Following the Money: America's 2024–2025 Bank Fraud Report

Start With the Money, Not the Headline

If you want to understand fraud in America, the most useful thing you can do is ignore the headlines for a moment and follow the money. Not the alarming anecdote, not the technology of the week — the dollars. Where do they actually go when a victim is defrauded, and through which doors do they leave the country's financial system?

I run a Bitcoin ATM company, so I have a stake in this question. Bitcoin ATMs are frequently named in fraud coverage, and that coverage shapes the laws now being written. But the only honest way to evaluate any payment channel — ours included — is against the full picture. So this is the full picture, assembled from the FTC, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, the Federal Reserve, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The numbers are larger than most people expect, and they point somewhere most coverage does not.

The National Picture, 2024

Fraud is growing, fast, and across every measure at once.

The FTC received fraud reports from 2.6 million consumers in 2024. The share of victims who reported actually losing money jumped to 38%, up from 27% the year before. The FBI's five-year running total now sits at $50.5 billion. Whatever is being done to stop fraud, it is not yet working — and the reasons have little to do with any single machine.

Where the Losses Come From

Broken out by scheme, the 2024 losses concentrate in a handful of categories — and nearly all of them are paid through bank channels.

The pattern is hard to miss. The money moves by wire, by transfer, by check, by card — the rails the banking system itself operates. That is not an indictment of banks so much as a statement of fact: fraud follows the channels that move the most money, and those channels are overwhelmingly the banks'.

The Banks' Own Channels

The Federal Reserve's 2024 risk-officer survey makes the channel breakdown explicit. Measured by share of bank fraud losses:

Check fraud — a technology older than the telephone — is one of the two largest categories, and it is still growing. The number of institutions reporting attempted check fraud rose 10% from 2023 to 2024, and remote-deposit-capture fraud alone accounted for roughly $400 million in a single year. The least modern instrument in American banking remains one of its most exploited.

Elder Fraud: The Sharpest Edge

No part of this story is more painful than what is happening to older Americans. The FBI recorded $4.885 billion in elder fraud losses in 2024 across 147,127 complaints — a 46% rise in complaints and a 43% rise in losses in a single year. The average loss per senior victim was $83,000. Over the prior three years, annual losses among people over 60 climbed 255%.

The most targeted channel for stealing from seniors is the bank wire transfer. The largest sub-categories in 2024 were investment losses ($1.8B), tech-support scams ($900M), confidence and romance scams ($400M), government impersonation ($200M+), and business-email compromise ($385M). Each begins the same way — with contact, usually a phone call — and ends with money leaving through a regulated financial institution.

The Zelle Reckoning

The clearest illustration of where responsibility actually sits came in December 2024, when the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau sued Early Warning Services — the operator of Zelle — together with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. The complaint alleged that the banks failed to protect the Zelle network from fraud, resulting in more than $870 million in consumer losses since Zelle launched in 2017. Those three banks account for nearly three-quarters of all Zelle activity.

In the interest of accuracy: the lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed in March 2025, following the change in administration. But the loss figures it cited remain documented in federal filings, and the underlying conduct was never disputed on the numbers. A payment network owned and operated by the largest banks in the country moved hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud — and no one has proposed banning it.

The Reimbursement Gap

There is a second, quieter finding that deserves attention. According to industry analysis, six of the largest U.S. banks — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Capital One, U.S. Bank, and Truist — have no clear public policy defining what qualifies as an "unauthorized" transaction. The practical effect is that many scam victims are left without recourse under the Electronic Fund Transfer Act. The institution holding the money is often under no obligation to return it, and frequently does not.

The Numbers Are Worse Than They Look

Every figure above understates the problem. Law-enforcement agencies estimate that only 2% to 6.7% of fraud victims report their losses, which means true totals may run 15 to 50 times higher than the reported figures. The direction of travel is also worsening: Deloitte projects that AI-enabled bank fraud will cost institutions $40 billion a year by 2027, and nearly 70% of enterprise banks already report that fraud rose over the past twelve months.

What This Means

None of this argues that fraud at cash kiosks does not matter, or that any operator should be complacent. It argues for proportion. The overwhelming majority of fraud losses in America move through bank wires, Zelle, checks, and cards — the most established, most regulated rails in the country. For context, fraud at Bitcoin ATMs runs in the low hundreds of millions, a small fraction of the totals above, and the great majority of kiosk transactions are entirely legitimate.

The lesson the data teaches is the same one fraud investigators have always known: you stop a scam at its source, not at its final step. The source is the contact — the spoofed call, the fake broker, the manufactured emergency — and the rails that carry the money are mostly the banking system's own. A serious response funds the things that work: confirmation-of-payee rules that stopped roughly 60% of this fraud in the United Kingdom, real penalties for the telecom infrastructure that delivers the calls, and the live-intervention safeguards that responsible operators already run. Banning the newest, smallest channel changes the headline. It does not change where the money goes.

Follow the money, and it leads somewhere specific. The honest policy question is whether we are willing to follow it there.

Sources

FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book 2024; FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) 2024 Annual Report and Elder Fraud Report; Consumer Financial Protection Bureau v. Early Warning Services, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase & Wells Fargo (December 2024); Federal Reserve FRFS Financial Institution Risk Officer Survey 2024; AFP Payments Fraud and Control Survey 2025; Alloy 2025 State of Fraud Report; ABA Banking Journal fraud coverage 2024–2025; Federal Reserve H.8 release; AARP Fraud Watch Network; Advanced Fraud Solutions check-fraud statistics 2025. Per-institution fraud figures referenced in related Byte Federal materials are modeled estimates, not audited disclosures; the federal totals above are as reported by the cited agencies.