Elder fraud losses reported to the Federal Trade Commission ballooned about $3 billion in 2025, five times the 2020 level, with investment scams alone costing Americans 60 and older more than $1 billion, according to the agency's annual report on scams across the US.
The total in the FTC’s ninth annual Protecting Older Consumers report rose from about $2.4 billion in 2024. Because most victims never file a complaint, the agency estimates that the real cost of fraud to older Americans last year could be as high as $119.5 billion, depending on how underreporting is modeled.
“The FTC is committed to protecting older Americans from scams, including by taking every action necessary to shut down fraud operations,” said Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement accompanying the report.
Losses above $100,000 made up only 6% of older adults’ loss reports in 2025, but they accounted for 70% of the dollars lost. The incidence of such reports rose to 6,769 from 1,136 in 2020, and combined six-figure losses grew nearly sevenfold over the same period. After adjusting for population, older adults were more than twice as likely as younger adults to report a loss that large.
The median reported loss for people 60 and older held at about $900. For those 80 and older it was $2,000, up 21% from 2024 and the highest of any age group.
Older adults are not easier targets overall, according to the FTC, which said 74% of fraud reports they receive involved no monetary loss. After controlling for population, older Americans were 14% less likely than adults ages 18 to 59 to report losing money. The problem is that when older adults do lose money, they tend to lose more.
Investment scams were the costliest category for elderly victims, at $1.06 billion in reported losses, up 42%. Victims often said they were steered toward fake cryptocurrency trading platforms after first being approached on social media.
Government impostor scams ranked second at $448 million, up 20%. The most costly of these involved fraudsters posing as the FTC, the Social Security Administration and the FBI. Business impostors, most often claiming to be banks, took $422 million.
Romance scams cost older adults $384 million, up 17%, and older adults were 48% more likely than younger people to report a loss to one. The gap was wider for tech-support schemes, where older adults were 324% more likely to report losing money, and for prize and sweepstakes scams, where they were 112% more likely.
The FTC said impostor cases tend to follow the same pattern. A caller claims an account has been compromised and tells the victim to “protect” their savings by wiring money, mailing cash or depositing it at a bitcoin ATM. In some cases, the callers coach victims on what to tell bank employees, creating challenges for banks trying to balance consumer protection against customers' right to access their own money.
Social media was the costliest way scammers first reached older adults, with $750 million in reported losses in 2025, about 12 times the 2020 figure. Investment scams made up 56% of those losses and romance scams 23%.
Phone scams caused less in total but more per victim. The median phone loss was $3,000, compared with $599 for scams that began on social media. Reported losses from text-message scams rose 61%.
Most of the money moved through bank transfers, which carried $1.03 billion in reported losses, and cryptocurrency, at $603 million. Since 2020, losses paid by bank transfer have grown more than tenfold and losses paid in crypto more than 27-fold.
The FTC said its enforcement actions returned more than $513 million to consumers of all ages in fiscal 2026. In 2025, it referred 680 high-loss reports to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. The FBI’s Recovery Asset Team was reportedly able to act on 200 of them, covering $18.7 million in reported losses, and banks froze more than $10.8 million.
Since April, the FTC has directed older adults who report significant fraud to the Justice Department’s National Elder Fraud Hotline, and it says more than 320 callers have been connected so far.
Still, the FTC says its tools remain limited. Among other requests, it is continuing to urge Congress to restore its power to seek monetary relief under Section 13(b) of the FTC Act, which the Supreme Court curtailed in 2021.
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