Older Americans Reported $3 Billion Lost to Fraud in 2025, but the FTC Says the Hidden Toll Could Reach $119.5 Billion as Six-Figure Scams Drive Most of the Damage

A CNBC report published October 22 examined a new Federal Trade Commission finding that Americans aged 60 and older reported losing approximately $3 billion to fraud in 2025. That was roughly five times the $600 million reported in 2020, yet the agency says the recorded losses represent only part of the problem. Under one of its estimation methods, the FTC calculated that the broader cost of fraud to older adults could have reached $119.5 billion.

In its announcement of the annual report to Congress, the FTC explained that the estimated total depends on how researchers account for fraud that victims never report. A separate VICE report published October 21 also highlighted the steep rise in reported losses and the growing financial damage associated with investment scams. Together, the findings reveal a serious increase in documented losses alongside substantial uncertainty about how much money older Americans actually lose.

What the FTC Actually Measured

The underlying source is the FTC’s Protecting Older Consumers 2025–2026 report, which analyzes consumer reports collected through the agency’s Consumer Sentinel Network. The report defines older adults as people aged 60 and older. Among the reports containing age information that came from this group, 469,597 were recorded, and approximately 123,000 indicated a monetary loss.

Those reports documented more than $3 billion in losses during 2025, compared with approximately $2.4 billion in 2024. Across all consumers, the network received more than 6.2 million reports about marketplace problems, including over 3 million concerning fraud, nearly 1.4 million about identity theft and approximately 1.9 million about other consumer issues. The FTC also noted that only about 46% of fraud reports submitted in 2025 included information about the consumer’s age, limiting what the data can reveal about the population as a whole.

The Estimated Total Is Much Larger, but Far Less Certain

The FTC did not present $119.5 billion as an exact amount established through individual reports. Instead, it used different assumptions about unreported fraud to produce a range of estimated losses for older adults in 2025, from $13.3 billion to $119.5 billion. The lower estimate represented a 32% increase over the comparable 2024 estimate, while the upper estimate represented a 47% increase.

The difference between those figures reflects how difficult it is to calculate the financial harm from incidents that never reach authorities. Some victims may tell only family members or friends, while others may never disclose what happened. The FTC cautioned that underreporting is particularly difficult to measure when substantial amounts of money are involved, making the upper estimate an indication of possible losses rather than a confirmed nationwide total.

Five Years of Rising Losses Tell a Troubling Story

The increase in reported losses becomes clearer when the figures are viewed across multiple years. Older adults reported approximately $600 million in fraud losses in 2020, and the amount had climbed to roughly $3 billion by 2025. The FTC described this as an approximately fivefold increase, reflecting a growing financial toll in its consumer-reporting data.

The number of reports indicating a monetary loss rose by about 78% over that same period, a considerably smaller increase than the total dollars reported lost. That contrast suggests the growth in aggregate losses was driven substantially by increasingly expensive cases rather than simply by a corresponding increase in the number of people reporting a loss. It also means that a relatively limited number of devastating incidents can have an enormous influence on the annual total.

A Small Share of Reports Accounted for Most of the Money

One of the most striking findings concerns cases involving losses of at least $100,000. These represented only around 6% of older adults’ reports that indicated monetary losses in 2025, but they accounted for approximately 70% of the combined dollars reported lost by this age group. The concentration shows how a small number of exceptionally large cases can shape the broader picture of fraud.

The number of older adults reporting six-figure losses increased from 1,136 cases in 2020 to 6,769 in 2025. That represents nearly a sevenfold increase in the number of such reports over five years. The FTC found that these high-dollar incidents frequently involved investment scams, romance scams or criminals impersonating government agencies and familiar businesses.

Investment Scams Became the Costliest Category

Investment fraud stood out as the largest reported source of financial losses among older adults in 2025. The FTC found that aggregate reported losses in this category exceeded $1 billion, increasing 42% from the previous year. No other fraud category accounted for a greater combined amount of reported losses from people aged 60 and older.

Many reports described people being steered toward fraudulent cryptocurrency investment platforms, sometimes after initial contact on social media. Such schemes can present what appears to be a legitimate investment opportunity while directing money into an operation controlled by criminals. The data do not establish that every investment scam followed the same pattern, but they show how costly these schemes have become within the overall landscape of reported fraud.

Social Media Has Become a Major Starting Point

Social media was associated with both the highest aggregate reported losses and the greatest number of money-loss reports among older adults in 2025. The total reported losses associated with scams that started on these platforms were about 12 times higher than the figure recorded in 2020. This makes social media an important part of the FTC’s assessment of how older consumers encounter fraudulent offers.

The agency’s guidance on scams originating on social media warns that fraudulent investment pitches and fabricated testimonials can direct people toward deceptive offers. Within older adults’ social-media-related losses, investment scams accounted for 56% of the total, followed by romance scams at 23%. Online-shopping scams were the most frequently reported type of fraud resulting in a loss through this contact method, even though investment scams generated the largest aggregate financial damage.

Phone Scams Can Produce Larger Individual Losses

Although social media generated the highest combined losses, phone-initiated scams were associated with higher median individual losses among older adults. The median reported loss for fraud that began with a phone call was $3,000 in 2025, compared with $599 for fraud that began on social media. These figures illustrate why the channel producing the most losses overall is not necessarily the channel associated with the most expensive typical individual case.

The pattern was especially pronounced among people aged 80 and older. In that group, phone calls were associated with substantially more loss reports and larger aggregate losses than other contact methods, with social media a distant second. The findings describe patterns in submitted reports rather than establishing why any particular person lost money, but they highlight the importance of taking unexpected calls about finances seriously.

