GASA rebuilt its State of Scams methodology to stop overcounting losses

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance has published the methodology behind its 2026 State of Scams reports, and the headline change is a deliberately more conservative way of counting losses. “For 2026, we made a conscious decision to change how we measure scam losses,” the group writes; “the goal was simple, but ambitious: get closer to the truth.”

The revised approach separates scam encounters from confirmed financial losses, then runs reported amounts through a multi-step validation — loss bands informed by the prior year’s distribution, reconfirmation of high-value figures, and an exact-amount capture — before applying strict data-cleaning rules. Responses get discarded where reported losses exceed annual household income without substantiation, or where figures shift repeatedly without resolution. The result, GASA says, is “a more conservative but more reliable estimate.”

The State of Scams report is the closest thing the anti-fraud world has to a global prevalence benchmark, and it gets cited freely in policy and industry decks. A methodology change of this size means the 2026 figures very likely won’t be apples-to-apples with 2025’s. Anyone quoting “scam losses rose/fell X%” across the two editions will be comparing two different rulers — worth keeping the methodology note handy the next time one of those numbers shows up in a slide.