A new Federal Trade Commission report on fraud against older Americans found that a small share of cases is doing almost all of the financial damage. In its December 2025 report to Congress, the agency said that in 2024, reports of losses of $100,000 or more made up only 5% of the fraud-loss reports filed by adults 60 and older, yet those reports accounted for 68% of the $2.4 billion in total losses that age group reported that year. The math is the story: a relatively small number of catastrophic cases is driving most of the dollar losses among older adults, even though the far more common experience is a smaller loss that never approaches six figures.
A Small Slice of Reports Produced Most of the Damage
The FTC’s report, “Protecting Older Consumers, 2024-2025,” draws on 2024 data submitted to the agency’s Consumer Sentinel Network, which collects fraud reports from consumers directly and from law enforcement and industry partners. Total fraud losses reported by adults 60 and older reached $2.4 billion in 2024, up from about $600 million in 2020, a roughly fourfold increase in just four years. The report ties most of that growth to the six-figure cases rather than to a broad increase in smaller losses, which means the average older adult filing a fraud report in 2024 was not typically reporting a catastrophic loss, even though the reports that did involve six figures pulled the total sharply upward. More than 20 states contribute data to the Consumer Sentinel Network alongside consumers who report directly, and across all age groups the agency separately logged more than 1.1 million identity-theft reports through IdentityTheft.gov in 2024, a distinct category from the fraud-loss figures discussed here.
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Six-Figure Fraud Reports Grew Fivefold Since 2020
The report’s underlying numbers show how fast this specific category grew. The number of older adults reporting a loss over $100,000 rose from 1,136 reports in 2020 to 5,125 reports in 2024, a 351% increase, and the combined dollar losses tied to those reports increased more than fivefold over the same period. By comparison, reports of losses between $10,000 and $100,000 rose 183% (from 6,965 to 19,679), and reports of losses under $10,000 rose a much smaller 39%. Every loss tier grew, in other words, but the six-figure tier grew fastest by a wide margin, which is exactly why it now drives more than two-thirds of the total dollar figure despite being a small fraction of the case count. That divergence is also why a simple average of all older-adult fraud reports would badly understate what the worst cases actually cost; the report’s own framing treats the six-figure tier as a distinct and fast-growing problem rather than a tail end of the same distribution.
Investment and Romance Scams, and Scammers Posing as the FTC or Microsoft
According to the FTC’s report, the six-figure reports were “often about investment scams, romance scams, and scammers impersonating the FTC, banks, Publishers Clearing House, and Microsoft.” Investment scams in particular stood out across the older-adult data: the agency found that older adults reported losing far more money to investment schemes than to any other fraud type in 2024, and that consumers of all ages most commonly say social media was how the scammer first made contact for an investment pitch. Romance scams follow a similar pattern of long-running contact building enough trust that a victim eventually wires tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, often in stages, before realizing anything is wrong. The report also points to the FTC’s Pass It On campaign, which distributes fraud-prevention materials aimed specifically at older adults so they can share the warnings with family and friends, as one of the agency’s main education tools alongside its law enforcement actions.
Older Adults Are Nearly Twice as Likely to Report a Six-Figure Loss
The full report also normalizes these numbers against population size, and the gap holds up: older adults were found to be nearly twice as likely as younger consumers to report a six-figure fraud loss once the comparison controls for how many people are in each age group. That statistic matters because it rules out the simplest explanation, that there are just more older adults filing reports overall. The disparity is specifically about the size of the loss, not the volume of reports, reinforcing the report’s broader finding that older victims are being targeted for, or are ending up exposed to, larger single-event losses more often than younger consumers are. The report notes that older adults also continue to report much higher median individual dollar losses than younger adults overall, with the gap widest among people 80 and older, a pattern the agency says has held for several years running.
The Commission approved the report to Congress by a 2-0 vote on December 1, 2025, and it draws entirely on Consumer Sentinel reports filed in 2024, the most recent full year of data available when the report was compiled. For households with an older relative managing savings or considering an unfamiliar investment pitch, the number worth remembering isn’t the $2.4 billion total; it’s the 68%, which shows exactly where the real financial risk is concentrated.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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