Category: Fraud & Scams
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Jordan Trought drew eight years and a $6,166,227 forfeiture for a sweepstakes scam aimed at older Americans
A federal judge in White Plains sentenced Jordan Trought, a 31-year-old Jamaican national, to eight years in prison this week for leading part of an international sweepstakes fraud ring that took more than $9 million from more than 200 elderly victims across the United States. The Southern District of New York’s announcement, dated September 10,…
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Prosecutors restrained $52 million of scam money in one day and seized the Xinbi marketplace behind it
Federal prosecutors in Washington pulled off an unusually large one-day haul this week, restraining roughly $52 million in cryptocurrency tied to a Chinese-language marketplace that functioned less like an underground criminal network and more like a supplier catalog for scam operators. The Department of Justice’s Scam Center Strike Force says the seizure pushes its running…
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The IRS wants taxpayers to lock down a six-digit PIN before someone else files a return in their name
The Internal Revenue Service and its Security Summit partners used the fourth entry in a summer awareness campaign to push a blunt message at taxpayers and the professionals who file for them: a stolen Social Security number is often all a criminal needs to file a bogus return, and a free six-digit code from the…
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An identity protection PIN shuts a stolen Social Security number out of a fake tax return, and the IRS pushed it again on September 4.
The IRS and its partners in the Security Summit are once again steering taxpayers toward a simple tool that can stop identity thieves from filing a tax return in someone else’s name. On September 4, 2026, the agency issued IR-2026-106, the fourth release in its “Protect Your Clients; Protect Yourself” summer series, urging both tax…
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Seniors filed 42,271 crypto complaints last year, losing $4.35 billion.
Cryptocurrency is now the single largest loss category the FBI tracks for older Americans, bigger than the report’s separate figures for investment fraud, romance scams and tech-support cons. In its newly released 2025 Internet Crime Report, the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center found that people 60 and older filed 42,271 complaints referencing cryptocurrency last year,…
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Nearly 30 percent of people who lost money to a scam last year say it started on social media, adding up to $2.1 billion.
New federal data single out one channel as the costliest way scammers reach people’s wallets: social media. The Federal Trade Commission reported that in 2025, nearly 30% of people who told the agency they lost money to a scam said it started on a social media platform, with total reported losses of $2.1 billion, an…
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Losses above $100,000 were 68 percent of older adults’ reported fraud.
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…
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Consumers filed 3 million fraud reports last year and put their losses at $15.9 billion, against about $12 billion the year before.
Federal regulators have a fresh number for how expensive scams got last year, and it isn’t small. The Federal Trade Commission told Congress this year that consumers filed 3 million fraud reports in 2025 and put their combined losses at $15.9 billion, up from 2.6 million reports and more than $12 billion in losses the…
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People over 50 accounted for $302 million of the money Americans fed into crypto ATMs at a scammer’s direction last year.
Crypto ATM kiosks look like ordinary cash machines, but the FBI says scammers have turned them into one of the fastest-growing ways to move a victim’s money out of reach for good. In its newly released 2025 Internet Crime Report, the bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center found that people 50 and older accounted for $302…
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More than 3,100 complaints from older Americans named artificial intelligence last year, and those cases alone topped $352 million in losses.
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center gave artificial intelligence its own fraud category for the first time in the bureau’s nearly 25-year history of tracking online crime, and the toll on older Americans is already substantial. In its newly published 2025 Internet Crime Report, IC3 recorded more than 3,100 complaints from people age 60 and…
