Money that stops leaving the country
Americans reported losing 2.1 billion dollars in 2025 to scams that began on social media, eight times the 2020 figure. A large share of it starts with an advertisement the platform was paid to deliver. The money goes to organised fraud operations abroad and does not come back.
▸ Show reasoning & sources ▾ Hide reasoning & sources
Value
The stream is money, priced at the middle of the scale, but it is not a transfer in the ordinary sense. A payment obtained by deception is not an exchange either side chose on informed terms, and the recipients are almost entirely criminal operations outside the country, so nothing offsets the loss anywhere in this accounting. That is why the whole amount is counted rather than a difference in what a euro is worth at two ends. The distress of being defrauded is a separate stream and is counted separately, because losing four thousand euro to a fake investment is not the same event as spending four thousand euro. The value is the middle of the scale, and the whole sum is counted because there is no second end to the transfer inside this accounting.
Impact
Americans reported 2.1 billion dollars of losses in 2025 to scams that began on social media, eight times the 2020 figure, with about 1.1 billion of it in investment fraud [1]. How much of that starts with a paid advertisement rather than a message, a marketplace listing or an organic post is the first estimate: 35 percent is used, in a range from 15 to 60, since investment and shopping fraud — the two largest categories — are the ones most often advertised. The second and larger correction is under-reporting. The trade commission's own work suggests only a small minority of defrauded people ever file a report; a multiplier of four is used here, in a range from two to ten, which is well below what its own estimate implies. That gives about 2.53 billion euro of actual losses from paid scam adverts. A platform facing liability screens its advertisers, and 40 percent of the losses are assumed prevented, in a range from 15 to 70 percent. The victims carry a weight of 1.2. The Impact is the largest in this debate and it rests on two multipliers rather than on any direct count of scam adverts.
▸ Show calculation ▾ Hide calculation
| Reported losses to scams that began on social media [1] | 2.1 billion dollars, eight times the 2020 figure | 1,810 million euro | |
| × | Share starting with a paid advertisement Setting, range 15 to 60 percent: investment and shopping fraud, the two largest categories, are the ones most often advertised [1] | 35 % | 634 million euro |
| × | Correction for losses never reported Setting, range 2 to 10: the trade commission's own work suggests only a small minority of defrauded people file a report, which implies a higher multiplier than the one used | × 4 | 2,530 million euro |
| × | Share prevented once platforms face liability Setting, range 15 to 70 percent: a platform that can be sued for a paid advert screens the advertiser | 40 % | 1,010 million euro |
| × | Weight of a euro at these incomes fraud losses fall across the income distribution and hit hardest relative to means below the middle of it | 1.2 | 1,212 million euro |
| ÷ | Normalised Impact scale of this evaluation | 200 million euro a point | 6.06 |
Plausibility
The reported loss figure is solid and everything built on it is estimated. The counterfactual is the current position, in which platforms face no liability for adverts they are paid to run and enforce their own policies at their own pace. The trade commission's series is a census of complaints rather than a survey, which makes it exact about what was reported and silent about what was not, and the under-reporting multiplier is where most of the uncertainty lives. What the measure would achieve has no measurement at all: the United Kingdom imposed a fraudulent advertising duty in its online safety regime and Australia built a scams prevention framework, both too recent to have produced an evaluation. The confounder that matters is displacement — fraud that cannot be advertised moves to messaging, marketplace listings and organic posts, none of which this bill touches — and it is unresolved. Reverse causation does not arise. The Plausibility is at the middle: the losses are counted precisely, the share attributable to adverts and the share preventable are both assumed, and no comparable duty has yet been evaluated anywhere.
Counterfactual: the current position, with no platform liability for paid adverts. Design: mechanistic — chain named (liability → advertiser screening → fewer scam adverts → fewer losses), with no evaluated precedent; the United Kingdom and Australian duties are too recent. Confounder: displacement of fraud into messaging, marketplace listings and organic posts, which the bill does not touch; unresolved. Direction: no reverse causation. Ceiling: projektion 6.0 binds and mechanistic gives the same. The under-reporting multiplier and the advert share are both carried in bands rather than in P.