Americans lost $2.1 billion to social media scams in 2025, an eightfold increase since 2020, according to a report released Monday by the Federal Trade Commission. 

Nearly 30% of Americans who reported being a victim of a scam last year said the scam originated on social media, with Facebook most frequently being identified as the social media platform where the scam originated, according to the report. Fellow Meta-owned platforms WhatsApp and Instagram were ranked a distant second and third, the FTC said.

“In 2025, people reported losing far more money to scams on Facebook alone than they reported losing to text or email scams,” the commission said.

Scams originating on Facebook cost users $794 million in 2025, while WhatsApp and Instagram combined for $659 million in losses.

Representatives for Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Read more: Crypto Scams and Senior Fraud Drive $21 Billion in 2025 Cyber Theft, FBI Reports

The FTC said social media scams largely fall into three categories: investment, shopping and romance. The greatest amount of money — $1.1 billion — was lost to investment scams often rooted in ads or posts offering a program to teach investment techniques. 

Shopping scams were the most reported social media scam in 2025, with more than 40% of social media scam victims reporting they got ripped off by ordering something they saw in a social media ad — “everything from clothes and makeup to car parts and even puppies,” the agency said.

Romance scams are also popular on social media. Nearly 60% of people who were victimized by a romance scam in 2025 said it originated on a social media platform. “Scammers often tailored their pitch based on people’s profiles, later inventing a crisis requiring money or casually offering investment advice to draw them onto a fake investment platform,” the FTC said.  

All age groups, except those 80 or older, reported losing more money to scams that began on social media than to any other method of contact.

To avoid being a victim of social media scams, the FTC advises consumers to limit who can see their posts and contacts on social media. Also, never let someone you have met only on social media make your investment decisions. 

And before buying something you’ve seen advertised on social media, do research on the company at the FTC.

If you suspect you have been a victim of a scam attempt, report it to authorities, such as the FTC’s website.

Don’t mistake the Steam Controller for a PC controller. Even though its main function is to play PC games, Valve’s new gamepad communicates with Steam, and only Steam. This is not a general controller for your PC, Android or iOS devices, and it’s certainly not compatible with any console on the market today, unless you count the handheld Steam Deck. In order to play a game with the Steam Controller, you have to boot it up through Steam. (More on this later).

Valve’s end goal for the Steam Controller is compatibility with the Steam Machine, a console that doesn’t yet have a public release date or price point. The Steam Machine will support 4K gaming at 60 fps with FSR, it’ll come with 512GB or 2TB of SSD storage, and it’ll work with the Steam Frame VR headset, as will the Controller. The new Steam Machine was supposed to drop early this year, fulfilling a long-promised dream of PC gaming by moving your entire Steam library to the couch in a compact but powerful box. Due to the memory shortages plaguing the tech industry, the Machine and Frame aren’t here yet, so the Steam Controller is the first step in Valve’s hardware takeover of living room territory. It’s due to come out on May 4, priced at $99.

The Steam Controller represents roughly 13 years of R&D, from its first iteration announced in 2013 to the debut of the Steam Deck in 2022, and the refinement period clearly paid off.

Valve

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The Steam Controller is a sturdy and sleek gamepad that stands up to the competition. It’s for Valve diehards, trackpad fanatics and anyone whose main gaming hub is Steam.

Pros

• Well-balanced and solidly built
• Precise TMR thumbsticks
• Trackpads and Gyros add flexibility
• Long battery life

Cons

• It’s built for Steam, for better or worse
• Some features won’t be useful until the Steam Frame is out

The Steam Controller is a tidy chonker of a gamepad with a broad, Duke-like face holding two square trackpads beneath the standard analog sticks and face buttons. Despite its extra girth, the Steam Controller feels light, slim and balanced, even in my smaller-than-average hands. The grips are slender and have four circular rear buttons, two per side, that are super satisfying to click even when they don’t do anything in-game. The bumpers, triggers, D-pad and face buttons are shiny black plastic, and all of the controller’s edges are rounded, allowing for a smooth glide between the bumpers and triggers especially. The trackpads don’t get in the way when you don’t need them, but in-use, they’re incredibly sensitive and kind of mesmerizing. They look and feel just like the trackpads on the Steam Deck, following the trails of your thumbs with miniature popping bubbles.

