Older adults.
Bigger fraud losses.
The FTC’s new older-consumer fraud report separates reported losses from estimates and shows where a pause can interrupt costly impersonation scams.
Older Americans reported more than $3 billion in fraud losses in 2025. A pause before an urgent transfer can matter more than guessing whether a caller sounds convincing.
A smaller share of reports, a disproportionate loss
The most important finding in the Federal Trade Commission’s new older-consumer fraud report is not simply that losses rose. It is that a relatively small set of very large losses now accounts for most of the money older Americans report losing. That changes the practical question. Recognizing an obvious junk message is useful, but interrupting a believable emergency before a large transfer can matter much more.
Released October 19, Protecting Older Consumers 2025–2026 analyzes reports about the previous calendar year. People age 60 and older reported more than $3 billion in fraud losses in 2025, compared with about $2.4 billion in 2024 and roughly $600 million in 2020. The figures describe reported losses, not a complete national accounting. They also do not mean that every older adult became more likely to be deceived.
In fact, the report complicates that stereotype. After adjusting for population size, older adults filed reports involving a monetary loss at a lower rate than younger adults. They reported fraud without losing money at a higher rate. The danger is concentrated in the severity of some incidents, not evidence that age alone determines judgment. A family conversation built around embarrassment or presumed incompetence misses that distinction.
The report provides a reason to build a practical interruption into everyday life: if an unexpected caller says money must be moved to keep it safe, stop the conversation and independently contact the institution. That advice is not a promise that every loss can be prevented. It is a way to separate a real account problem from the person who claims to have discovered it.
What the $3 billion actually measures
Consumer Sentinel is a reporting network, not a representative survey of everyone who encountered fraud. The FTC and participating organizations receive accounts from consumers who choose to report and decide how much information to provide. In 2025, about 46 percent of fraud reports included age information. Among reports with age information, 469,597 came from people 60 or older; about 123,000 indicated a monetary loss.
That denominator matters. A tally of complaints is not a count of all victims, and a change in complaints is not automatically an equal change in the underlying incidence of fraud. Awareness, willingness to report, access to a reporting channel and the kind of fraud encountered can all affect the records. The FTC also notes that it did not accept consumer reports from October 1 through November 13, 2025, during a lapse in funding.
The age comparisons in the report generally exclude data supplied by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center because the age ranges collected differ. A later calculation estimating total losses uses a different scope and includes a contributed subset of IC3 data. Readers should not add totals from different reporting systems, or compare them as though their definitions and populations were interchangeable.
This is why a large reported total remains important without being a complete prevalence estimate. The reports reveal payment methods, contact routes, impersonated organizations and the size of losses that consumers describe. They can guide prevention and enforcement even when they cannot tell a household its precise probability of encountering or losing money to a scam.
The extreme losses explain much of the increase
The FTC says older adults’ reports of losses above $100,000 represented about 6 percent of their loss reports in 2025 but accounted for about 70 percent of their aggregate reported losses. The report’s trend analysis says the combined dollars in this group increased nearly sevenfold from 2020. That is a different story from a uniform increase across every type of purchase or every household.
The same pattern can explain why the total rises sharply while a typical-loss measure moves little. The combined median loss reported by people 60 and older was about $900, roughly unchanged from the previous year. A median marks the middle of the ordered reported losses; it is not the average obtained by dividing all dollars by all reports. Large losses can pull the total upward without shifting the middle very much.
For people 80 and older, the median reported individual loss was $2,000, up 21 percent from 2024. That figure applies to reported monetary losses in this age group. It does not mean that every person over 80 lost $2,000, or that a suspicious message carries a $2,000 expected cost. Keeping those conditions next to the number prevents an alarming statistic from becoming a misleading one.
The practical implication is to focus on the transition from conversation to commitment. A person can correctly reject dozens of suspicious texts and still face a costly situation when a persuasive caller claims to be a bank employee, a government investigator or a technical-support specialist. The point of an independent callback is to test the claim before the transfer, not to debate how convincing the caller sounds.
Older adults are also reporting scams they avoided
About 74 percent of fraud reports from older adults did not indicate a monetary loss. Adjusted for population size, their no-loss reporting rate was 34 percent higher than the rate for adults 18 through 59, while their monetary-loss reporting rate was 14 percent lower. These are reporting comparisons, not a controlled experiment establishing who is better at spotting fraud.
