Fraud isn’t just a nuisance anymore. It’s a multi-billion-dollar drain on the American economy. Fraudsters should be punished. 

      Americans lost $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, according to newly released Federal Trade Commission data, a sharp jump from the prior year. Investment scams alone accounted for $5.7 billion, while identity-based fraud continued to spread across banking, crypto, real estate and social media platforms.  What’s driving the surge isn’t necessarily more scams, but more effective ones.  “The problem isn’t that fraud is new,” said Kevin Leyes, CEO of Miami-based holding company LeyesX. “It’s that identity has become the weakest link in the entire digital economy.”

     Leyes, a 25-year-old Argentinian-American entrepreneur who advises high-net-worth individuals and institutions on cyber risk, says modern fraud rarely begins with a dramatic hack. Instead, it builds quietly through exposed personal data, impersonation accounts, leaked records and forgotten online profiles that attackers exploit long before money disappears  The FTC’s data shows something unusual: the total number of fraud reports hasn’t exploded, but the percentage of victims who actually lose money has jumped sharply. In 2024, 38% of people who reported fraud said they lost money, up from 27% the year before.

     That shift mirrors what LeyesX sees among clients whose digital footprints stretch across dozens of platforms and jurisdictions.  “Once your identity is mapped, fraud becomes predictable,” Leyes said. “By the time alerts fire, the damage is already baked in.” Traditional cybersecurity, he argues, was never built for this. Firewalls protect networks. Banks monitor transactions. Platforms secure accounts. But no one governs identity as a continuous source of economic risk.

     To address that gap, Leyes developed what he calls Identity Risk Governance, or IRG.  Rather than treating fraud as isolated incidents, IRG treats digital identity as a living risk surface, something that must be continuously mapped, monitored and reduced, similar to financial or operational risk.  The framework combines cyber-intelligence, open-source data analysis and reputation defense to identify where identity exposure accumulates and how attackers could exploit it.  “It’s about understanding how data leaks, replicates and reconnects,” Leyes said. “Identity today is an attack surface, not a credential.”

     Leyes recently published research outlining the IRG framework, arguing that identity risk has outgrown the tools designed to manage it. As finance, media and even personal safety become increasingly digital, he believes identity governance will become unavoidable.