The opening text is the whole con: what 2024's scam data reveals about the funnel

Every pig-butchering loss begins with a message you didn't ask for. In 2024, Americans reported losing $470 million to scams that started with a text, the Federal Trade Commission found, roughly five times the 2020 figure. The opener is cheap, deniable and, increasingly, the single most common way a crypto con begins.

The FTC's tally of the most-reported text scams reads like a field guide to the funnel: bogus package-delivery alerts; task and job scams promising easy money for liking videos or reviewing products; fake bank fraud alerts; phony unpaid-toll notices; and the wrong-number text that arrives as a misdirected hello and slowly turns flirty or businesslike. Job scams alone cost more than $220 million in the first half of 2024, nearly 40 percent of them task scams, per the FTC. The wrong-number opener is the classic doorway to romance-investment fraud.

Where the money ends up

The FBI's 2024 Internet Crime Report shows where those openers lead. Americans filed more than 859,000 complaints reporting $16.6 billion in losses, up 33 percent from 2023, according to a TRM Labs analysis of the report. Investment fraud was again the costliest category at $6.57 billion, and cryptocurrency-investment scams accounted for 41,557 complaints and $5.7 billion, a 47 percent jump. Losses touching digital assets reached $9.3 billion overall, and confidence and romance scams frequently feed those investment totals, as courtships are engineered to end at a crypto deposit.

The burden falls hardest on older Americans: people 60 and over reported $2.8 billion in crypto-scam losses, the most of any age group, per TRM Labs's read of the FBI data. On the enforcement side, the bureau's Operation Level Up identified more than 4,300 victims and headed off nearly $286 million in losses.

The numbers point to a simple defensive posture: - Treat any unsolicited text or DM from a stranger as a possible opener, especially a friendly wrong number. - Never let someone you've met only online direct your investing, however warm the relationship feels. - Verify any platform independently; a screenshot of profits is not proof of anything. - Be extra protective of older relatives, the group losing the most. - Report attempts to ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov.

The con's economics depend on volume: crews blast millions of openers knowing a handful will land. Deleting the first message, no reply, no curiosity, is where the whole scheme is cheapest to defeat.

— Sources: [TRM Labs](https://www.trmlabs.com/resources/blog/a-record-breaking-year-for-cybercrime-key-findings-from-the-fbis-2024-ic3-report) · [Techlicious](https://www.techlicious.com/blog/ftc-says-these-text-scams-cost-americans-470-million-in-2024/)