The Steam Controller uses tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) joysticks, which are a leveled-up version of Hall effect sticks, offering ultimate precision and long-term stability with no chance of drift. After a few days of use across a range of game genres, including competitive first-person shooters, they’ve proven to be reliable and accurate. In terms of stick precision and feel, I find the Steam Controller is comparable to the Razer Wolverine V3 Pro, my PC gamepad of choice. I otherwise much prefer the swappability, rubberized microswitches and crisp clickiness of Razer’s gamepad — but the Wolverine also costs about $100 more and doesn’t come with trackpad capabilities, so we’ll call it a wash.

One of the neatest aspects of the Steam Controller is its charging and connection puck, which plugs into your PC or Steam Deck through a USB cable and enables stable wireless play. The puck snaps onto the belly of the controller for charging, and when you hover the gamepad’s connection point over it, it jumps up and latches on like a cute little sucker fish. I don’t know if this behavior is an intentional selling point, but it certainly is for me. The Steam Controller also connects to devices via Bluetooth or with a cable, and in all configurations it’s performed without issue for me. Of course, Bluetooth mode has the highest latency, so that’s mainly for phones and Steam Link play. The puck can support two Steam Controllers at once. Swapping between Puck and Bluetooth mode is a simple matter of holding the right bumper and A or B, respectively, when you turn the controller on.

Pressing the power button with the Steam logo wakes up the gamepad, and pressing it twice when you’re connected to a PC launches Steam in Big Picture mode. The Steam Controller feels like a natural extension of Valve’s storefront, and with its matte black finish and bubbled edges, it’ll be familiar to anyone who’s fallen in love with a Steam Deck these past few years.

I tested out the controller on my PC with Steam games and non-Steam games (added to my Steam library first, of course — seriously, more on that later), and in my living room with my Steam Deck acting as a makeshift, low-powered Steam Machine. On PC I played The Seance of Blake Manor, Creature Kitchen and Overwatch, and on Steam Deck I played Blake Manor, Demonschool and Balatro. Whether connected with Bluetooth, the puck or USB, the Steam Controller provided seamless play and no noticeable latency. The distance from my couch to the puck nestled behind my Steam Deck is about eight feet, and I didn’t feel a frame drop while cosplaying as a Steam Machine owner. I also never ran into battery issues, but that’s not shocking considering Valve’s claim that the gamepad has more than 35 hours on a single charge. In my testing, the battery barely registered a drop after multiple hours of playtime, and I was happy to snap on the charging puck whenever I wanted to set the controller down.

Valve notes the battery life may be lower if playing with the Steam Frame. The Steam Controller has infrared LEDs for tracking, which will obviously drain the battery a little faster. Some VR games may have you waving your controller, as there are gyroscopic sensors in there as well. As the Steam Frame isn’t out, I wasn’t able to test some of the controller’s more interesting features.

Even against players using a keyboard and mouse in competitive Overwatch matches, I won games and earned awards, passing my personal ultimate test of a controller’s capabilities. When it comes to Overwatch, I’m mostly comparing the Steam Controller to Sony’s DualSense, and it feels surprisingly similar. I enjoy the Steam Controller’s smooth slide between the bumpers and triggers, though its haptic feedback is more subtle than the DualSense’s, lacking in the analog sticks particularly. Much like with the Steam Deck, I haven’t found a consistent use case for the trackpads on the Steam Controller, but I appreciate their inclusion, the accessibility factor, and the fact that they aren’t otherwise intrusive. Now, just add a Playdate crank and I’m really sold.

