Senior News Line: FBI report on senior scam losses

This is painful to write: The FBI’s 2025 report says that seniors lost over $7.7 billion to scams — in one year. Complaints to their Internet Crime Complaint Center, also called IC3, showed losses had increased by 59% — again, in one year.

The information was grim. Where IC3 used to get a few thousand complaints per month, they were seeing 3,000 per day. Over the course of the year, seniors logged over 201,000 complaints.

The average loss was over $38,500, with phishing or spoofing, tech or customer service and investment scams heading the list. Following on the list were personal data breaches, confidence or romance scams and non-payment or non-delivery.

Dollar amounts for all age groups put investment losses clearly at the top of the list, by a wide margin: over $8 billion. Even at the very bottom of the long list of types of crimes, charity losses were nearly $8 million.

Where seniors were scammed with romance fraud, the losses were over $548 million, money that they’ll likely never get back.

We were scammed by tech or customer support to the tune of $1 billion, and seniors topped the list of all age groups with $4 billion in cryptocurrency losses.

To see the whole FBI report, go to tinyurl.com/2025-Internet-Crime-Report. As you scroll through the 66 pages of the report, note the sections with advice, especially the section on recovery scams and thieves impersonating the FBI while pretending to help you recoup your losses.

Note the section that compares 2023, 2024 and 2025 for all types of senior complaints. With the exception of extortion, which had a short pause in 2024, all categories rose over the years.

An important sentence near the top of the report: “It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint and electronic interactions.”

There’s our warning. We must be diligent.