4. Inconsistent data standards between industries and sectors make data aggregation and sharing challenging.

  5. Counter-incentives like unclear reporting expectations and procedures, victim shaming, and low expectation of recovery reduce consumer reporting of completed and attempted scams, reducing the data available to scam combat efforts across the ecosystem.

  6. Catching up to fast-moving criminal operations requires allocation of significant resources and strategic alignment of incentives across sectors.

Each working group generated its own set of key findings, summarized and linked below.

Information Sharing Across Sectors Working Group 

This group explored how we might increase the actionable intelligence and data shared between private sector platforms to help identify criminals and remove them from platforms at scale.

Findings Summary

  1. Companies are incentivized to remove scammers from their platforms, and many have sophisticated anti-fraud capabilities, but they require access to information from other industries/sectors to help them identify criminal actors and combat scams earlier in the process.

  2. Operationalizing cross-sector information sharing is already underway, but is being provided by a growing number of competing solutions, none of which currently engage the majority of relevant players in one platform. Reaching the scale and efficacy of information sharing required will require coordination, wide-spread participation, uniform data standards, technical and strategic innovation, and government support.

  3. Real and perceived legal and compliance risks and challenges to sharing relevant information will constrain progress if not addressed.

  4. Progress towards more widespread information sharing requires better aligned incentives for all types of companies to overcome perceived obstacles and invest resources in information sharing.

Read the full set of Information Sharing Working Group findings.

Law Enforcement Engagement and Alignment Working Group 

This group explored how we might increase coordination among law enforcement agencies and between them and the private sector to support the identification and prosecution of the criminals.

Findings Summary

  1. The U.S. has strong investigative and prosecutorial powers and dedicated teams fighting the rise of scams, but these teams lack the resources and prioritization needed from top-level leadership to address the problem at scale. 

  2. Scam criminals are technologically advanced and utilize a wide range of digital assets. Law enforcement technologies are not as advanced, and law enforcement powers to seize digital assets may be a limiting factor.

  3. Federal law enforcement relies on private sector information to help identify key perpetrators and build strong cases, but reporting between the private sector and law enforcement is not working well enough to address the problem at scale. 

    • Companies are unclear on what data to report, to which law enforcement entities, and through which mechanisms, and want stronger feedback loops and actionable intelligence from law enforcement to help justify the resources necessary to comply with reporting requirements. 

    • Law enforcement is hampered by the limitations of outdated data management systems.

Read the full set of Law Enforcement Working Group findings.

Consumer Awareness, Warning, and Intervention Working Group 

This group explored how we might refine strategies for interacting directly with consumers to prevent or disrupt scams in progress before funds change hands.

Findings Summary

  1. Consumer education cannot solve the scam crisis, which requires strengthening our systems against bad actors. But consumer education can help, by increasing vigilance and encouraging the reporting of information that could improve scam-fighting efforts. Participants called for a disciplined and well-resourced public safety campaign, with coordinated messaging and calls to action across industry sectors.

  2. More effective warning and intervention techniques, such as preventative friction in payment transactions, could help consumers avoid falling victim to scams and make this crime less lucrative to criminals. 

  3. Certain types of preventative intervention are already widespread but are underperforming and need improvement, such as enhanced use of just-in-time communications techniques across the scam lifecycle, insights from behavioral psychology, and simple, consistent messaging. 

  4. Reporting information should also be made easier for victims. 

  5. Challenges include the dynamic nature of threats, victim blame, insufficient evidence-based strategies, unclear calls to action, and intense resource needs. Incentives or safe harbors for companies to take action also need clarification.

Read the Working Group's National Public Awareness Campaign Guidance.

Read the Working Group's Principles for Preventative Friction.

Definition of Success: Goals, Metrics, and Measurement Working Group

This group explored how we might facilitate coordination between relevant sectors around measurement practices to give us a clearer picture of the scale and nature of the problem and better target scam-fighting resources.

Findings Summary

  1. Increased coordination around measurement of fraud and scam activities and outcomes is a critically important element of fighting fraud and scams, necessary to clarify our understanding of the scale and nature of the problem and better target our limited scam-fighting resources.

  2. Achieving scam measurement goals is currently challenging because:

    • Social stigma reduces consumer motivation to report when they have been manipulated to authorize a fraudulent transaction.

    • A bewildering array of reporting pathways confounds companies and victims who try to report scam information. Those who do report are frustrated by the lack of a feedback loop to demonstrate how the information helped deter or prosecute scam activity.

    • Institutions collect scam data in different sectors and use varied measurement practices and terminology, making it inefficient to combine data sets to get a clearer picture of the problem, its evolution, and the efficacy of efforts to address it.

    • Resource requirements, murkiness in the legal and regulatory landscape, and lack of centralized leadership misalign incentives for key players to increase the coordination of their measurement practices.

    • The growing volume of scam attempts is overwhelming, and thus difficult to report and measure. Plus, current data collection focuses on completed scams, which obscures which interventions, if any, are working.

Read the full set of Goals, Metrics, and Measurement Working Group findings.

A focused and well-resourced national strategy to combat scams should forcefully address these observations. Changes to policies, laws, or business practices are crucial. The Task Force is currently working to specify which of those specific changes would most effectively reduce the impact of these manipulative financial crimes on our security, economy, and society. 

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