The report offers more than one possible explanation: older adults may avoid losing money more often when exposed to fraud, may be more inclined to report incidents that caused no loss, or may reflect a combination of factors. That uncertainty should remain in the story. A confident claim that the data prove either superior resilience or greater gullibility would go beyond what the analysis establishes.
A no-loss report still has value. It can describe a fake toll notice, an impersonated agency, a payment request or the contact details used in an attempt. The FTC says reports help it identify trends, educate consumers and build cases. Reporting does not require a household to wait until money disappears, and a report should not be mistaken for a promise of an individual investigation or reimbursement.
For relatives, the useful response to an unexpected message is curiosity rather than a quiz. Ask what the sender wants the recipient to do, how that organization can be reached independently, and whether any payment or account access has already occurred. A person who expects support has a better reason to disclose the next uncomfortable encounter than someone who expects to be scolded.
The most frequent scam is not the most expensive
Online-shopping fraud produced the largest number of older adults’ reports involving a loss. Yet investment scams produced the largest aggregate dollar loss: about $1.059 billion in 2025, a 42 percent increase from 2024. Government impersonation followed at about $448 million, with business impersonation at about $422 million. These categories answer a different question from a ranking based on how many people filed reports.
This distinction explains why prevention cannot be reduced to a single warning about shopping links. A missing purchase can generate many reports with comparatively small losses. A fraudulent investment relationship or a fabricated account emergency can result in fewer reports but far more dollars. The report says older consumers often described being drawn toward fake cryptocurrency-investment platforms after contact on social media.
Age comparisons vary by category as well. Adjusted for population size, older adults were over four times as likely as younger adults to report losing money to a technical-support scam. But they were less likely to report a monetary loss to investment scams than younger adults. That does not contradict investment scams leading their total losses: frequency and financial severity are separate measurements.
A large return displayed on an unfamiliar website does not resolve whether the underlying investment or intermediary is legitimate. For this article, the important point is not which investment to choose. It is that a relationship, account screen or apparent professional title is not independent verification. Stop treating the person directing the transaction as the sole source of evidence about its safety.
Social media leads the total; phone calls carry a different risk
For older adults, scams first encountered through social media generated about $750 million in reported losses in 2025. That was the largest aggregate total among the contact methods shown in the report. But the median reported loss for phone-call-origin fraud was $3,000, compared with $599 for social-media-origin fraud. Those measures describe different aspects of the problem and should not be collapsed into a claim that one channel is always more dangerous.
The contact-method classification describes where the consumer first learned of the fraud. It does not mean the entire interaction remained there. A message can lead to a call, a call to a website, and a website to a payment. Text messages are classified separately from phone calls. Treating every mobile-device encounter as a phone scam would erase a distinction the report deliberately preserves.
The oldest age group also differed from the broader group. People 80 and older reported substantially greater losses and more loss reports from scams beginning with a phone call than from other contact methods. That is a reason to include telephone verification in a household plan even when public discussion concentrates on social platforms and sophisticated online tools.
In its earlier analysis of high-loss impersonation scams, the FTC described an especially effective maneuver: a fake warning about an account or computer is followed by instructions to contact another supposed authority. The second person can make the first story feel independently confirmed. But a transfer arranged by the original caller is still part of the same unverified chain. End that chain before checking the account through a channel you choose.
The payment method changes the response
Bank transfers or payments accounted for about $1.033 billion in older adults’ reported losses in the payment-method comparison, followed by cryptocurrency at about $603 million. Credit cards, by contrast, were the most frequently reported payment method. The chart does not say that ordinary bank transfers are inherently fraudulent. It shows that payment methods appear differently when ranked by total dollars and by report frequency.
The method matters once money has moved. The FTC advises contacting the bank or credit union immediately after a suspected fraudulent bank transfer and asking whether the payment can be reversed. For a card payment, contact the issuer using its established app, website or the number on the card. For a payment app or wire-transfer service, contact that provider promptly. Describe what happened accurately rather than assuming all scams have the same recovery process.
