Reported losses from scams that began on social media climbed nearly ninefold among Americans age 60 and older between 2020 and 2024, the sharpest increase of any contact method the Federal Trade Commission tracks. The finding sits inside a broader surge: aggregate fraud losses reported by older adults rose from about $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2024, a 300 percent increase driven mostly by a small number of six-figure cases. Social platforms now produce more reported dollars lost and more loss reports from older adults than any other single point of first contact, including phone calls, text messages, and mail. That shift reorders which channel now carries the heaviest fraud burden for the agency and for the households it tracks.
Social Platforms Overtake Every Other Point of First Contact
The finding comes from Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025, the Federal Trade Commission’s eighth annual report to Congress on protecting older adults, released December 1, 2025. The report compiles fraud reports filed with the agency’s Consumer Sentinel Network, the investigative database law enforcement agencies use to spot patterns across millions of consumer complaints. Sentinel data is self-reported rather than survey-based, meaning the totals reflect what consumers or their representatives chose to disclose, but the agency’s own analysis now identifies social media as the single largest source of both reports and reported dollars lost among adults 60 and older.
Behind the topline number is a concentration effect the report itself highlights: reports of losses over $100,000 by older adults increased 351 percent between 2020 and 2024, from 1,136 reports to 5,125, even though such filings remained rare, accounting for only 5 percent of older adults’ loss reports in 2024. Those six-figure cases nonetheless accounted for 68 percent of the group’s total reported losses, meaning a comparatively small number of victims absorbing catastrophic sums are driving the headline totals more than a broad increase in everyday scam activity.
The concentration in social media contacts also reflects how Sentinel records are coded. The database tags only the victim’s first point of contact, so a scam that opens with a direct message or a comment on a social platform is logged as social media even when the fraud later shifts to a phone call or a private messaging app to close the transaction. That coding choice makes the ninefold increase a meaningful signal about where older adults are first being reached, even when the money ultimately changes hands somewhere else.
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The Phone Call Still Produces the Bigger Single Loss
The ninefold jump does not mean social media has become the costliest channel on a per-incident basis. The report found the median individual loss for fraud that began with a phone call was $2,210 in 2024, more than three times the $650 median loss reported for fraud that started on social media. Phone-originated schemes remain concentrated in business impersonation, government impersonation, and prize or sweepstakes claims, categories built around extracting a single large payment rather than a relationship or trading scheme that develops over weeks.
When a phone call was the point of contact, older adults most often reported dollar losses to business impersonation scams, which accounted for 40 percent of phone-originated losses, followed by government impersonation schemes at 23 percent and prize, sweepstakes, or lottery claims at 15 percent. Each relies on the same pressure tactic: a caller claims a bank account, a government benefit, or a windfall is at risk unless the recipient acts within minutes, a script that a slower-moving social media relationship or investment pitch typically does not use.
The distinction matters most for the oldest reporters. Adults 80 and older, the age group with the highest median individual losses of any cohort at more than $1,600, continued in 2024 to report far more money lost to phone-based fraud than to any other contact method, with social media a distant second for that group. The population most exposed to a single catastrophic loss is not primarily the one being reached through apps and feeds; it is the one still answering the phone.
Investment and Romance Schemes Drive the Feed-Based Losses
When a scam did begin on social media, older adults most frequently reported losing money to online shopping fraud, which accounted for 31 percent of social-media loss reports. Measured by dollars rather than case count, the picture flips: investment scams accounted for 51 percent of aggregate losses tied to social platforms, followed by romance scams at 28 percent. Investment fraud overall remained the single largest category of reported dollar losses among older adults in 2024, with victims describing being steered toward fraudulent cryptocurrency trading platforms after first being contacted on a social app.
A newer scam layered onto the same channels expanded just as sharply. So-called task scams, in which a target completes simple app-based assignments and is told to deposit money to unlock supposed earnings, helped push older adults’ reported job-scam losses up nearly 300 percent compared with 2023. The mechanism mirrors the shopping and investment schemes riding social platforms: a small, plausible interaction that asks for an initial deposit before the fraud accelerates.
Bank transfers produced the highest aggregate reported losses among older adults’ fraud payment methods in 2024, with cryptocurrency transfers ranking second, a pairing consistent with romance and investment schemes that persuade a target to wire funds or move money into a crypto wallet over weeks or months. Because Sentinel captures only what victims choose to report, the FTC’s own analysis puts the true scope of 2024 fraud against older Americans somewhere between $10.1 billion and $81.5 billion, a range wide enough to suggest that most of the damage described in the report never reaches a case file at all.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence.
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