Blaming Scam Victims Is a Cop-Out. Big Tech Built the Trap

When someone admits they lost their savings to an online scam, the first reaction is rarely sympathy. It is contempt. Comment sections ask how anyone could fall for it, group chats call it a sucker tax, and somewhere a coworker quietly decides the victim must be dumb. That reflex is the most socially acceptable cruelty we have left, and blaming scam victims protects exactly the wrong people. The companies that built the trap get to watch the person who walked into it take the blame.

This week, a new coalition called United to Stop Online Scams launched with a different answer, and it is worth saying out loud: stop blaming scam victims. More than thirty consumer, older adult, and tech accountability groups signed a letter to Congress this month urging lawmakers to examine how platforms profit from fraud and to make fraud prevention a legal obligation instead of a voluntary hobby. The kickoff livestream drew more than twenty thousand viewers and featured scam survivor Kate Kleinert alongside Senator Mark Kelly, Representative Valerie Foushee, and California Business and Consumer Services Secretary Rohit Chopra, according to the October 1 announcement from the Motion Picture and Television Fund.

The losses are measured in hundreds of billions

Blaming scam victims looks especially shabby once you see the scale. Americans lost nearly one hundred fifty billion dollars to online scams and crimes in a single year, about four hundred six million dollars a day, according to figures from the Consumer Federation of America cited in the announcement. The FBI reported that losses for Americans aged sixty and over rose by fifty-nine percent, averaging roughly thirty-eight thousand five hundred dollars per complaint. These are not people who skipped a two-factor-authentication tutorial. They are being run through industrial-scale deception operations that now use cloned voices and synthetic video to impersonate real relatives, bankers, and romantic partners.

"So many of us scam survivors carry so much shame," said Kleinert, a Pennsylvania widow who lost thirty-nine thousand dollars to a Facebook romance scammer, in the coalition's new PSA. "I am here to tell you: It is not on you. It is on them. Meta and the AI companies are counting on survivors being quiet. We can't be." That one passage does more than a hundred scam-awareness webinars, because it ends the era of blaming scam victims in about twenty words. The PSA, produced with the Motion Picture and Television Fund and the Entertainment Industry Foundation, demonstrates how AI voice cloning and deepfake video make deception more convincing and harder to detect.

Awareness tips are just blame with a friendlier font

Here is the unpopular part. Every "five red flags to watch for" list, every seminar for seniors on spotting phishing, every relative who lectures the victim on digital literacy is, however well meant, a way of blaming scam victims. It relocates responsibility from the trillion-dollar companies that designed the engagement machines to the individual who got deceived by one. Nobody runs awareness seminars for bank vaults. We expect the vault to hold. The platforms built the vault, left the door open, collected ad revenue from the scam ads running beside the crime, and then blamed the user for walking through.

Japan has already started treating synthetic impersonation as a legal problem rather than a personal-failing problem, as my colleague's report on the Japanese ruling against AI voice cloning explained. And on the device level, new scam detection tools can help, though they should be on by default rather than a setting buried in a menu. But software toggles will never fix an incentive problem. As long as platforms profit from scam advertising and face no legal duty to stop fraud on their networks, the cheapest strategy is a helpline and a hashtag.

Make fraud prevention a legal duty, not a PR choice

"AI is making scams more sophisticated, and older Americans are particularly vulnerable, losing hard-earned retirement savings to criminals online," said Senator Kelly in the coalition announcement. "Older Americans shouldn't be an afterthought as this technology evolves." The coalition's demand is specific and correct: Congress should shift the burden from consumers to platforms, examining exactly how the platforms profit from scams and requiring fraud prevention by law, because a culture of blaming scam victims lets those platforms off the hook.

The next time someone in your life gets scammed, try the sentence the coalition put in the PSA instead of the one your group chat wants to use. It is not on them. The shame belongs to an industry that engineered the trap and kept the profits. The coalition's site, unitedtostoponlinescams.org, lists its members and its demands. Read them, and stop blaming scam victims. It was always the easy option. It was never the right one.