Older Americans reported losing roughly $7.75 billion to fraud last year, a 59% jump over the prior year, according to the FBI’s own tally of internet-crime complaints. The agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged 201,266 reports from people 60 and older in 2025, and the average victim who lost money lost $38,500 — with more than 12,400 people losing over $100,000 apiece. The figure that alarms investigators most isn’t the total dollar amount but the pace: losses climbed even faster than the number of reports itself, meaning each individual case is, on average, getting more expensive.
Where the Money Actually Went
The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report breaks the losses down by category, and investment fraud sits far above everything else at $3.52 billion, more than triple the next largest category. Much of that involves cryptocurrency and fake trading platforms, where victims are walked through a process that looks like real investing — a dashboard showing gains, a customer-service line, even small early withdrawals that work — right up until the platform stops letting them take money out at all.
Tech and customer-support scams were the second-costliest category at $1.04 billion, typically starting with a fake security pop-up warning that a computer has been hacked. Confidence and romance scams cost seniors $584 million, and business email compromises — schemes that often target people in the middle of closing on a home sale — added another $568 million across 4,566 complaints. Seniors also reported $540 million in losses to a newer twist: recovery scams, where someone who already lost money is approached by a fake law firm or government office offering to get it back for an upfront fee.
Cryptocurrency now touches a striking share of every category combined. Seniors filed 42,271 complaints involving cryptocurrency in 2025, totaling $4.35 billion in losses, more than half of everything reported. Crypto ATMs and kiosks were a particular weak point: victims 60 and older reported 6,188 incidents at physical kiosks, losing $257.5 million, a 58% jump in losses from the year before, as scammers increasingly direct victims to convert cash into digital currency in person rather than over a bank wire.
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AI Is Making the Oldest Scams More Convincing
The FBI’s report flags artificial intelligence as a new accelerant on an old problem. The bureau received more than 3,100 complaints from seniors referencing AI in 2025, tied to losses exceeding $352 million. Voice-cloning technology has made “grandparent” or “distress” scams far more convincing, letting a caller mimic the sound of a panicked family member closely enough that victims wire money before verifying anything. Seniors reported more than $5 million in losses in 2025 tied specifically to these voice-cloned distress calls, and investigators say the scam is evolving to mimic other relatives and close friends, not just grandchildren.
The geographic spread of the losses tracks population, not vulnerability. California recorded the most senior complaints, 22,157, and the highest dollar losses at $1.4 billion; Florida followed with 17,147 complaints, and Texas with 14,410. Investigators note the pattern holds across states with very different demographics, suggesting the scripts scammers use — the fake account alert, the too-good investment, the distressed relative — travel well regardless of where a victim lives.
What’s Being Done — and What Victims Should Do Next
The FBI’s Recovery Asset Team, which works to freeze money before it disappears overseas, recovered $32.9 million of the $65.4 million in elder-fraud cases it moved on through the Financial Fraud Kill Chain in 2025, a recovery rate that underscores how much can still be saved if a victim or bank flags a transfer within hours rather than days. The Justice Department’s National Elder Fraud Hotline exists specifically to move that fast, connecting callers with a case manager who helps report the crime and pursue recovery.
The hotline has stayed busy since the Department of Justice launched it in March 2020: it has fielded more than 121,000 calls, averaging 83 a day, and every caller is assigned a dedicated case manager who stays the point of contact through the reporting process rather than being handed off to someone new at each step. It operates Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern time, with services available in English, Spanish and other languages — a growing daily call volume that gives some sense of how a $7.75 billion annual loss figure translates into individual people looking for a way to recover.
Federal officials recommend a short list of habits that block most of these schemes before money moves: turn on multifactor authentication for every financial account, never send cryptocurrency to someone met only online, and verify any urgent request for money by calling the family member or institution directly using a number looked up independently, never one supplied by the person asking for money. Anyone who has lost money to a cyber-enabled scam is urged to file a report at IC3.gov regardless of the amount, since the aggregated data is what lets investigators spot a pattern early enough to act.
The trend line is also a reminder that awareness alone hasn’t been enough to slow the losses. The same categories — fake investments, tech-support pop-ups, romance and confidence schemes — have circulated in public warnings for years, yet the dollar figures kept climbing through 2025, which investigators attribute to scammers refining the emotional pressure of the pitch faster than the public can adapt to it.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team before publication.
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