Denmark survey: most scam victims never report it, GASA finds

According to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, a new study of 2,210 Danish adults has measured, for the first time in this detail, how often scams happen, how often people fall for them, and how rarely anyone tells the authorities.

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance found that 74% of participants encountered a scam in the past year. That is the starting point for everything else in the report.

What the numbers show

Most people in the study think they would spot a scam. 73% say they are confident in recognizing one. But confidence and contact are different things. Among those exposed to a scam, 38% went on to interact with the scammer anyway.

Of that group, 6% experienced financial or data loss. That is a small share of a large number, which means it still adds up to a lot of people across the full population surveyed.

The part of the study that matters most for anyone thinking about how scams get tracked is this: only 45% of those scammed reported the incident to authorities. Less than half.

That gap is the real finding here. It means official scam statistics, wherever they come from, are built on reports from under half the people who actually lost money or data. The study does not say what happened to the rest, only that they did not tell anyone.

The study also measured what happens after the loss. Among victims, 62% reported an impact on their mental wellbeing. That number sits alongside the reporting rate and says something about why people stay quiet. A scam is not only a financial event for most of the people who go through one.

Why counting this matters

Surveys like this one do a different job than a police log or a bank's fraud desk. They catch the people who never filed a report, which this study suggests is most of them. That is the only way a reporting rate like 45% becomes visible at all. Without a study asking directly, there would be no way to know how much of this goes unrecorded in Denmark.

For anyone reading this, the practical point is simple. A low official number does not mean scams are rare. In this study, it means a lot of people who got scammed decided not to say so. Reporting a scam, even one that cannot be undone, is one way to close that gap.