Older adults lost $2.4 billion to fraud schemes in 2024, driven largely by reported individual losses of more than $100,000 to investment and romance scams, as well as impersonations, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s annual report to Congress.
The FTC’s Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025 report, released earlier this month, revealed that in 2024, older adults reported losing far more money to investment scams than to any other fraud type, often reporting that the scammers targeted them on social media. Consumers reported losing about $12.8 billion to fraud in 2024; 36% of those reports came from older adults, and the results could affect their long-term care plans.
Older adult fraud losses skyrocketed from $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2024. But because most fraud goes unreported, the FTC estimated that real losses experienced by older adults in 2024 could be as high as $82 billion.
Key findings from the FTC’s 2024 Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book revealed that reported fraud losses by older adults increased four-fold from 2020 to 2024, driven largely by increasing reports of extraordinarily large individual losses. Older adults continued to report higher median individual losses than younger adults, with people aged 80 or more years reporting median losses exceeding $1,600.
From 2020 to 2024, combined losses by older adults who reported losing more than $100,000 increased more than fivefold. Although those reports were rare — making up 5% of older adults’ loss reports in 2024 — they accounted for 68% of aggregate reported losses.
Reported losses by older adults to investment scams ($744 million) once again were far higher than any other fraud type. Losses to business impersonation scams ($377 million) were second, with the highest aggregate reported losses on scams impersonating bands. Government impersonation scams ($375 million) moved into the third position in 2024, with reported losses jumping 47%. There also are increasing reports of a new type of job scam, the so-called “task scam,” which helped drive up older adults’ reported job scam losses $33 million) by nearly 300% compared with 2023.
Older adults were more likely than younger ones to report losing money on tech support scams; prize, sweepstakes and lottery scams; romance scams; and government impersonation scams.
Investment scams, business impersonation and government impersonation scams were the top fraud types based on aggregate reported losses by older adults. Both aggregated reported losses ($561 million in total losses, $650 in reported median individual losses) and the number of reports (23,000) of money lost by older adults were highest for frauds initiated on social media, but reported median individual losses continued to be highest for frauds that started with a phone call ($2,210).
Older adults reported the highest aggregate losses to frauds facilitated by bank transfers or payments ($832 million), followed by cryptocurrency transfers (454 million). Credit cards (26% of loss reports) and gift cards (16% of loss reports) were the fraud payment methods most frequently reported by older adults.
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