Just when older adults need their money for retirement, many of them are being robbed. On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission issued its annual report to Congress on protecting older adults, noting that adults 60 and over continue to report losing far more money to investment scams than to any other type of fraud.
Adults 60 and over lost $3 billion to fraud in 2025, five times the $600 million reported five years prior, in 2020. This increase was driven largely by growing reports of extraordinarily large individual losses. Fraud losses due to investment scams jumped 42% in 2025 to over $1 billion, with consumers reporting that scammers often reach them on social media.
The full 58-page report, Protecting Older Consumers 2025-2026, is available online. It summarizes fraud and consumer complaints submitted to the Consumer Sentinel Network in 2025. The network is a free online investigative FTC tool that gives its member groups access to millions of fraud reports to assist their investigations.
Adults 60 and over continue to report much higher individual dollar losses than younger people, with people 80 and over faring the worst, with a median reported loss of $2,000. According to the report, older adults are more likely to report losing money to tech support scams; prize, sweepstakes and lottery scams; romance scams; government impersonation scams; and scams in which someone impersonates their friends or family members.
The government will ‘never ever’ ask for gift cards
The report outlines FTC law enforcement actions targeting fraud aimed at older adults. Those actions include targeted consumer education initiatives and collaboration with government, academic and private-sector partners. The FTC also coordinates with law enforcement and connects victims experiencing significant financial losses to resources such as the Department of Justice’s National Elder Fraud Hotline.
The FTC’s Never Ever campaign, one of those actions, aims to educate seniors by highlighting three red flags that prove a caller or sender is a scammer rather than a legitimate government agency or bank. Those red flags tell people that legitimate government officials will never direct them to transfer money to protect it, threaten to suspend government benefits without immediate payment or demand payment via money apps, cryptocurrency, wire transfers or gift cards.
An article published Monday in PCMag, part of the CNET Group of publications, relays the story of a 77-year-old widow and retired nurse, Mary Ellen Strange, who lost most of her life savings, over $400,000, over a seven-week period in 2024. Strange’s money was taken by a team of cyber scammers led by a man impersonating a Federal Trade Commission officer. On three separate occasions, men pretending to be undercover FBI agents came to her home and left with boxes of her money.
A recent CNET Group survey of 1,000 Americans reveals that scams are a weekly nuisance for many. Over 80% of those surveyed receive scam calls and emails every week, while 76.5% receive weekly scam texts. CNET offers a guide to avoiding the top seven scams, plus tips on how to minimize the damage if you fear you have been scammed.
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line. See full bio
English (US) ·