The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reflects on the top consumer frauds for 2020, noting that overall it was a busy year. According to the FTC, last year it received more than 2.2 million reports about fraud, with people collectively indicating they had lost nearly $3.3 billion. The top fraud of 2020 was imposter scams, with scammers showed up wearing many different hats – from that of a government official, to a known business, to a dear family member or friend. The FTC got nearly 500,000 reports of imposter scams, and people reported losing a lot of money to these scammers: $1.2 billion, with a median loss of $850. Government and business imposter scams were also among the top categories of COVID-19 and stimulus related reports, proving once again, that scammers follow the headlines. The FTC also observes that the phone is still the top way that scammers are reaching us — both through phone calls and text messages. In fact, there was a sharp increase in the number of reports saying that scammers contacted them by text message. And, not surprisingly, many of these text messages were related to the pandemic. A full breakdown of reports received in 2020 is now available on the FTC’s data analysis site at ftc.gov/exploredata. The data dashboards there breakdown the reports across a numbers of categories, including by state and metropolitan area, as well as exploring a number of subcategories of fraud reports. Read more at the FTC.