Scams that target seniors

Fraud against older adults is a growth industry. In 2025, people 60 and older filed more than 201,000 complaints with the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and reported losing over $7.7 billion, a jump of nearly 60 percent in a single year ¹. The average reported loss was more than $38,000, and at least 12,400 older victims lost $100,000 or more ¹. Those are only the cases people reported; most are never reported at all.

Scammers concentrate on older adults for practical reasons. People in their 60s, 70s, and 80s hold much of the country's household wealth, from retirement accounts to paid-off homes. They are more likely to answer an unknown call, more likely to live alone, and often more reluctant to tell anyone when something goes wrong, out of embarrassment or fear that family will question their independence. None of this reflects gullibility: today's operations are run by organized criminal groups, working from scripts refined on thousands of victims, increasingly with help from artificial intelligence.

The encouraging part is that nearly all of these schemes share a small set of tells, especially in how they ask to be paid. Learning a half-dozen storylines and three or four payment red flags blocks the vast majority of attempts. This article covers the major scams, the red flags, where to report, and how to protect a parent without taking over their life. Exploitation by family members and caregivers, a related but distinct problem, is covered in elder abuse.

What the numbers show#

Two federal agencies track elder fraud from different angles. The FBI's IC3 collects complaints about internet-enabled crime; its 2025 totals across all ages exceeded one million complaints and $20.9 billion in losses, with the 60-and-over group losing more than any other age bracket ¹. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) runs the broader Consumer Sentinel database and reports to Congress annually on older consumers. Its most recent report found that adults 60 and older reported $2.4 billion in fraud losses in 2024, roughly four times the $600 million reported in 2020, with the growth driven by six-figure losses to investment, romance, and impersonation scams ².

The FTC also estimates how much goes unreported. Adjusting for fraud that never reaches any agency, it puts older adults' true 2024 losses as high as $81.5 billion ². Younger adults actually report losing money to fraud more often; older adults lose far more per incident, because the schemes aimed at them are designed to empty accounts rather than skim small charges ².

Sources for this section: [1] [2]

The major scams#

Grandparent and family emergency scams#

The classic version is a panicked late-night call: a grandchild has been arrested or hurt far from home, a lawyer or officer gets on the line, and money must be sent immediately and kept secret from the parents. Artificial intelligence has made the con more convincing. Voice-cloning software needs only a short audio clip, easily harvested from social media, to imitate a family member on the phone ³. Some rings escalate further, sending couriers to collect cash from the victim's door.

The FTC's advice is to resist the manufactured urgency: hang up, call the family member back on a number you know is theirs, or ask a question no stranger could answer ³. Many families agree on a private code word for exactly this situation.

Romance scams#

Romance scams build over weeks or months. The scammer, often working from a script at an overseas call center, showers the target with attention, moves the conversation off the dating platform, and always has a reason not to meet: military deployment, an oil rig, overseas contract work. Then come the crises requiring money, or an invitation to invest together. Older adults are much more likely than younger ones to report losing money this way ², and widowed people are frequent targets; scammers scan obituaries and social media for the recently bereaved, a pattern worth knowing about during grief and loss. Loneliness is the raw material here, which is one more argument for the social ties described in staying socially connected.

Investment and cryptocurrency scams#

Investment fraud is now the most expensive category for older adults: more than $3.5 billion reported lost in 2025, and schemes involving cryptocurrency took $4.3 billion from more than 42,000 victims 60 and older ¹. The signature scheme is so-called pig butchering, named for fattening a hog before slaughter. A stranger builds a friendship or romance through texts and chat apps, introduces a crypto trading platform, and lets the victim watch fake profits grow on a polished dashboard. Withdrawals are blocked, "taxes" and "fees" extract even more, and the platform eventually vanishes ⁴. Financial regulators have flagged these operations, many run by criminal syndicates using trafficked labor overseas, as a major and growing threat ⁴. Any unsolicited investment pitch that guarantees returns, or any "advisor" you have never met who directs you to a specific platform, deserves a hard no.

Tech support scams#

A pop-up freezes the screen, a loud warning says the computer is infected, and a toll-free number connects to a fake Microsoft or Apple technician who requests remote access and payment. In a newer variant, the "technician" claims hackers are inside the victim's bank account and hands the call to a fake bank investigator or federal agent, who instructs the victim to move savings into crypto or gift cards to "protect" it. No legitimate company or agency operates this way. Older adults reported $159 million in tech support scam losses in 2024, and they are far more likely than younger adults to lose money to this scheme ². Basic digital habits, covered in technology for seniors, close off most of these entry points.

