We’re proud to hear of many wonderful Sentinel success stories! In Florida, a CEO of a cryptocurrency ATM company was arrested on conspiracy, money laundering and other charges. In New York, a defendant was sentenced for participating in a scheme to mail fraudulent prize notices. In Texas, an El Paso woman was accused of impersonating a federal employee and for falsely processing immigration applications. In Los Angeles, the City Attorney’s Office stopped a health food store from peddling radish paste as a coronavirus cure. Beyond law enforcement, a group of academics used Sentinel data in a research paper postulating that limiting the tracking and sharing of personal information reduces financial fraud.
Have a Sentinel success story? We would love to hear it at sentinel@ftc.gov.
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The 2022 Data Book provides an overview of consumer complaint trends in the past year. Consumers reported losing $8.8 billion to fraud in 2022, which is $2.6 billion more than 2021. The data is also available on an interactive Tableau dashboard that we update quarterly.
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The FTC reviewed consumer age data to learn who experiences scams. The resulting Data Spotlight found that consumers under the age of 60 are significantly more likely to report losing money to online shopping scams than older adults. More information on how scams affect people older than 60 can be found in the FTC’s annual report to Congress on older adults.
A separate Data Spotlight sheds new light on the lies that romance scammers use to take advantage of people—lies that Sentinel complaints show cost nearly 70,000 consumers $1.3 billion in 2022.
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You can find consumers by age range after running a Sentinel search and opening the consumer filters on the left-hand side to find “Consumer Age Range.” About half of consumers provide age information in a way that we can process it.
You can learn more information on how to best use Sentinel by joining one of our monthly Spring Training Sessions, which are live and online. Just email sentinel@ftc.gov for more information.
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We wish the FTC’s Criminal Liaison Unit a happy 20th birthday. CLU helps increase the criminal prosecution of consumer fraud. Since it was formed 20 years ago, the FTC’s CLU has contributed to the successful prosecution of over one thousand defendants, including fraudulent telemarketers, phantom debt and mortgage relief scammers, immigration fraudsters and others who prey on American consumers and small businesses. There is a CLU library in Sentinel (see Other Resources/For Criminal Law Enforcement) that we are updating with additional charging documents used to prosecute scams, consumer fraud, contempt of FTC orders, and other consumer protection violations. You can also contact the CLU Chief, a veteran FTC attorney, at clu@ftc.gov to coordinate on the criminal prosecution of consumer protection cases.
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Sentinel complaints also aid the agency’s consumer redress mission. More than $115 million in refunds are being sent to consumers nationwide as a result of a 2018 action that the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice brought against MoneyGram for failing to crack down on scammers using their payment system.
The 2018 action charged that MoneyGram violated an FTC settlement from 2009, along with a 2012 DOJ agreement in which the company agreed to take proactive steps to reduce scammers’ ability to use their payment system to receive money from consumers.
Preventing fraud is an agency priority. The FTC provides timely consumer education information on current topics such as family emergency schemes and crypto investment scams. See more consumer advice at consumer.ftc.gov.
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