Online Scams Cost Users, Businesses $1 Trillion Last Year. Guess Who’s Likeliest To Fall For Them?

Younger generations are falling for scams at higher rates—raising new concerns about cyber habits they may bring into the workforce.

A new report reveals that global losses from online scams totaled $1 trillion in 2025. The report also offers some surprising findings on who is most likely to fall victim to online scams. If you think it’s senior citizens, think again.

According to Bitdefender’s Global Scam Intelligence Report 2026, online scams were the fastest emerging type of cybercrime last year.

In fact, the report shows that among 7,000 users surveyed across seven different countries, 1 in 7 (14 percent) fell victim to an online scam. U.S. consumers are scammed the most (17 percent of Americans have been scammed), followed by the U.K. and Australia (both at 16 percent).

Here’s what really is attention-grabbing: Younger generations are twice as likely to fall victim to online scams than older ones. For example, online scammers are hitting gaming culture – big time.

The report takes notes of ongoing efforts to steal Steam accounts from the popular cloud gaming platform.

“Fake beta invites,” “early-access promises,” and false offers of exclusive in-game purchases, enable hackers to steal Steam credentials and deploy “infostealers” — a type of malware that collects sensitive data from a user’s device.

A Workforce Readiness Gap

Several parents, through verified social media messages, told MES Computing about their experiences and thoughts around young people and cyber threat education.

Kids in school, “are taught nothing about how to responsibly handle this type of technology,” said Heidi Perry-Hipp, a former New York-based paraprofessional in the education sector, in a message.

“Now with the ‘bell-to-bell' law not allowing phones in schools, they speak less of them. The only time this was addressed in a school both when I was an educator and as a mom was when one of their own moms had some type of issue being cyberbullied. I remember ... when I was teaching about how to avoid creeps online and how to keep your info locked down, but that was about it,” she said.

Both of her children “had no class like this,” said Florida-based mother of two, Carrie Person.

Person said that cyber threat awareness should be “mandatory.”

“Kids also need to be taught that it isn’t just their phones they need to be aware of. It’s also their computers, gaming systems, smart devices, etc.” she added.

Another mom, New York artist and professor, Heather Dunn, agreed.

“I think it would be a good idea to include cyber scam education in school,” although noting that she and her daughter “have talked about scams.”

“I know she is very careful not to use her name, correct birthday or age, and not share pictures publicly,” Dunn added.

The underlying issue here for midmarket IT leaders is how prepared are younger people entering the workforce if they are vulnerable to online scams? They can potentially become the biggest gateway into threats entering the organization.

The report offered several other interesting takeaways:

Scams Move Where Users Are

Social media has outpaced email as the primary threat vector.

Online crooks are increasingly targeting social media platforms. WhatsApp, Meta, and social ads are bullseyes for threat actors.

Money is the primary motivator.

As with motivation since ancient times – money ignites these attacks, the report found. Investment fraud, bank phishing, and crypto schemes, dominate the threat landscape.

Scammers work like enterprises.

Scammers operate tight-run ships. Their peak activity runs Tuesdays and Thursday and hardly on Sundays. They follow the corporate schedule, according to the report.

The Bottom Line

Scam risk is migrating to the platforms younger users rely on most, and that has implications far beyond the typical smartphone user.

Midmarket IT leaders should treat this as signaling that security awareness training, onboarding, and acceptable-use policies may need to evolve for a generation shaped more by social apps and gaming ecosystems than by email.