Consumer Sentinel Network: FTC's Fraud Database

The Consumer Sentinel Network (CSNet) is the Federal Trade Commission's secure, online database that aggregates consumer fraud, identity theft, and other complaint data from across the United States and select international partners. Law enforcement agencies at the federal, state, and local level use the database to identify fraud trends, target investigations, and coordinate enforcement. Understanding how CSNet collects, organizes, and shares complaint data is essential for grasping how the FTC's consumer protection work translates into actionable intelligence.

Definition and scope

The Consumer Sentinel Network is a restricted-access investigative tool maintained by the FTC under authority granted by the Federal Trade Commission Act. Unlike a public complaint portal, CSNet is accessible only to vetted law enforcement members — as of the FTC's published program documentation, the network has more than 2,500 member organizations (FTC Consumer Sentinel Network).

The database's scope spans three primary complaint categories:

1. Fraud reports — Complaints alleging deceptive schemes in which a consumer lost money or was targeted by a solicitation designed to deceive.
2. Identity theft reports — Structured reports generated when a consumer files through IdentityTheft.gov, the FTC's dedicated identity theft reporting platform.
3. Other consumer reports — Complaints about unwanted telemarketing calls, Do Not Call Registry violations, robocalls, and general marketplace disputes that do not rise to the fraud or identity theft threshold.

Geographic scope is national, with data contributions from Canadian partners through cross-border enforcement agreements, expanding the network's utility for transnational fraud investigations. The FTC's international cooperation framework formalizes these data-sharing arrangements.

How it works

CSNet operates as a centralized aggregation platform fed by multiple data contributors simultaneously. The FTC collects reports directly through ReportFraud.ftc.gov and IdentityTheft.gov. Third-party contributing organizations — including the Better Business Bureau, the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) operated by the FBI, state attorneys general offices, and financial industry partners — submit complaint data through standardized data feeds or batch uploads.

The data pipeline works as follows:

1. A consumer submits a complaint through an FTC-operated portal or a partner organization's intake system.
2. The complaint is assigned a structured record containing the complaint category, reported loss amount, method of contact, and geographic identifiers.
3. The record is ingested into CSNet and becomes searchable by authorized law enforcement members.
4. Investigators query the database by keywords, phone numbers, email addresses, business names, or fraud type to identify patterns or corroborate existing leads.
5. Aggregated complaint data is used to generate the annual Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book, a public report the FTC releases each year detailing national fraud and identity theft trends (FTC Consumer Sentinel Data Book).

The 2023 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book reported that consumers filed more than 5.4 million reports in 2023, with fraud reports accounting for approximately 2.6 million of those submissions (FTC Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2023). Reported fraud losses totaled more than $10 billion in 2023, the first time that threshold was crossed, according to the same report.

Common scenarios

CSNet data surfaces most frequently in three enforcement contexts.

Targeted enforcement actions. When complaint volume against a specific company, phone number, or named individual spikes within a short window, FTC attorneys and partner agencies use that concentration of reports as a predicate for opening a formal investigation. High complaint density around a single entity can support civil investigative demands — a tool explained in detail in the FTC civil investigative demands section of this resource.

Identity theft triage. Reports filed through IdentityTheft.gov generate personalized recovery plans and pre-populated dispute letters for victims. The underlying reports flow into CSNet, giving law enforcement a real-time signal of identity theft clusters — for example, a surge of new-account fraud reports tied to a single financial institution following a data breach.

Trend analysis and policy development. The FTC publishes annual breakdowns of complaint categories, with imposter scams, online shopping fraud, and telephone and mobile services consistently ranking among the top complaint types. These trend snapshots inform FTC rulemaking and resource allocation decisions.

Decision boundaries

CSNet is not a mechanism for resolving individual disputes, and filing a report does not initiate a case on behalf of the reporting consumer. This distinction separates CSNet from litigation support tools.

CSNet does vs. does not:

A second boundary separates CSNet from the FTC's complaint process at the consumer-facing level. Consumers interact with ReportFraud.ftc.gov or IdentityTheft.gov; CSNet is the back-end repository those portals feed. Law enforcement members interact with the CSNet interface directly.

Membership in the network is limited to government law enforcement agencies and certain non-governmental organizations that satisfy the FTC's membership criteria. Private attorneys, individual litigants, and businesses cannot access the database, regardless of their interest in specific complaint records. This restriction preserves the integrity of ongoing investigations and protects reporter privacy.

For a broader orientation to the FTC's consumer protection mandate and the agencies that contribute to it, the FTC Authority overview provides a structured entry point to the agency's full regulatory scope.