The Federal Trade Commission reports that the median fraud loss for consumers aged 60 and older was $900, and that the figure climbs to $2,210 when the scammer made first contact by telephone. Both numbers come from the agency’s Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025 report to Congress, a December 2025 document that tallies what older adults told the FTC they lost.
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A median is not the same thing as a typical headline loss. It marks the midpoint: half of the people in a group lost less, and half lost more. That makes it a useful corrective to the largest and most publicized cases.
What the $900 median measures
In the FTC’s Protecting Older Consumers report, the combined median loss reported by people ages 60 and over was $900, up from $650 in 2023. For people 80 and over the reported median individual loss was $1,650. Those are medians of individual losses among people who chose to report, so they describe the middle of a distribution that also contains very large outliers. The 80-and-over median is nearly double the figure for everyone 60 and older, which means the oldest reporters lose considerably more per report. None of the medians says anything about people who never filed a complaint, and unreported cases are one reason the FTC pairs its reported-loss total with a much wider estimate of the true cost, discussed below.
The same report puts the aggregate in a different register. Reported losses from people 60 and older totaled nearly $2.4 billion, up from about $1.9 billion in 2023. The FTC also estimates that the overall cost of fraud to older adults in 2024 ran between $10.1 billion and $81.5 billion, a wide band that reflects how much fraud never reaches a federal database. Fox Business covered that estimate when the report appeared. Median and total measure different things: a rising median means the typical reporter lost more, while a rising total can also come from more people reporting.
Why a phone call costs $2,210
The medians also come with a baseline: the report sets the $900 figure beside the 2023 figure to show direction. The direction is upward, from $650 to $900, which is why the FTC’s Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025 report is more than a snapshot.
The report breaks medians out by how the scammer first reached the victim. For phone contact, in the report’s words, reported median individual losses “remained far higher for phone fraud at $2,210.” By comparison, the median when contact began on social media was $650, which is also the figure the FTC gave for all older adults two years earlier. A phone call therefore carries a median loss more than three times as large as a social media approach. Set against the $900 median for all reporters aged 60 and older, a phone-initiated loss is about 2.5 times the overall middle figure, so the contact method alone separates a modest typical loss from a serious one. The comparison also shows why a single national median can mislead: the $900 blends together very different kinds of contact, and the dollar amount attached to a case depends heavily on how the first conversation happened.
The gap is consistent with how a voice call works on a target. A caller can respond in real time, press for an immediate transfer, stay on the line while the person goes to a bank, and impersonate an official in a way a text message struggles to match. The report does not itself prove those mechanics in the passage cited here, so they are best read as a plausible explanation for the gap, not as a finding.
Investment fraud and the impersonation scams
By aggregate reported losses, the report names investment scams, business impersonation scams and government impersonation scams as the top types for older adults. In plain terms, the schemes that take the most money in total are those where a stranger builds a plausible financial or institutional reason to move funds. Business and government impersonation both rely on a trusted name, which is why a call that opens in the name of a bank or a federal agency deserves a pause before any money moves.
Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador appear on the cover of the document, which the FTC submitted to the Committees on the Judiciary of the United States Senate and the United States House of Representatives. Congress requires the submission under Section 101(c)(2) of the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act of 2017, so the medians are an annual accountability measure as much as a consumer warning.
The FTC’s own announcement, FTC Issues Annual Report to Congress on the Agency’s Actions to Protect Older Adults, is the agency’s own summary of the document. Anyone who has been targeted can file a complaint at the FTC’s ReportFraud portal, and those complaints are the raw material from which medians like $900 and $2,210 are calculated.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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