On a recent day in America, a team of cybersecurity and anti-fraud experts working for a nationwide retailer successfully took down a fake website claiming to belong to their employer. The site was part of a scam to deceive shoppers and steal their account details by offering gift card holders discounted diapers. 

These scammers steal money to buy smartphones and accessories that they aim to counterfeit and "return" to the retailer’s stores for "refunds," while sending the real products to a black market in China. This raises funds to support a violent criminal gang based in Cambodia. The gang runs an off-the-books casino and employs a staff of enslaved laborers, mostly unsuspecting migrants from India who accept offers of good jobs only to be forced to help their captors sell sex and smuggle drugs. The criminals recently began using their enslaved workforce to conduct more money-making scams against Americans: impersonating bank representatives on the phone, posing as love interests on dating apps, and pretending to be financial advisors or crypto traders—all schemes to prey on the emotions and assets of victims in cities across the United States. 

That very day, in Dallas, a retired truck driver named Tony lost his $50,000 nest egg to a scammer who successfully posed as an "IRS auditor" trying to help him. The scammer gained Tony’s trust by sending text messages and making phone calls filled with accurate—though illicitly obtained—personal information. Tony found the courage to report the crime, but nothing came of it—the money was gone. Devastated and overwhelmed with shame, he felt his only choices were to end his life or turn to public assistance to survive.

The net result in America that day: Thousands of fraud investigators working for corporations and law enforcement agencies may have prevented hundreds or thousands of scams, but about 57,000 of their customers and members of the public became victims nonetheless. [2] Scammers stole about $430 million [3] of Americans’ household wealth, in just one day, and used the money to fund their other criminal and antisocial activities. 

The next day, basically the same thing happened. 

And every day since.  

This is obviously not a composite illustration but it reflects cold truths. 

Does it surprise you? Is it astonishing to know that so many people are getting scammed or that it costs so much? Does it seem strange that corporate America employs hundreds or thousands of people trained in skills normally associated with spy agencies, fighting fake websites and gift card fraud? Or that these scams help fund transnational organized crime and terrorism, to such an extent that experts call it a national security threat? [4] Are you surprised at how easy it is for an average American to lose their savings or how hard it can be to get it back? Or that victims are reporting a surge in suicidal thoughts? [5]

This is the scam pandemic. It is harming millions of people and undermining trust in America’s systems of commerce and communication. Yet experts we interviewed confirmed that there is no coordinated national plan in America for dealing with it. [6] Now is the time to change that.

Lack of coordination puts success out of reach

To be clear, a mind-boggling array of experts are working to protect their employers, their customers, their industries, and the public from fraud and scams. [7] But, in addition to the immense size and complexity of the problem, they face numerous daily roadblocks to success. Companies across America struggle because there are no agreed standards for warning customers or intervening to assist them due to the absence of a unified approach to measure or understand scam activity. For example: 

• A dating app waits to take down a potentially fraudulent user profile because it is unable to verify the legitimacy of received complaints. 

• A retailer can’t get a fake website shut down because an internet registry won’t or can’t cooperate.

• A bank detects that social media accounts are tied to suspicious transactions. Meanwhile, the social media company detects inappropriate solicitations on its platform. But lacking legal or practical ways to share data, the companies struggle to confirm or act on their suspicions. 

• Victims, lacking a clear way to report being scammed or suffering from frustration or shame, don’t know where to turn. 

Meanwhile, regulatory and law enforcement approaches to financial crime have not fully evolved from the days of paper checks, fax machines, and the Cold War:

• Law enforcement agencies are slow to act or struggle to keep up against scams, partly because there is inconsistent coordination across different levels of government. [8] One of the FBI’s most powerful tools, the Financial Fraud Kill Chain, falls short of the need. [9]

• The federal officials enforcing against scam texts and phone calls lack resources that similar agencies in other countries have. 

• The forms-based system provided by law for banks to share financial fraud information is difficult to scale and unavailable for use by non-banks. [10]

Despite increasingly sophisticated efforts by companies and agencies to collaborate on combating scams, there is no comprehensive government strategy to support their work, nor is there a designated federal official leading the charge.

