Shame and sleepless nights follow scam victims long after the money is gone

Eva Velasquez, CEO of the Identity Theft Resource Center, summed up the group’s latest survey with a contrast between two kinds of crime. In her words, scams act as an acute trauma, while traditional identity theft acts as a chronic burden. The center’s 2026 Consumer Impact Report, based on surveys fielded in August and September, puts numbers on the emotional damage that outlasts any lost balance.

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Two separate groups answered. One was 1,111 American adults drawn from the general public, 798 of whom reported a lifetime brush with identity crime or a scam. The other was 197 people who had contacted the center for help during the previous year. Comparing the two let the researchers separate everyday exposure from the experience of people whose cases were serious enough to prompt a call for assistance.

Shame and self-blame in the ITRC survey

Among scam victims who had reached out to the center, 54.8 percent said they felt ashamed or embarrassed, and many believed the incident was partly their own fault. ConsumerAffairs, summarizing the same report, put the self-blame figure at 87 percent for scam victims in the general consumer group. Victims in both the scam and identity theft groups also described trouble falling or staying asleep, which is the sleepless-nights half of the picture.

Money was part of it too. Some scam victims in the general group reported losing at least $100,000 that they never got back, a share ConsumerAffairs reported as 29.5 percent of that group.

Losses reached working-age adults and households with higher incomes, so the pattern is not confined to people with little money to lose. Some respondents said the crime cost them jobs, cost them promotions or strained relationships with supervisors, which suggests the damage keeps spreading through a victim’s working life after the transfer itself is finished and the bank account is empty.

Recovery scams and organizations that never answered

Asking for help did not reliably produce any. In the general consumer group, 87.9 percent of scam victims said they had asked an organization for assistance and heard nothing back. Several said the organizations that did respond left them feeling the incident was their fault. One victim who contacted the center described government representatives on the phone who did not seem to care, and said the case was still unresolved after six months.

Official silence leaves room for a second wave of fraud. About 78.9 percent of scam victims in the general group paid a fee to a third party promising to recover stolen money, repair their credit or catch the scammer, according to Help Net Security’s account of the report. The center labels these offers recovery scams, and the survey suggests that a person who has already been robbed is an unusually reachable target for them.

Identity theft as a chronic burden

Traditional identity theft, in which criminals use stolen personal details to open credit, charge cards, set up bank accounts or misuse medical and employment records, produced a different kind of strain: time. Of the victims who contacted the center, 64 percent spent more than 40 hours trying to resolve the crime, and ConsumerAffairs reported that 62.7 percent still had unresolved cases when the survey closed. Some had only discovered the crime more than a year after it happened.

The slow tail is what Velasquez meant by a chronic burden. A scam hits like a shock, with a clear moment of realization, while identity theft can surface months later and then consume weeks of calls to lenders, agencies and credit bureaus. Help Net Security noted that the center’s findings come with a caution of their own, since survey results should not be read as proof that every victim faces identical consequences.

Close calls among confident consumers

Confidence did not equal immunity. In the general group, 91 percent described themselves as knowledgeable about protecting personal information, yet nearly half said that during the previous 12 months they had come close to handing over information or sending money to a scammer before stopping in time. More than a quarter reported multiple close calls, a rate that makes the shame attached to actual victims look hard to justify.

People who avoided losses credited three things: a sense that something felt wrong, recognizing a tactic they had learned about through consumer education, and a warning from a bank or payment app. Related scam research, including the Bitdefender global scam trends report and an Experian study of digital identity fraud risks, covers how those tactics keep changing.

Velasquez, whose professional profile lists her as the center’s chief executive, said behind the numbers are real people enduring devastating trauma and shame. The unanswered question in the survey is whether banks, agencies and payment apps will answer the next victim any faster than the 87.9 percent who heard nothing this time.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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