If a gift card was involved, keep the card and receipt and contact the issuer. If cryptocurrency was involved, contact the exchange or ATM operator and report the incident; cryptocurrency payments do not have the same legal protections as credit and debit cards. The FTC warns that recovery can be difficult. An instruction to ask for a reversal is not a guarantee that the provider can or must recover the funds.
Do not postpone contacting the payment provider while assembling a perfect narrative. A concise account of the timing, amount, payment route and recipient details can start the conversation. Preserve the messages and receipts available to you, and then complete the fraud report. Different organizations have different roles: the provider may be able to act on the transaction, while a fraud report helps authorities understand and investigate patterns.
Why the larger estimate is a range, not another reported total
The FTC estimates that the overall 2025 cost of fraud to older adults could be between $13.3 billion and $119.5 billion, depending on assumptions about underreporting. Neither endpoint is the amount actually reported by older consumers. The gap between the estimates is a central part of the finding, not a detail to hide behind the most dramatic number.
One approach applies estimated reporting rates of 2 percent for losses below $1,000 and 6.7 percent for losses of $1,000 or more. Those rates come from research comparing case records with consumer reports. The FTC explains that none of the nine cases in that study had average losses of $10,000 or more. Extending the rates to very large losses therefore requires an assumption in precisely the area that now drives much of the reported total.
A more conservative approach assumes everyone who lost $10,000 or more submitted a report. That yields the lower older-adult estimate of $13.3 billion. It is not proof that complete reporting actually occurs at that threshold. It is a sensitivity test showing how much the result changes when the assumed reporting rate for large losses changes.
The estimates also account for missing reports during the 2025 reporting interruption and make assumptions about reports without age data. This is not a simple instruction to multiply $3 billion by a universal factor. The responsible reading is that reported losses substantially understate harm, while the scale of the missing losses remains uncertain. A household does not need the highest estimate to justify verifying an unexpected demand.
Build a pause that works during an apparent emergency
A useful household plan can be simple enough to remember under pressure. First, end the unexpected contact rather than remaining on the line while trying to investigate. Second, open the institution’s known app or use contact information from a statement or a website you have independently identified. Third, discuss the situation with a trusted person before following instructions to move money or provide account access.
The FTC’s warning is specific: it will not tell people to transfer funds for protection, withdraw cash, buy gold for someone, or hand money to a courier. A caller using an actual official’s name does not change that rule. Nor does caller ID establish identity; the displayed name and number can be altered. The required action is more revealing than the impressive title attached to it.
Consider a hypothetical account alert that says a transfer must happen today to stop a theft. The appropriate test is not whether the message contains your name or appears professionally written. It is whether your institution confirms the problem when you contact it independently. Do not use the number inside the unexpected alert, and do not let the original caller supply the person who supposedly verifies the story.
For families, agree on the process before an incident rather than demanding control afterward. Keep trusted contact information accessible and discuss who can help with a confusing message. This does not require sharing passwords or granting another person authority over accounts. The aim is to make a second perspective easy to obtain while preserving the older adult’s autonomy and privacy.
After a loss, watch for the second approach
A person who has already lost money may be contacted by someone promising to recover it for a fee. The FTC warns that refund-and-recovery scammers target prior victims, sometimes using details of the first incident to appear credible. Knowledge of the amount lost or the company involved is not evidence that a new caller has official authority or a genuine recovery route.
An unexpected demand for upfront payment to obtain a refund is a warning sign, not the final administrative step in a guaranteed recovery. Independently verify any claimed organization. Do not let the urgency of repairing the first loss create a second payment before checking. The FTC says legitimate government agencies will not charge people to help obtain a refund and will not guarantee that lost money will be returned.
For help reporting fraud involving someone age 60 or older, the Justice Department’s National Elder Fraud Hotline is 1-833-372-8311. Its central contact page lists Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Time. The service offers assistance with reporting and appropriate resources; it is not an emergency line or a reimbursement guarantee. Immediate threats to personal safety call for emergency assistance instead.
The new report’s strongest message is not that older Americans should retreat from digital life. It is that a financial emergency described by an unexpected stranger needs independent verification before it becomes a transaction. The fraud may begin with fear, friendliness or a promise. A workable response gives the person time, another source of information and a way to ask for help without shame.
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