Americans aged 60 and older filed 201,266 complaints with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center in the 2025 data year, and the people behind them reported $7.7 billion in losses. Both numbers describe that one age group only. They sit inside a report-wide total of 1,008,597 complaints and $20.877 billion in reported losses across every age. The center, known as IC3, is the FBI’s intake point for internet-enabled fraud, so the counts measure what victims chose to report to it.
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The 60-and-older page of the 2025 IC3 report
The age-group page of the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report gives four headline numbers for complainants labeled 60+. Complaints stand at 201,266, up 37 percent from 2024. Losses stand at $7.748 billion, up 59 percent, which rounds to the $7.7 billion in the headline. The report lists an average loss of $38,500 and counts 12,444 complainants in this age group who lost more than $100,000.
Scope matters here. The complaint figure counts complaints filed, not investigated or confirmed cases. The dollar figure is losses reported by those complainants for 2025, not money recovered and not a survey estimate. By the same report’s totals, the 60+ group accounts for roughly one in five complaints (201,266 of 1,008,597) and about 37 percent of reported dollars ($7.748 billion of $20.877 billion), a share worked out here from the report’s own totals rather than printed in it.
Where the 60+ dollars sit: investment fraud and tech support
The report’s scam-type breakdown for the group shows that the number of complaints and the size of the loss point in different directions. Investment fraud drew 16,926 complaints from the 60+ group and $3,519,296,354 in reported losses, the largest dollar total of any type listed on pages 45 and 46 of the 2025 report. Tech and customer support schemes drew 21,333 complaints and $1,040,730,043. Confidence and romance fraud drew 10,188 complaints and $584,032,745.
The report also tags $4,347,081,557 of the group’s losses with a cryptocurrency descriptor on page 46. That figure is a separate label applied to complaints, so it should not be added to the scam-type totals above.
The 2024 baseline behind the 37 and 59 percent jumps
The two growth rates can be traced to the prior year’s report. The IC3’s 2024 report counted 147,127 complaints from people over 60 and $4.885 billion in losses for that year, and described the group as having suffered the most losses and submitted the most complaints of any age demographic. Moving from 147,127 to 201,266 complaints is the 37 percent increase, and moving from $4.885 billion to $7.748 billion is the 59 percent increase.
One comparison does not carry over cleanly. The 2024 report printed an average loss of $83,000 for the group and the 2025 report prints $38,500, so the two averages should not be read as a one-year drop without a note from the FBI on how each was calculated. The complaint counts and dollar totals are the like-for-like figures.
Phishing and spoofing: the most complaints, the smallest dollar totals
Phishing and spoofing led the 60+ group on volume, with 48,064 complaints, yet its reported losses were $77,020,936, far below investment fraud. Personal data breach followed with 11,705 complaints and $324,470,413 in reported losses. These are the contacts that begin with a scammer holding a name, a phone number or an address.
Personal details reach scammers by several routes, and broker listings are one of them: less personal data on broker lists can mean fewer scam calls, texts and emails, and Incogni sends removal requests to data brokers and people-search sites on a customer’s behalf and keeps re-sending them. A removal service does not touch the investment and tech support schemes that account for most of the dollars above, which usually start with a conversation rather than a list.
The FBI’s own elder fraud page lists the contact types that recur across its cases: romance, tech support, grandparent, government impersonation, sweepstakes, charity and lottery, and home repair scams. It quotes former FBI and CIA Director William Webster, then 98, on his own 2014 lottery-scam experience: “If it can happen to me, it can happen to you.”
Reporting routes: IC3 and the National Elder Fraud Hotline
The FBI’s elder fraud page directs victims to file at ic3.gov and to include the scammer’s names or company names, contact dates and methods, phone numbers, emails, addresses and websites, the payment method used, and any wire-transfer or prepaid-card details with the financial institution. It also advises keeping original emails, faxes and communication logs.
Victims who want a person to walk through the process can call the National Elder Fraud Hotline at 833-FRAUD-11 (833-372-8311), open Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office for Victims of Crime created the line, and its program page says callers are assigned a case manager who helps with the reporting process at the federal, state and local levels. The 201,266 complaints in the IC3 report are the ones that reached the FBI’s intake system, and the FBI’s own page notes that fear and embarrassment keep many incidents from being reported at all.
Personal details on data broker lists
The 60-and-older complaint data in the IC3 report shows phishing and spoofing as the most-reported category, a kind of contact that starts with a name, number or address. Incogni asks data brokers and people-search sites to remove personal information, sends those requests on the member’s behalf and keeps re-sending them. Less personal data on broker lists can mean fewer scam calls, texts and emails, and the status of each request shows in the account.
Click here to see what Incogni removes from data broker lists →
This piece was drafted with AI assistance; the figures were checked against the FBI’s 2025 and 2024 Internet Crime Reports, the FBI’s elder fraud page and the Justice Department’s Office for Victims of Crime.