The Steam Controller is a clear and unmistakable signal that Valve is joining the console wars, and perhaps by patient and diligent design, it’s appearing at a vulnerable time. Xbox is fumbling the current generation and attempting to redefine its place in the console market amid a significant leadership shakeup, while Sony and Nintendo are carrying on with standard hardware upgrade cycles in a landscape that’s based less on platform exclusivity every day. Right now there’s room for a robust PC-based storefront to stake its claim on couch gaming, and voila, here’s Valve with the Steam Machine and Steam Controller.

Similarly to the way Valve used Half-Life 2 to get people to download Steam in 2004, the Steam Controller pushes players to fully consolidate their PC libraries in its own ecosystem. You’ll have to add games with their own launchers like Overwatch, Valorant, Minecraft and Fortnite to your Steam library before you can play them using Valve’s controller. This is a small inconvenience, since it takes just a few clicks to add a non-Steam game to your profile.

(Welcome to later). However, I don’t enjoy doing it. As I was browsing through files to add Overwatch to my Steam library, I couldn’t help thinking that it would have been pretty easy for Valve to add a switch that would let the Steam Controller communicate with any PC game. Maybe it’s a touch of oppositional defiant disorder, but I despise being coerced into behaviors that are designed to serve a corporation’s market control over my own workflow, especially in my personal spaces.

Now more than ever, I value my ability to choose — which businesses I work with, where I store my software, how I play — and the Steam launcher requirement is another small expansion of Valve’s incredible power in the PC games industry. It’s too easy to say, most of my games are already on Steam, no big deal, and use the Controller as an excuse to consolidate them all on Valve’s launcher. Suddenly, Steam is where you begin and end every gaming session, rather than just most. Obviously and especially with the coming rollout of the Steam Machine, this is the reality that Valve wants: a rich industry utterly reliant on its platform of DRM, shitty revenue splits and random opaque censorship. It’s the situation that Microsoft, Apple or Epic also want for themselves, but the main difference is that this future is actually in reach for Valve, and the Steam Controller is a tiny part of the plan. If willing and unforced support of a monopoly makes you bristle as well, feel free to stick with 8BitDo.

Truly though, I get it. The Steam Controller doesn’t come with a PC switch because it’s not a PC controller. It’s for controlling Steam, a service that’s become synonymous with PC and handheld gaming, and is now creeping onto the living-room scene. The Steam Controller is designed to follow you everywhere Steam is, for all your gaming needs across every screen forever and always — and there is something soothing about that idea in a Brave New World Soma kind of way. A PC controller? That’s far too limited, from Valve’s perspective.

Encroaching corporate dystopia aside, the Steam Controller is a sturdy and sleek gamepad that stands up to the competition. It’s for Valve diehards, trackpad fanatics and anyone whose main gaming hub is Steam. Which, to be clear, is a massive market that’s only poised to grow.

Valve’s Steam Controller will hit the market on Monday, May 4, for a going price of $99 in the United States. The Steam Controller does precisely what it says: It communicates with anything running Steam or the Steam Link app, so this includes PCs, Macs, mobile devices and the Steam Deck.

Eventually, the Steam Controller will connect to the new Steam Machine console and Steam Frame VR headset, but neither of these products have solid release dates just yet. They were originally slated to come out in early 2026 alongside the Steam Controller, but we’re nearly five months into the year and only a third of that promise is poised to be fulfilled. Valve in March said it hopes to ship in 2026, dropping the “early” bit.

As noted in our review, the Steam Controller is a solid gamepad, especially for the price. It feels and looks a lot like a Steam Deck, complete with two trackpads beneath a pair of TMR thumbsticks and a standard face array. It’s reactive, ergonomic, and comes with a cute little charging and connection puck that snaps onto the bottom of the gamepad. Just note that the Steam Controller is not a PC controller: It works with Steam, and only Steam. You’ll have to add games with their own launchers like Overwatch, Valorant, Minecraft or Fortnite to your Steam library before playing them with Valve’s proprietary controller. How convenient — for Valve, at least.

