Scam victims surveyed reported serious emotional and financial consequences, including substantial unrecovered losses.
Many victims said organizations ignored requests for help, while recovery scammers targeted them again.
Traditional identity theft often involved lengthy recovery efforts, with cases remaining unresolved after considerable work.
Scams can leave victims struggling with shame, disrupted careers and financial losses long after the initial deception, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2026 Consumer Impact Report.
Released with support from Experian, the report examines how identity crimes affect victims beyond the money stolen. It describes scams as an immediate emotional trauma, while traditional identity theft can create a prolonged burden of paperwork and recovery efforts.
The research draws on two separate online surveys conducted in August and September: one involving 197 people who contacted ITRC for assistance during the previous year, and another involving 1,111 U.S. adults who may or may not have experienced identity theft, scams or fraud.
Among the general consumer respondents, 798 reported experiencing an identity crime or scam during their lifetime.
Intense emotional reactions
The emotional findings were stark. Among scam victims in the general consumer group, 87% partly blamed themselves. Some 80.5% reported thoughts of suicide following the crime, compared with 24.5% of traditional identity theft victims.
Financial damage was also substantial: 29.5% of general consumer scam victims reported unrecovered losses of at least $100,000.
Seeking help often brought further frustration. Nearly 88% said an organization they approached never responded, and 78.9% reported being targeted by recovery scammers seeking upfront payments to retrieve lost funds.
Taken together, those findings highlight a difficult recovery environment. Victims may be trying to address financial damage while coping with emotional distress and evaluating fresh promises of assistance. An offer to recover stolen money can become another decision to navigate at an already vulnerable moment.
Different challenge
Traditional identity theft presented a different challenge: the time required to resolve it. Among respondents who contacted ITRC, 64% of traditional identity crime victims spent more than 40 hours seeking resolution, and 62.7% still had unresolved cases when surveyed.
The two survey groups should be considered separately. ITRC’s client sample consisted of people who had sought its assistance, while the general consumer sample included adults with and without victimization experiences. Their questionnaires were similar but not identical.
Roughly half the questions maintained comparisons with earlier annual surveys; the remainder examined identity-related scams in greater depth.
The findings describe respondents’ reported experiences; they should not be read as proof that every victim faces the same consequences. They nevertheless illustrate why assessing the damage from identity crime requires looking beyond the amount stolen to the emotional strain and unfinished work of recovery.