Impersonation Scams Turn Fear Into Financial Losses

Investment fraud was not the only category responsible for substantial losses. Government-impersonation scams ranked second in aggregate reported losses among older adults, followed by business-impersonation scams. The FTC found that fraudulent messages and calls frequently involved criminals claiming to represent agencies such as the FTC, the FBI or the Social Security Administration.

Business impersonators often invoked familiar companies, particularly banks, while claiming that a security problem had put someone’s account at risk. The FTC’s analysis of impersonation scams that have cost older adults their savings describes schemes in which false alarms and urgent claims persuade people to move their money. A warning delivered in the name of a trusted institution is not proof that the warning is genuine, especially when the person making contact insists on an immediate transfer.

The Way Money Is Sent Reveals Another Part of the Problem

The FTC’s findings also distinguish scams by how victims reported sending money. Bank transfers and other payments sent directly to scammers produced the highest aggregate reported losses among older adults in 2025, while cryptocurrency transfers ranked second. Credit cards, however, were the payment method most frequently identified in older adults’ fraud reports, demonstrating that frequency and total financial damage are different measures.

Gift cards also appeared prominently in several categories of fraud. Reported gift-card payments were overwhelmingly associated with impersonation schemes, and the method also appeared frequently in tech-support scams, romance scams, scams impersonating friends or relatives, and prize or lottery schemes. Requests to share gift-card codes or transfer cryptocurrency to resolve an unexpected financial emergency should be treated as serious warning signs rather than proof that a problem is real.

Most Fraud Reports From Older Adults Did Not Show a Financial Loss

The findings do not suggest that every encounter with fraud ends in a financial loss. Approximately 74% of older adults’ fraud reports in 2025 did not indicate that money had been lost. These reports included incidents in which people encountered suspicious activity or reported scams without documenting a monetary loss.

After adjusting for population size, older adults reported losing money to fraud at a rate 14% lower than adults aged 18 to 59. They also filed reports about fraud they avoided without losing money at a rate 34% higher than the younger group. These findings complicate the assumption that older adults are universally more likely to lose money when targeted, even as the reported financial consequences for those who do lose money remain substantial.

People in Their 80s Reported Especially High Median Losses

The median reported individual loss among adults aged 60 and older who said they lost money remained around $900 in 2025. For people aged 80 and above, that median reached $2,000, an increase of 21% compared with 2024. The FTC found that the oldest age group had a higher median reported loss than any other age group in its comparison.

The report also found that about 17% of fraud reports filed for people aged 80 and older were submitted by someone else, such as an adult child, spouse or caretaker. Reports submitted by another person had higher median reported losses than cases reported directly by the affected consumer, with a particularly notable difference among older adults. These figures do not describe the experience of every person in their 80s, but they show why the scale of individual losses deserves attention alongside the number of reports.

FBI Data Shows Another Dimension of the Crisis

The FTC’s figures are not the only federal record showing substantial financial harm to older Americans. The FBI’s summary of its 2025 Internet Crime Complaint Center findings reported that people over 60 filed more than 201,000 complaints involving internet-enabled crimes and reported approximately $7.7 billion in losses during 2025. Those complaints covered cybercrime, a more specific area than the broader consumer-fraud reporting examined in the FTC’s analysis.

The two sets of figures should not be added together or treated as directly interchangeable. The agencies use different reporting systems and scopes, and the FTC has explained that differences in age ranges affect how FBI data are included in its analysis. Both sets of findings nevertheless point to substantial financial harm, while neither provides a complete accounting of every fraud incident or every person who lost money.

A Reporting Interruption Adds Important Context

The FTC also disclosed that it did not accept consumer reports between October 1 and November 13, 2025, because of a lapse in funding. When calculating its broader nationwide estimates of unreported losses, the agency estimated missing loss amounts by using average reported losses from the 30 days immediately before and after the interruption. This detail matters because the largest estimates depend partly on assumptions and adjustments rather than solely on losses directly recorded by the agency.

The interruption does not establish how much fraud occurred during the period when reports were not being accepted. Nor does it mean that every figure in the older-adult analysis was independently reconstructed from the missing weeks. Instead, it is a methodological limitation that readers should understand when evaluating the agency’s estimates and comparing the available figures across years.

The FTC’s Response Extends Beyond Publishing the Numbers

The FTC’s annual report also describes enforcement actions and education efforts intended to protect older consumers. Its work during the period included matters involving debt-relief services, health-insurance fraud, government and business impersonation, money-making opportunities and tech-support scams. The range of these matters shows that the agency’s work extends beyond a single type of financial deception.

The FTC also reported returning more than $513 million to consumers of all ages through its actions in fiscal year 2026, although that amount should not be interpreted as money returned exclusively to older fraud victims. Its prevention work includes efforts to make people more aware of government and business impersonation schemes before they send money. The report does not suggest that enforcement and education have eliminated the threat, and the increase in reported losses indicates that the problem remains significant.

Preventing the Next Loss Starts With Slowing Down

The FTC encourages consumers not to let people they meet on social media direct their investment decisions, to check companies independently and to report suspected fraud. An unexpected call or message claiming that money is in danger should prompt verification through an independently obtained, trusted contact channel rather than an immediate transfer to an account supplied by the caller. Families can also discuss common scam tactics with older relatives without assuming that age alone makes someone incapable of recognizing fraud.

People who believe they have encountered a scam can submit a report through ReportFraud.ftc.gov, while suspected internet-enabled crimes can be reported to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Reporting does not guarantee that stolen money will be recovered, but complaints can help authorities identify patterns and investigate suspicious operations. The FTC’s figures leave the exact overall cost of fraud uncertain, yet they establish a clear warning: the growing number of high-dollar losses makes prevention and early intervention increasingly important.