The online loan manager Lending Tree says Pennsylvanians lost $158 million to scammers in 2023, and increase of $28 million from the year before…and that’s only covering the first nine months of the year. The complete year’s losses are not yet compiled.
The data was drawn from the Federal Trade Commission’s Consumer Sentinel Network statistics of fraud reports, which showed that state residents filed 126,576 fraud claims in the first three quarters of last year. The average loss per report was $1,250. Nationwide, there were 1.8 million reports, with a total loss of about $7 billion.
By far, the most common scam techniques are remote contact through emails, phone calls, texts, and social media, with social media the fifth most-used method but the most profitable for crooks. One billion dollars of the total $7 billion stolen nationwide last year was via social media contact.
Pennsylvania ranked fourteenth in the nation for the highest increase in scam losses, at 21.7 percent.
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