The experts we interviewed know too well that criminals are organized and vertically integrated while industries and government struggle to coordinate. They understand that criminals have a playbook to turn a target (regardless of age, education, or any other demographic) into a victim. They know that victims suffer their losses silently when they don’t know where to turn, believe no one can help them, or feel shame about being defrauded.  

To be sure, organizations have already developed responses to these challenges and will continue to do so. From banking and payments, telephone and text, to retail, social media and tech, companies are making strides in their own domains. They have even begun to build bridges to foster collaboration across industry borders. But at every turn, they—and the regulators and law enforcement agencies that help oversee them—face challenges because the legal mechanisms designed for one sector do not always work well with other sectors. Meanwhile, fraudulent schemes have evolved rapidly to exploit this weakness, seamlessly traversing industry and national boundaries, using all forms of modern communication and commerce in America to deceive victims and steal their money and information. 

This cohesive threat demands a coherent national response, supported at the highest levels of government, that empowers and helps coordinate the collective efforts of companies, their regulators, victim support groups, and law enforcement.

Toward a national strategy for stopping scams

The Aspen Institute Financial Security Program has launched the National Task Force on Fraud and Scam Prevention to help implement a coordinated national strategy to address the fraud crisis. To do this, the task force is organizing cross-sector, expert working groups to develop recommendations and put forth goals for the strategy. The core purpose of the national strategy will be to foster collaboration and information-sharing across sectors and among institutions of all sizes, so that companies and law enforcement agencies can detect and prevent scams against consumers before they happen. If successful, this effort will help protect individuals and households in all corners of the country who are at severe risk of harm today. It will also aim to help preserve trust in America’s core systems of commerce and communication, which is seriously threatened by the fraud and scams pandemic.

Key components of a national strategy

Drawing on the initial recommendations from the task force and other expert opinions, the following are key components of a robust national strategy to combat scams: [11]

• Prioritize policies to stop scams and measure success: The United States should make prevention of scams against individuals a national priority, akin to preventing terrorism.

• Enhance information sharing: Facilitate faster sharing of anti-fraud and scam information across industry sectors, law enforcement, and regulatory agencies to enable early detection and disruption of scams. This can be achieved by establishing data exchanges, encouraging use of standard communication protocols (APIs), and providing legal mechanisms for sharing information responsibly, securely, and quickly.

• Disrupt communication between scammers and victims: Establish or improve upon coordinated approaches for organizations and government to act when scams are detected, for example, to take down scam websites or social media accounts and block fraudulent use of phone and text communications. Similarly, improve trust and safety by making it easier for individuals to verify that they are communicating authentically with the people and businesses they rely on.

• Align resources: Enable companies across all sectors to allocate resources toward comprehensive scam prevention by providing clearer government guidance and reporting requirements, reducing legal and operational risks associated with participating in anti-fraud information networks, collaborating with community organizations to build public support for anti-scam efforts, and ensuring fair cost-sharing for scam detection.

• Empower law enforcement: Direct law enforcement agencies to focus on preventing scams against individuals and reporting fraudulent activity. Give them sufficient authority and resources to proactively investigate and disrupt financial crime networks. Enable better tracing or freezing of fraudulent transactions as well as improved prosecution of criminals and recovery of assets stolen through fraud. 

• Improve consumer awareness and intervention: Supplement systemic scam disruption efforts by enhancing individuals’ capacity to identify threats (consumer awareness) and protect themselves and their loved ones. This will include identifying ways to improve how firms proactively communicate with customers or provide resources to them when there is heightened risk of harm (warning) or when imminent harm is indicated (intervention). 

• Learn from Elsewhere: Study the successes and failures of others—including from other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Australia, and Singapore, that have already established coordinated national approaches to disrupt fraud and scams against individuals. 

The time to act is now

Organizations across the United States are working furiously to combat scams, and promising industry-wide efforts have already emerged. But even the most sophisticated efforts come up against formidable limits when done without a coordinated national strategy. The scam pandemic is a serious systemic threat to national livelihood that demands coordination and action at the highest levels of national leadership. 

Every day we wait there are 57,000 new scam victims in the United States—enough people to fill a baseball stadium, robbed of enough money to build it.