Worldwide, Steam Controller prices are as follows:

A jury was selected on Monday during the first day of trial for Musk v. Altman in a federal court in Oakland, California. Some of the jurors that were ultimately selected voiced concerns over Musk himself, as well as the AI technology at the core of the case, but assured the court they would put these concerns aside for the trial. The kick off also catalyzed an array of shenanigans outside the courtroom.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman were spotted in the security line inside the courthouse this morning, but Elon Musk was nowhere to be found. A few dozen journalists crammed into an overflow room to listen to an audio stream of the proceedings.

The goal today was to select nine jurors who could be fair and impartial in this case—an especially difficult challenge considering the main characters are some of the most high-profile tech executives in the world. Several potential jurors said they had negative opinions about Musk when questioned by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers and attorneys. But that didn’t necessarily disqualify them; only one juror was ultimately excused on the basis of their strong negative opinions regarding Musk.

“The reality is that many people don’t like him,” Gonzalez Rogers told the courtroom. She added that she believed Americans with negative feelings about Musk could still have integrity for the judicial process and decide the case fairly. The jury will help establish the core facts regarding whether Sam Altman and other defendants improperly steered OpenAI’s nonprofit venture away from its original mission, potentially violating the law in the process. But their verdict will be advisory—Gonzalez Rogers will have the final call.

The nine jurors that were ultimately selected represent quite a diverse group, including a painter, a former Lockheed Martin employee, and a psychiatrist. Some of them said they had negative opinions about artificial intelligence technology more broadly. In the end, however, all of the people selected assured the court that their outside opinions about Musk and AI shouldn’t interfere with their ability to determine the facts of the case.

OpenAI’s attorney William Savitt said at a press briefing afterward that he was satisfied with the jury the court settled on.

“Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman, and OpenAI are looking forward to presenting their case to that jury. They’re confident in their position and are looking forward to the facts being known,” Savitt told reporters. “The hurdle we think we need to get over is just to present the truth here. We’ve got a story about what happened that is consistent with the facts, it’s consistent with the documents, and we just want the jury to see that.”

Musk is already trying to win his case in the court of public opinion. On Monday morning, the billionaire used his social media platform X to boost a recent New Yorker investigation into Altman’s alleged deceptive business conduct. The story is weeks old, and the fact that Musk promoted it on the first day of the trial is no coincidence. Earlier this morning, OpenAI’s official newsroom account published a post on X calling Musk’s lawsuit an “attempt to undermine our work to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” Meanwhile, demonstrators were outside the court protesting the AI race altogether and calling for a pause on further development.

On Tuesday, lawyers for OpenAI and Elon Musk will deliver opening statements, and the first witness in the case will be called to the stand.

This is an edition of Maxwell Zeff’s Model Behavior newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds via Paramount Plus on July 23. The ten episodes air weekly until September 24. This is actually the second-to-last batch of episodes, as the show was recently .

The streamer has dropped a trailer for season four and it looks promising. The tone looks slightly darker when compared to season three, which was maligned for . The trailer is narrated by Anson Mount’s Captain Christopher Pike, who discusses the “terror” of space as a planet explodes.

This is still Strange New Worlds, so it won’t be all doom and gloom. The trailer shows us a screeching alien dinosaur, which is pretty fun. There have also been reports that season four with involvement from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.

This new batch of episodes will lean even heavier into connections to the original Star Trek show from the 1960s. Paul Wesley’s version of Captain Kirk features prominently in several scenes, with one looking like a direct callback to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. A younger Scotty also makes an appearance.

For the uninitiated, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is a prequel to the first show and starts several years before Kirk takes over as captain of the Enterprise. It’s been said that the series will end with Kirk taking the big chair. It’s also primarily an episodic series, with no real serialized season-long arcs. !

