Fraud reports that put a loss above $100,000 on the table from people aged 60 and older reached 5,125 in 2024, up from 1,136 in 2020, a rise of 351 percent in four years. The counts come from the Federal Trade Commission, which compiled them for its annual report to Congress on protecting older adults. They measure reports, not victims or dollars, but they describe a shift in what the biggest frauds against older people look like and how fast that category has grown.
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The six-figure band is small in number and large in consequence. Within older adults’ fraud reports that stated a monetary loss, losses above $100,000 made up about 5 percent of reports but 68 percent of all the dollars reported lost. A handful of very large losses therefore drive most of the money, which is why the FTC’s report singles out that band when explaining why aggregate reported losses have climbed so steeply.
Where the 5,125 and 1,136 come from
The counts appear in Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025: A Report of the Federal Trade Commission, in a section titled “Aggregate Reported Losses to Fraud by Older Adults Have Skyrocketed.” The agency received 421,031 fraud reports from people 60 and older that included age information in 2024, about 36 percent of the reports that included age, and 109,580 of them indicated a monetary loss. Of that group, 5,125 stated losses above $100,000, against 1,136 in 2020. The report is published on the FTC’s landing page for the 2024-2025 edition, dated December 2025.
The data behind the report come from the Consumer Sentinel Network, the FTC’s database of consumer complaints, where people file reports directly and outside contributors add their own. Because the network collects what people choose to report, the figures describe reports received, which is a floor on real activity and not a census of every incident.
Investment, romance and impersonation scams
According to the report, large-loss reports were “often about investment scams, romance scams, and scammers impersonating the FTC, banks, Publishers Clearing House, and Microsoft.” Investment losses were typically tied to fake cryptocurrency platforms promoted on social media, and social media produced the highest aggregate losses of any contact method. Investment scams accounted for 51 percent of the losses that began on social media, while phone calls were tied mainly to business impersonation, at 40 percent, and government impersonation, at 23 percent.
The FTC press release for the report adds that fraud losses reported by adults 60 and older rose roughly fourfold from 2020 to 2024, from about $600 million to $2.4 billion, and that the increase was driven mainly by losses over $100,000. Christopher Mufarrige, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in the agency’s announcement: “The FTC is doing everything possible to protect older adults and shut down illegal scams.”
Bank transfers, cryptocurrency and the cost of a single payment
How the money moves explains part of the growth. Credit cards and gift cards were the payment methods reported most often, but bank transfers and cryptocurrency were the costliest by total dollars. Reported losses using bank transfers rose more than eightfold since 2020, and those using cryptocurrency rose more than twentyfold. A single wire or crypto deposit can move an entire savings balance in one step, which is how a single payment can carry a loss past six figures.
Impersonation scams add a second route. The report says scammers often claim a retirement account is at risk, and that losses “involving hundreds of thousands of dollars” can drain life savings. Losses to government impersonation rose 47 percent, mostly from scammers posing as the FTC and the Social Security Administration, and some involved Bitcoin ATMs, with victims told to deposit cash to keep it safe.
Older adults and the six-figure risk
The comparison with younger adults is not simple. Older adults reported losing money to fraud at a lower rate than younger adults, yet once population size is accounted for, they were nearly twice as likely as younger adults to report a six-figure loss. The difference between older and younger adults shows up in the extreme tail of very large losses, the band this article is about, and not in how often money is lost at all.
For anyone checking a suspicious contact, the FTC takes fraud reports at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, the intake point that feeds the same Consumer Sentinel data the report analyzes. Every report filed adds to the count that lets the agency see which scams are growing, and the jump from 1,136 reports in 2020 to 5,125 in 2024 records how quickly the largest losses have multiplied within the FTC’s data. The report itself, rather than any summary of it, is the place to read the definitions, the contact-method breakdowns and the agency’s account of its enforcement and education work for older adults.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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