LeyesX CEO Kevin Leyes wants to solve America’s fraud problem

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

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.

Identity is now an economic infrastructure

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.

A new framework for a new threat

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.

Why fraud keeps winning

According to Leyes, the reason fraud continues to climb isn’t a lack of technology, but a lack of coordination.

Banks see transactions. Social platforms see accounts. Governments see reports. Attackers see the full picture.

“That fragmentation is where fraud lives,” he said.

IRG attempts to flip that model by putting identity at the center of risk governance, instead of treating it as a downstream consequence of breaches.

The approach has attracted attention as fraud losses climb into the tens of billions and identity theft becomes a mainstream economic issue rather than a niche cyber problem.

A problem that isn’t slowing down

The FTC numbers suggest the current approach isn’t working, and Leyes doesn’t expect fraud losses to stabilize on their own.

“Fraud isn’t slowing down,” he said. “And it won’t until identity is governed with the same seriousness as money.”

For Americans watching billions vanish each year, the question may no longer be whether fraud is a crisis, but whether the systems meant to stop it are built for today’s world.