The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a list of recommendations for how three federal agencies tasked with identifying and preventing scammers from harming consumers, companies and national security can better collaborate to accomplish certain shared objectives.
The recommendations include action items to be taken by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to improve complaint reporting, consumer education and federal coordination between the agencies to counter scams.
According to the office’s findings, detailed in a report based on a study of banking data filed in 2021, there currently is “no government-wide estimate of the money lost to scams, no common definition of scams, and no national strategy for combating them.”
The director of the FBI would be given the task of leading an effort to develop and implement a government-wide strategy to counter scams, as well as coordinating related activities.
“This effort should address issues such as a common definition for scams; consumer complaint reporting; related types/granularity/aggregation of data, risks, and responses; a government-wide estimate of this type of crime; and coordination of federal and business activities. As appropriate, and consistent with desired characteristics, a strategy should also define agency roles, responsibilities, and authorities; identify necessary resources; and identify any legislative, regulatory, or administrative changes needed to enable a comprehensive, coordinated response,” the GAO said in its first of 16 recommendations – many of which overlapped between agencies due to their collaborative nature.
To address this issue, the GAO recommended the leaders of each agency work to “harmonize data collection” by consistently collecting data on scam type, dollar loss amount, payment method, and other data fields, as appropriate. One specific way this could be done, per the report, is through the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network – an investigative cyber tool providing access to millions of fraud and scam reports. The information contributed to Sentinel is used to improve scam identification, categorized by scam type, as well as dollar loss amounts, payment methods and other data.
The GAO instructed all three agencies to use their respective data collection and analysis tools to estimate and report the number of complaints they receive and the associated financial losses resulting from scams identified from those complaint records.
Developing and adopting a common definition of what constitutes a scam, as well as related scam types, was another key recommendation posed in the report. After doing so, the agencies should then work together to calculate a single, government-wide estimate of the number of consumers affected by, and dollar losses resulting from, scams, factoring in an estimate of unreported incidents, per the report.
Anti-scam training for stakeholder organizations and consumers is frequently offered to improve consumers’ ability to recognize and protect themselves against scams. Such training is often provided through in-person events or webinars. The GAO recommended the agencies establish metrics and a plan for measuring the effectiveness of these types of educational offerings.