Consumers reported losing nearly $16 billion to fraud and scams in 2025, according to the Federal Trade Commission — a 25% increase over the previous year. Those losses represent far more than dollars: retirement savings wiped out, family finances upended, small businesses harmed, and trust in our economy weakened. As Georgia’s Attorney General, protecting consumers is one of my office’s top priorities. Every day, we investigate fraud, scams, and other forms of financial crime, prosecute bad actors, and help Georgians avoid becoming victims. But financial crime has evolved faster than public policy. We continue to think about scams as though they are simply another form of fraud. They are not. Traditional fraud involves criminals making unauthorized transactions using stolen credentials or compromised accounts and can often be addressed by securing a transaction. Scams present fundamentally different challenges and demand different solutions. In 2025 alone, Americans reported losing $3.5 billion to imposter scams — nearly triple the total from five years earlier. Criminals increasingly pose as trusted businesses, financial institutions, government agencies, or even family members to manipulate victims into sending money willingly, genuinely believes the transaction is legitimate. Many of these scams begin on social media, through text messages, spoofed phone calls, dating websites, fake investment opportunities, and phishing emails. Here in Georgia, we have seen the same troubling evolution. Cryptocurrency investment scams, government impersonation schemes, romance scams, and business email compromise attacks are growing in sophistication, creating devastating losses. For too long, public debate has focused on the final stage of the scam. By then, a victim may have been manipulated over days, weeks, or even months. The real opportunities to stop these crimes exist throughout: when deceptive advertisements appear online, when scam text messages are sent, when criminals impersonate trusted institutions, when suspicious accounts surface, and when funds can still be intercepted before reaching criminal organizations. A strategy focused on only one stage will always fall short. No single organization or single sector can solve this problem alone. Attorneys general, federal agencies, technology companies, telecommunications providers, financial institutions, payment companies, merchants, consumer advocates, and law enforcement each see a different part of the criminal enterprise. By combining knowledge and resources, we can protect consumers before losses occur. Important work is already underway across both the public and private sectors. Businesses and organizations are investing in artificial intelligence, stronger authentication, behavioral analytics, fraud detection, transaction monitoring to identify suspicious activity earlier and disrupt criminal activity before consumers suffer losses. Law enforcement agencies are expanding partnerships and their capacity to investigate sophisticated criminal organizations. These efforts matter, but criminals are adapting just as quickly. Continued innovation, investment, and collaboration across all levels remain essential—starting with consumer education, so people recognize scams before it’s too late. In Georgia, we have continued to meet consumers where they are – visiting seniors, retirement groups, churches, and industry associations to share information on the latest scams and how to avoid them. We have also created three educational guides to help older adults, small businesses, and military families protect their finances and prevent cyber threats. Education is key. Consumers who know what to look for have a far better chance of ignoring a scam phone call, text or email — keeping their hard-earned dollars safe. We must also improve the timely sharing of threat intelligence among the public and private sectors so emerging scam tactics can be disrupted faster. Finally, we must provide law enforcement with the resources necessary to identify, investigate, and prosecute the sophisticated criminal organizations behind these schemes. Through our White Collar and Cyber Crime Unit, we’re partnering with local, state, and federal officers to disrupt Business Email Compromise schemes, and leading the charge on crypto scam investigations, but there’s more work to do. We must continue to strengthen those efforts — supporting state and local cybercrime units so we can dismantle large-scale criminal networks, intercept funds, and help victims. For generations, consumer protection has focused on holding criminals accountable after harm occurs. That work remains essential, but the next generation of consumer protection must also focus on preventing harm before it happens. Today’s scams are coordinated, multi-stage criminal enterprises that exploit an interconnected digital economy and our human inclination to trust. Our response must be just as coordinated. If government, industry, and law enforcement each strengthen parts of the ecosystem they are best positioned to protect — and work together to close the gaps between them — we can stop scams before consumers ever lose their money. Success won’t be measured only by how much money we recover after a scam. It will be measured by how many people never become victims in the first place. That should be the defining goal of modern consumer protection. Chris Carr has served as Georgia’s attorney general since 2016. The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. 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