Capturing Adults' Familiarity With Financial Fraud

According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers lost $12.8 billion to fraud in 2024, with actual losses estimated to be as high as $196 billion. Research on financial fraud knowledge is scant, limiting development of effective protection tools. Using RAND's American Life Panel, 1,509 respondents (ages 21–90) listed up to five fraud schemes and tactics. We explore respondents' conceptualizations of fraud types through the freelisting technique and categorize the answers into five groups: threat-, opportunity-, consumer-, imposter-, and ID-based frauds. We find that women mention more imposter-based and fewer ID-based scams than men, while older adults mention more consumer-based scams than their younger counterparts. Higher financial literacy is associated with a greater likelihood of mentioning threat-, ID-, and imposter-based fraud. Mentioning ID- or consumer-based scams is tied to a greater likelihood of being targeted by a fraudster, whereas mentioning threat-based scams is tied to a smaller likelihood of losing money.