Updated August 3, 2026. Quick answer: in 2025 the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 201,266 complaints from people aged 60 and over and $7.748 billion in reported losses — complaints up 37% and losses up 59% in one year. Investment fraud, not the telephone scams that get the coverage, is where most of the money goes.
The 2025 figures
| Measure | 2025 | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Complaints filed by people 60+ | 201,266 | +37% vs 2024 |
| Total reported losses | $7.748 billion | +59% vs 2024 |
| Complainants who lost more than $100,000 | 12,444 | — |
| Costliest crime type | Investment fraud — $3,519,296,354 | 16,926 complaints |
| Second costliest | Tech/customer support fraud — $1,040,730,043 | 21,333 complaints |
| Most reported crime type | Phishing/spoofing | 48,064 complaints |
| Complaints from 60+ referencing cryptocurrency | $4,347,081,557 | 42,271 complaints |
Source: FBI IC3 2025 Annual Report, elder-fraud section, read from the official PDF on 3 August 2026.
Read this before comparing to last year’s headline
The 2024 report prints an average loss of $83,000. The 2025 report prints $38,500. Set side by side those suggest average losses more than halved. They did not. The two figures are not computed the same way, and the arithmetic on each report’s own page shows it:
| Year | Printed average | Total losses / total complaints | Do they match? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | $38,500 | $7.748bn / 201,266 = $38,496 | Yes |
| 2024 | $83,000 | $4.885bn / 147,127 = $33,203 | No |
The 2025 average is the total divided by every complaint. The 2024 figure implies a denominator of about 58,855 — roughly 40% of the complaints filed — which is what you would get by averaging only over complainants who reported a non-zero loss. Many IC3 complaints report no financial loss at all.
So do not compare the two averages, and be sceptical of anything that does. The comparison produces a 54% fall in average loss in a year when total losses rose 59%, which should be the tell. The complaint counts and the loss totals are comparable and both rose sharply; the average is the figure to leave alone.
We have not seen this noted anywhere else, so check it yourself — both reports are public, and the numbers are printed on the same page as each average.
One more figure that is easy to misattribute
The 2025 report also prints an average loss of $62,604 alongside 18,589 complainants losing more than $100,000. That is the cryptocurrency section covering all ages, not elder fraud. It sits a few pages from the elder-fraud section and gets quoted as though it were the same population.
The preventive step these numbers argue for is free and statutory. The federal protected-consumer freeze covers incapacitated adults, not only children — a representative can place one, at no cost, and the agency has one business day to act. Whether to add a paid service on top is a separate question: freezing versus monitoring.
What the composition actually says
Investment fraud is the money. It accounts for $3,519,296,354 across only 16,926 complaints — a small share of the reports and the largest share of the losses. The per-victim damage is what makes it different in kind from the high-volume scams.
Phishing and spoofing are the volume — 48,064 complaints, far more than any other category.
Cryptocurrency appears in a large share of the losses: $4,347,081,557 across 42,271 complaints from this age group referenced it. It is the settlement layer for the relationship-then-investment frauds, not a separate category of scam.
These figures and the comparability finding are archived as a citable open dataset: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21781267 (CC BY 4.0). The README carries the arithmetic in full, so anyone citing the average-loss caution inherits the working.
One recruitment pattern behind the numbers
The limits of this data, stated plainly
- These are reports, not incidents. Elder fraud is widely believed to be under-reported; every figure here is a floor.
- Self-reported ages and amounts are not audited.
- Year-on-year rises may partly reflect reporting rather than only offending — more awareness produces more complaints.
- Definitions shift between reports, which is exactly what the average-loss problem above demonstrates.
Related: what to do if it has already happened · the investment-fraud entry point.
General information drawn from federal regulator and law-enforcement publications, not legal or investment advice. This page describes patterns reported by regulators; it does not accuse any company or person of wrongdoing. Sources and read dates are given so you can check them yourself.
The other half of the problem. Most elder financial abuse is committed by someone the person knows, and it has a different route than a scam does — what reporting actually does, and the three places a report can go.
If you brief people on this: the scam guides are built to print and hand over, free to copy and share with attribution.