More people in Texas are scammed on the internet than almost all of the other U.S. states.
Search and verification website Social Catfish studied recent online scams reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and the Federal Trade Commission to find out where in the country were the most number of victims.
“This study is an extension of Social Catfish’s mission to protect consumers from Internet scams through its reverse search technology which can confirm the identity of the person you are interacting with online,” the , adding that its results in 2021 were cited in a Federal Trade Commission report to Congress.
Texas ranked second highest in the country, with 41,148 victims reported in 2022 alone, the study found. In total, Texans this year lost more than $600 million dollars to online scams. The only state higher than Texas was California at 67,095 victims who, in total, lost more than $1.2 billion.
The average theft from each victim in the Lone Star State this year was $14,732. Moreover, the amount of money stolen by online scammers has doubled in the country since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the FBI. In 2019, $3.5 billion was stolen online. In 2021, that number jumped to a staggering $6.9 billion.
People over the age of 60 lost the most amount of money last year — $1.68 billion, the data showed. The five most common types…