It’s also ending in the near future. Season five will presumably premiere next year and will include just six episodes. As a matter of fact, it looks like the modern incarnation of Star Trek is ending in totality. Sets are being taken down and there are currently for the first time in a decade.

This is a bummer, some of the newer content. The upcoming second season of Starfleet Academy will be its last, which is exceptionally sad because it was really . It was 12 years between the final episode of Star Trek: Enterprise and the first episode of Star Trek: Discovery, which kicked off the modern era. Who knows how long we’ll have to wait this time.

May is hosting one of the most interesting lunar events of the 2026 calendar year: two full moons. Its first full moon is on May 1, leaving just enough time for a second full moon on the last day of the month, May 31. The second full moon in a single month is known as a blue moon, which inspired the “once in a blue moon” saying for something rare. 

According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the first full moon in May reaches its peak brightness at 1:23 p.m. ET, or right in the middle of the day. The best time to see the full moon is the evenings of April 30 and May 1. You won’t need any help; it’ll be the brightest thing in the night sky. This moon is commonly called the Flower Moon, named in honor of the spring flowers blooming right now. 

The second full moon reaches its peak brightness at 4:45 a.m. ET on May 31. Since it’s the second full moon of the month, it is called a blue moon. 

Both moons are also micromoons, which means they are smaller and less bright than a regular full moon. This happens because the moon is in apogee, the point in its elliptical orbit when it is farthest from Earth. The moon stays in apogee for three to four months every year, and both of May’s full moons take place during this time. When the opposite occurs, it’s called perigee, and that’s when Earth gets a supermoon. 

It takes a whole month for a blue moon to occur, but there are some other things you can look out for in the meantime. The week before and the week after May’s new moon is prime viewing time for Earthshine, a phenomenon where you can see the dim part of the moon. That gives May four lunar events to enjoy for your viewing pleasure. 

Two kinds of blue moons

The last blue moon of this type occurred in August 2023. But if you think you remember the term being tossed around more recently, you’re right. There’s also a seasonal blue moon, which refers to the third full moon in an astronomical season of four, and that happened in 2024.

One season typically spans three months and therefore usually gets only three full moons. But because the seasons don’t begin and end on the first and last of particular months, it’s possible to get a fourth full moon in a single season. That fourth full moon in the season is known as a seasonal blue moon. The next seasonal blue moon is expected to hit in May 2027. 

When the above happens with new moons instead of full moons, it’s known as a black moon, which most recently occurred in August. 

Monthly blue moons occur when one calendar month gets two full moons instead of the usual one. The moon orbits Earth every 27.3 days, and goes from one new moon to the next new moon in about 29.5 days. Since all but one month are 30 days or longer, that means there’s the opportunity for two full moons to occur in a single month in any given month not named February. 

Since the moon cycle is 29.5 days, that means each successive full moon happens earlier and earlier as the months go by. This continues until the full moon happens on the first day of a month that is long enough, therefore giving the moon enough time to circle the Earth and become full again before the month ends. Blue moons are mostly quirks of the calendar system, so the moon isn’t doing anything terribly special. The timing is pretty cool, though. 

This cycle takes approximately 29 months to repeat. The next monthly blue moon is slated for December 2028, followed by September 2031. So, if you’re ever asked how often something occurs if it happens “once in a blue moon,” you now know the answer.

Shoppers looking for a good gaming machine these days are frequently met with component prices that continue to rise, with many top-of-the-line solutions that would have been affordable a few months ago being exceedingly expensive. Against this backdrop, the ASUS TUF Gaming F16 (2025) appears deceptively low-cost at $899.99 (was $1,299.99), as if it’s almost too good to be true.

When you launch a current game, the Intel Core i5 and the RTX 5050 graphics chip at 115 watts create an immediate impression. You can crank up the settings without worrying about it tanking – smooth frames and all, even in the most demanding parts of the game. Even with multitasking, everything runs well, with no juddering or latency.

