(SeaPRwire) – The Joint Economic Committee just dropped a report that reads like a confession of incompetence. We are losing money at a rate of two million dollars an hour. Yet the government has no single ledger. It does not know how much was stolen. It does not know how much was seized. It certainly does not know how much came back. This is not a policy gap. It is a functional blind spot.
The numbers from the FBI are brutal. Americans lost nearly eighteen billion dollars in 2025. Total reported internet crime losses hit twenty point nine billion. That is a twenty six percent jump from 2024. The government returned only three hundred and thirty six million dollars via the FBI. The Secret Service added another seven hundred and seventy million dollars. But those funds came from mixed fraud schemes. They are not specific to cyber threats. The accounting is fragmented. It spans different time periods. It uses different categories. Suzanne Sando from Javelin says we lack true accounting. We do not grasp the full extent of the problem.
Congress wants to fix this with the ReportScams.Gov Act. It aims for a unified federal strategy. It wants a central location for victims. It also wants to hold foreign countries accountable for scam compounds. These are reasonable goals. But the private sector refuses to act proactively. Banks and social platforms protect user privacy while ignoring abuse. They do not have incentives to catch fraud early. The result is a diffuse crisis. Millions of victims across dozens of countries suffer small losses that add up to billions. Law enforcement focuses on big fish. They leave the small cases alone.
Victims stay silent because they feel embarrassed. They fear judgment. They believe recovery is impossible. Sen. Maggie Hassan and Rep. Don Beyer are pushing for legislation to change this. But the real issue is coordination. We have organized criminal networks in Southeast Asia. They use trafficked workers. They leverage AI to build trust. Deepfakes make the scams convincing. The tech improves faster than our legal frameworks. We are playing catch up with a moving target. The only way forward is a strategic, well-resourced response. We need to stop treating this as a minor nuisance. It is a systemic failure of protection. Action is the only cure.