FTC says older adults lost $3 billion to fraud in 2025
The FTC says adults aged 60 and over reported $3 billion in fraud losses in 2025, with investment scams causing more than $1 billion of the damage.
Older adults reported losing $3 billion to fraud in 2025, five times the amount reported in 2020, according to a new Federal Trade Commission report. Investment scams accounted for more than $1 billion of those losses, making them the most damaging fraud category by reported dollar value for people aged 60 and over.1
The FTC’s annual report, Protecting Older Consumers 2025–2026, says investment-scam losses rose 42% in 2025. The agency says social media is often where scammers reach potential victims, while the largest individual losses pushed the overall figures sharply higher.1
What the FTC report says
The figures come from complaints submitted to the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network during 2025. They are reported losses, not an estimate of every scam suffered by older adults: many victims never report fraud, and the agency warns that complaint data does not capture the full scale of the problem.1
People aged 80 and over reported the highest median losses, at $2,000. Older consumers also reported higher losses from tech-support scams, prize and lottery fraud, romance scams, government impersonation and criminals pretending to be friends or relatives.1
The FTC says legitimate government officials will never tell someone to move money to “protect” it, threaten to suspend benefits unless an immediate payment is made, or demand payment through gift cards, cryptocurrency, money-transfer apps or wire transfers. Those warnings are part of the agency’s Never Ever education campaign.1
The report also highlights the increasingly personal nature of fraud. CNET pointed to a case reported by PCMag in which a retired nurse lost more than $400,000 over seven weeks after scammers impersonated FTC and FBI officials.2 That kind of deception helps explain why investment fraud cannot be treated merely as a problem of spotting suspicious websites: victims may be manipulated through a sustained conversation designed to create urgency and trust.
Our opinion
The headline figure is alarming, but the most useful takeaway is practical. A request to transfer money for “safekeeping”, pay through cryptocurrency or gift cards, or act immediately is not normal government or financial-institution behaviour. Families should discuss those red flags before a crisis arrives, without treating older relatives as incapable of making their own decisions. The FTC’s report is a reminder that prevention depends as much on slowing down a pressured conversation as on improving any single security tool.
The full 58-page FTC report is available online, alongside the agency’s consumer-protection resources and fraud-reporting tools.