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In terms of build quality, this thing has it where it counts, as the chassis has passed all military-style endurance tests, drops, vibrations, and high temperatures, all the while being relatively lightweight for its size. Measuring around an inch thick at its narrowest point, it sports a strong metal lid and a reinforced frame, so you get a laptop that can withstand the rigors of daily use without a scratch.

The 16-inch panel is a beast of a screen, with a 165Hz refresh rate and a 16:10 aspect ratio, giving you a lot more vertical real estate than you’re used to, which is just what you need to get more done. Fast-paced gaming runs extremely well, while the anti-glare coating helps keep your eyes from tiring.

The battery life is actually rather impressive for a gaming laptop, thanks to its 90Wh cell. Doing simple tasks like browsing or streaming may give you several hours on a single charge, which is more than many people expected from this type of technology. With rapid charging, you can quickly top it up at the coffee shop and be ready to go for the remainder of the day.

In terms of connectivity, you’ll have all you need to handle almost any situation without having to deal with clunky USB hubs. Connect an external monitor via HDMI or USB-C, connect to a wired network via Ethernet when speed is critical, or plug in a controller or headphones via USB. Finally, upgrades are the only thing that will keep your laptop useful for years to come. You begin with two memory slots (16GB of DDR5 to get you started) and the ability to add more. A PCIe drive has 512GB of storage by default, although more can be added if necessary.

‘The transaction complied fully with applicable law,’ Meta said in a statement.

China has blocked Meta’s $2bn acquisition of AI start-up Manus. In a brief statement, the country’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said that the decision to prohibit foreign investment in Manus was made in accordance with Chinese laws. It has asked the parties to withdraw from the acquisition.

In a statement to SiliconRepublic.com, a spokesperson for Meta said: “The transaction complied fully with applicable law. We anticipate an appropriate resolution to the inquiry.” Meta did not confirm whether it would push back against the decision.

China’s decision hinders Meta’s massive AI plans to play catch-up with its Big Tech competitors. The company has spent billions to acquire businesses, hire expensive executives and realign its priorities around AI. Last week, the Facebook owner decided to cut 8,000 jobs in a bid to run “more efficiently” and “offset the other investments” it’s making.

The company, which has budgeted $135bn in spending this year, committed to purchasing Manus late last year, followed by the viral Moltbook platform in March for an undisclosed amount.

Manus employees and executives have joined Meta, while investors including Tencent Holdings, ZhenFund and Hongshan have already received their proceeds from the acquisition, sources have told Bloomberg.

A person familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that the NDRC’s decision was “harsh”, and that it carries a “strong intention to stop follow-on deals” similar to Manus.

“In reality, it’s hard to unwind a done deal, so it is more about verbal warnings on similar deals and the leveraging building before the Xi-Trump summit,” the source added. FT has since removed the latter half of this quote. US president Donald Trump is set to meet with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping next month.

Manus is headquartered in Singapore, but has a Chinese parent company called Butterfly Effect Technology. Meta acquired the company after a $75m funding round last April that valued it at $500m.

As per the now contested acquisition deal, Meta would operate and sell the Manus service, as well as integrate it into its own products. However, Manus would still be able to sell its subscriptions through its own app and website.

In February, the start-up launched ‘Manus Agents’, personal AI agents that perform similarly to the Austrian-made open source OpenClaw. The agents, which debuted on Telegram that month, had been expanded to WhatsApp shortly after. Meta did not confirm if China’s decision would affect Manus Agents on WhatsApp.

The Chinese Ministry of Commerce launched an investigation shortly following the Meta acquisition to determine whether it violated the country’s laws on technology exports and outbound investment. According to the rules, the Chinese government needs to approve the export of certain technologies, including AI.

Bloomberg recently reported that Chinese agencies told the country’s key AI firms that they should reject capital with US origins unless explicitly approved.

Updated, 4.02pm, 27 April 2026: This article was amended to mention that a quote given to the Financial Times has since been edited.

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