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An online safety organisation says the amount of money New Zealanders have lost to scams has surpassed $2.3 billion this year.
A survey of more than 1000 people by Netsafe and the Global Antiscam Alliance found around a third were scammed and an average of $3100 was lost per victim.
Netsafe chief executive Brent Carey said that data has been used to estimate a $2 billion loss for the whole population.
"It is just a headline figure because the sample size here is reasonably small, but we know that New Zealanders report to Netsafe average losses every day that are higher than above $3000."
New government data released on Monday showed New Zealanders lost nearly $200 million to scams in the last year.
But Carey said that figure related to payment data from just 11 finance institutions.
"We know that there's many more banks and many other ways that people pay as well. So, I guess we really just don't know what the actual figure is, but we know that it's a lot, a lot of money and any loss right now is something that we need to fix."
He said also fraud was seriously under reported, which means the true loss figure is likely much higher than $200 million.
The Netsafe report found six in every 10 New Zealanders deal with scams at least once a month, but more than two thirds do not report it to law enforcement.
Carey said he was concerned people did not report because they thought it would not make a difference.
"Every scam is important to report, and that helps us build up that scam intelligence system that we need to disrupt the scammers.
"One of the things we need to focus on is in that victim recovery space and doing more to make sure that we're recovering money when it's lost in a scam situation. There are ways that the legal system can respond, and we need to make that simpler and clearer for people, so they know that if there is a chance to get their money back."
He welcomed the government's plans to ramp up the country's anti-scam efforts, but he wanted more details.
"We'll need to know what that looks like. We have, along with the banks and Consumer NZ, been calling for a broad based Anti-Scam Centre.
"It could look virtually like bringing these different agencies together, it could have a single reporting process, it could run a scam helpline for people so they know how to contact it, and they could also, you know, look at doing scam investigations and giving us good scam data and reporting."
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