Government impersonation scams#

Callers claim to be from Social Security, Medicare, the IRS, or even the FBI, often with spoofed caller ID that displays the agency's real number. The scripts alternate between threat (your Social Security number was used in a crime; there is a warrant) and false rescue (move your money to a safe account while we investigate). Reports of older adults losing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to impersonation scams have risen more than fourfold since 2020 ². The real agencies communicate by mail in almost all cases, and none of them will ever threaten arrest by phone, demand secrecy, or ask for payment in gift cards, wire transfers, or cryptocurrency.

Sweepstakes and lottery scams#

The oldest trick on the list still works: you have won a sweepstakes, a foreign lottery, or a Publishers Clearing House prize, and only need to pay taxes, insurance, or delivery fees to collect. The fees never end and the prize never comes. Older adults are disproportionately represented among victims who report these scams ². A real prize never requires payment to receive, and legitimate sweepstakes do not call winners of contests they never entered.

Sources for this section: [1] [2] [3] [4]

The payment method is the tell#

Whatever the storyline, the ending gives scams away, because criminals need payment that moves fast and cannot be reversed. The FTC is blunt about the most common one: only scammers tell you to buy gift cards and read them the numbers, full stop; no business or government agency settles debts in Apple or Google Play cards ⁵.

Cryptocurrency ATMs, the machines installed in gas stations and convenience stores, have become another favorite off-ramp. Consumers lost more than $65 million to crypto ATM scams in just the first half of 2024, with a median loss of $10,000, and people over 60 were more than three times as likely as younger adults to be victims ⁶. Wire transfers, mailed cash, couriers sent to the door, and pressure to lie to your bank teller about a withdrawal's purpose all belong on the same list.

Caution: Treat any of these demands as proof of fraud, regardless of who is asking: payment by gift card, cryptocurrency, or wire to a stranger; moving money to a "safe" account; secrecy; or a deadline measured in hours. Real institutions do none of these things.

Sources for this section: [5] [6]

How to report a scam#

Reporting matters even when the money is gone. Reports steer investigations, trigger takedowns of phone numbers and websites, and occasionally lead to recovered funds, and they are the only way the statistics above get counted.

The Department of Justice's National Elder Fraud Hotline (833-372-8311) assigns a case manager who walks victims through reporting to the right agencies ⁷. For local intervention, every state runs Adult Protective Services; the Eldercare Locator at 800-677-1116 connects you to the right office, and reports can be made anonymously ⁸. If money moved recently, call the bank before anything else; wires can sometimes be recalled and accounts frozen in the first hours. And be wary of the follow-up con: victims are routinely re-targeted by "recovery services" that promise, for an upfront fee, to get the money back.

Sources for this section: [7] [8]

Protecting a parent without taking over#

Family members usually want to act the moment they learn a parent sent money to a stranger. People who work in aging services counsel a lighter touch: shame and control push older adults to hide the next incident, and secrecy is what scammers depend on.

A few arrangements provide protection while leaving your parent in charge. Banks and brokerages will add a trusted contact person, someone the institution may call about suspected exploitation, who gets no access to the money and no authority over it. Account alerts can flag large or unusual transactions in real time. A durable power of attorney, set up while your parent has full capacity and used only if needed, beats scrambling for guardianship later. Phone carriers offer free spam-call labeling and blocking. None of these require anyone to surrender independence, which is precisely why parents tend to accept them.

The conversational tools matter as much as the technical ones. Talk about scams as news stories rather than warnings aimed at the parent ("someone in town lost $40,000 to a fake Medicare call"). Agree on the family code word. Offer to be the sounding board for any request for money or personal information, framed as something you do yourself with your own spouse or friends. Practice the shorter pause, verify, and recover routine before an urgent contact arrives. And if a scam succeeds anyway, put the blame loudly where it belongs, on the criminal, then move straight to reporting and damage control. Caregivers coordinating this from a distance can find related tactics in family caregiving and long-distance caregiving.

Watch for the quiet signs between conversations: unexplained gift card purchases, receipts from crypto ATMs, a new online friend or sudden romance no one has met, secrecy around the phone or computer, or unpaid bills from someone who was always current. Any of them justifies a gentle question sooner rather than later.

RetiredWiki. (2026, July 17). Scams that target seniors. https://retiredwiki.com/article/scams-targeting-seniors