Nasdaq CEO Urges U.S. Fraud Strategy as 2025 Global Losses Are Estimated at $579.4B

Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman urged the U.S. to develop a National Fraud Strategy bringing public agencies and private firms together against fraud, as estimated global losses were $579.4 billion in 2025.

Friedman made the proposal Tuesday, Oct. 20, at the American Banker Most Powerful Women in Banking and Finance Conference in New York. Her framework would connect financial institutions, law enforcement, telecommunications providers, technology companies and payment networks, with participants sharing information responsibly and adopting common practices.

She proposed legal safe harbors and joint Suspicious Activity Reports, with law enforcement providing feedback. Friedman said the strategy should build on existing public- and private-sector programs and align with efforts to modernize the U.S. anti-money laundering and countering the financing of terrorism framework. She said it would create neither a new regulator nor an enforcement agency, and would add no obligations for financial institutions.

“This challenge is simply too large and evolving too quickly for any single institution to solve alone,” Friedman said. An Irish economic-crime strategy also calls for wider information sharing between public agencies and businesses.

Estimated worldwide losses from fraud scams and bank-fraud schemes totaled $579.4 billion in 2025. The estimate includes $62 billion in scam losses and $517.4 billion in bank-fraud losses. It covers losses to consumers and businesses, is not specific to cryptocurrency and captures only part of financial-crime harm by counting confirmed and reported losses from identified incidents.

The estimated combined losses had a 9.2% compound annual growth rate from 2023 through 2025. Scam losses grew at an estimated 19.3% annual rate, while bank-fraud losses grew 8.2%.

Separately, 90% of 505 surveyed financial-crime professionals said AI-driven attacks at their institutions had increased over the prior two years. The survey result does not measure AI’s share of the estimated 2025 losses.