Impersonation scams cost Americans about $3.5 billion in reported losses in 2025, and the Federal Trade Commission said on September 24, 2026 that it wants to know whether the platforms that carry the scammers’ ads should answer for them. The agency voted 2-0 to issue an advance notice of proposed rulemaking asking whether to amend its Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses, or write a new one, to reach platforms.
The FTC logged more than one million imposter scam reports in 2025. Its release says impersonation scams “have been amplified by search engines, social media and other digital marketplace platforms that profit from optimizing online ads for third parties, regardless of whether the third parties are legitimate.” That sentence frames the question the notice puts to the public.
The Consumer Sentinel numbers behind $3.5 billion
The figures come from the FTC’s consumer complaint data. In its May 2026 consumer alert, the agency said imposter scams ranked first for the ninth consecutive year, with over a million reports and $3.5 billion in losses, nearly 20 percent more than the prior year. Reports of government impersonators rose 40 percent, driven by bogus toll payment texts that spoof EZ-Pass, SunPass, FasTrak and TxTag, and romance scam losses climbed 22 percent to $1.48 billion.
The notice isolates the platform slice. According to the FTC press release, $2.1 billion in losses came from scams that began on social media, and nearly 30 percent of people who lost money to scams named social media as the point of contact. The FTC’s chairman, Andrew N. Ferguson, wrote in a Bloomberg Law commentary that social media scams have grown eightfold since 2020.
Online shopping is the setting the notice emphasizes: about 85 percent of U.S. consumers shop online, and the filing centers on the ad-optimization tools that platforms sell to third-party advertisers.
Ad optimization and the platform incentive
The notice itself describes a market failure. Platforms earn advertising revenue whether an advertiser is legitimate or not, while consumers and the businesses being impersonated bear the cost. It cites reporting that Meta earned roughly $16 billion, about 10 percent of its 2024 revenue, from fraudulent advertisements, and it notes that 52 percent of U.S. consumers use Facebook daily and 48 percent use YouTube daily, so the ads reach most of the public.
Ferguson put the stakes bluntly: “If Big Tech won’t put American citizens first by cracking down on scammers who use their platforms to prey on the innocent, the FTC will do it for them.” Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, framed the proceeding around trust: “Free markets depend on trust, transparency and consumers’ ability to make informed choices.”
Section 230, the 2024 rule and the questions asked
The existing rule was finalized on March 1, 2024 and bars impersonating government and businesses as an unfair or deceptive practice under Section 5 of the FTC Act. As the law firm Mayer Brown notes in its analysis of the notice, the agency previously rejected a broader “means and instrumentalities” provision that would have reached service providers who knew their tools could enable impersonation. The new notice reopens that territory, and says individual scam advertisers averaged 151 ad removals each, a sign that takedowns alone do not deter them.
The notice argues that Section 230 immunity does not protect a platform’s own conduct, including a material contribution to developing unlawful content or algorithmic curation. If a rule were adopted, the FTC could seek civil penalties and consumer redress in a single federal action under Section 19 of the FTC Act. The questions fall into six groups: how the ad marketplace is structured, what optimization tools and safeguards exist, how common platform-enabled deception is, whether regulation or alternatives are needed, what compliance would require, and how long implementation would take.
Measures the Commission asks about include advertiser vetting, pre-publication ad review, monitoring for impersonation, investigating complaints, removing confirmed scam ads, disciplining advertisers and suspending optimization services for repeat offenders.
Comment window and what remains undecided
Comments go to Regulations.gov under “16 CFR Part 461, Impersonation Rule, Matter No. R207000,” and are due 60 days after Federal Register publication, a date the sources reviewed do not specify. The ANPRM listing in the FTC legal library carries RIN 3084-AB90. The document is a request for information rather than a proposed rule, so no obligation on platforms exists yet, and the Commission would need a further proposal, a second round of comments and a final vote before any platform duty took effect. The figure the record cannot yet settle is how much of the $2.1 billion in social-media-origin losses traces to paid ads rather than to organic messages and posts, because the FTC’s release does not break the number down.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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