FTC Military Consumer Dashboard

7/13/20

Insight:

Total monetary loss by category is driven by a high volume of low monetary loss in some categories and a low volume of high monetary loss in others.

For example:

Looking at median loss for claims filed by all military personnel, the “Invest: Advice, Seminars” categories has the largest loss at $20,000. While there were only 100 of these claims filed from 2015 - present, the total reported loss is $2.3 million. The dashboard appears to only let me sort in descending order which is disappointing because I’d like to see what the smallest median loss is…I’m sure the raw data is out there somewhere.

Total loss is maxed at $51.9 million under the category of “Prizes/Sweepstakes/Lotteries”, there being 10,822 claims from 2015 - present with a median loss of $2,800. So here the total loss is probably being driven by a large number of smaller claims rather than fewer larger ones, as is the case with the “Invest: Advice, Seminars” category.

As a side note, I’m a little weirded out by them using backslashes (\) instead of forward slashes when separating “Prizes/Sweepstakes/Lottiers”. Not sure if that was a work around for not being able to use forward slashes in tableau or something.