New Data Show How Much Worse Scams Are Getting for Americans Over 60

The Federal Trade Commission released a new report Monday on fraud targeting older Americans, defined as people 60 and older. And things just keep getting worse.

The report, which is mandated by Congress under the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act of 2017, found that the amount of money seniors reported to the FTC as being lost to fraud jumped from $600 million in 2020 to $3 billion in 2025. But the real number is likely several times that, since most fraud goes unreported. The FTC estimates that the overall cost in 2025 could be anywhere from $13.5 billion to $119.5 billion, depending on which methodology is used. That’s an increase of as much as 47% over 2024.

“These figures reflect a considerable degree of uncertainty because the scale of underreporting, particularly when losses are high, is not well understood,” the FTC says in its new report .

Older adults reported the highest individual losses to the FTC, compared to younger Americans, which is to be expected given the way that wealth is distributed in the U.S.—Baby Boomers, those between 62-80 years old, hold about 51% of the nation’s wealth, while Gen-X holds 26%, and Millennials hold 11%.

Those over 80 years old, known as the Silent Generation, hold about 11% of the country’s wealth but reported the largest individual losses. The median reported loss among those 80 and older was $2,000.

“From 2020 to 2025, combined losses by older adults who reported losing over $100,000 increased nearly sevenfold. While these reports were relatively rare at 6% of older adults’ loss reports in 2025, they accounted for 70% of their aggregate reported losses,” according to the report.

The most common types of fraud reported to the FTC among older adults was investment scams, scams involving impersonation of government officials, and business-impersonation scams, according to the report.

One interesting thing to note is that while the most common way for these scams to be initiated was through social media, median individual losses were much higher for frauds that began with a phone call. Frauds first initiated by text were counted in a separate category from phone frauds.

Older adults were 324% more likely than younger people to report losing money on a scam that was made to sound like a tech support call. Lottery and sweepstakes scams were also much higher among older people.

Older people were also 48% more likely to report losing money to a romance scam, something that’s not altogether surprising. But older people were less likely to report losing money on things like online shopping fraud, though interestingly they had a higher propensity to issue reports on that type of fraud than younger people.