Author: Deborah Bongiorno
Prime Time
A blog for older Americans to help them make the most of their prime retirement years and age well
Seniors, Scams, and Swindles
FBI: The Bad Guys Hit Seniors the Hardest
Remember when avoiding financial scams was as simple as hanging up on fake Nigerian princes who needed your bank account number to send you $500,000? Yeah … me too.
Today, it’s a whole new world of fast-moving scams and widespread deceit orchestrated by international organized crime syndicates who increasingly target seniors, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (also known as the FBI IC3).
How big is the problem? It’s a global crisis of epidemic proportions, according to the FBI IC3. Think it can’t happen to you? Think again.
A 75-year-old grandmother got a call from her "grandson's" voice claiming he'd been in an accident and rear-ended a pregnant woman. She withdrew $7,000 in cash and handed it over to a collector. The next morning, she received another call claiming the pregnant woman had a miscarriage and they now needed $20,000. After hearing a radio story about similar scams, she called her real grandson, who confirmed he had not been in an accident.
A 90-year-old woman saw an online pop-up notice claiming to be a Microsoft security warning. She called the number, followed instructions to send $20,000 via wire transfer, and only realized she'd been ripped off after the money vanished.
A widow in her 70s interacted online with a fake financial advisor who guided her through "cryptocurrency investments." She sent him money from her IRA. He created fake results to display a huge profit and pushed for more: $120,000, then $490,000, then $62,000—all from her IRA. Not only were there no profits, her savings vanished, and she faced enormous tax penalties for early IRA withdrawals.
Consider these statistics:
· Scammers steal a LOT of money. People aged 60 and older lost $4.885 billion to digital fraud in 2024–a staggering 43 percent increase from 2023—with the average elderly victim losing $83,000, more than four times the overall average.
· It’s on the rise. According to the IC3's 2024 Elder Fraud Report, individuals aged 60 and older filed more than 147,000 complaints about scams—a 46 percent increase from 2023.
· Crooks target vulnerabilities. Investment scams dominate at $1.8 billion in losses for elderly people, many of whom take investment risks to combat the rising cost of living.
· Scams are under-reported. These figures represent only a fraction of actual damage because so few victims report their losses: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) says actual losses could reach $81.5 billion annually when accounting for under-reporting.
All too often, the damage doesn’t stop with the first victim. Perhaps most alarmingly, scams and malicious technologies can spread through internet networks like a virus, with one compromised victim becoming an unwitting gateway for criminals to “harvest” an entire network of family, friends, and neighbors–including neighbors who share networks in retirement communities.
Simply put, one scammed elderly person is often the first domino to fall in a series of crimes that impact dozens of secondary victims, who then unintentionally pass the scam along to their friends and neighbors. And so on, and so on … you get the idea.
Artificial Intelligence Leads to Real Fraud
AI pours fuel on the fraud fire, adding layers of sophistication and complexity that make spotting scams extremely difficult—even when victims are alert and tech-savvy.
AI can do detailed research and personalization and pull real information to “sell the lie.” AI “knows” the names of relatives, vacation plans, personalities, and so on. In these and other ways, AI has revolutionized the traditional “grandparent scam” to a significantly more dangerous threat by using tech tools that can closely match a loved one’s voice–including crying, distress, and panic–making fake “emergency calls” even more convincing.
The FBI estimates that one in four people–that’s 25 percent of us–have encountered an AI voice scam or know someone who has, and a whopping 70 percent of us say we aren't sure we could distinguish a simulated voice from the real thing. Scammers only need three seconds of your voice to translate it into an entire “conversation.” And they can pull those three seconds from innocent family videos, social media, and online greetings—not just phone calls.
Manipulating Trust
The bad guys impersonate trusted federal agencies to an alarming degree. A few examples:
The IRS. IRS impersonation typically begins with robocalls or live callers claiming the victim owes back taxes requiring immediate payment to avoid arrest, license suspension, or deportation. Scammers provide fake badge numbers and case numbers, with spoofed caller ID displaying legitimate IRS phone numbers. Adults 65 to 74 are most frequently targeted for payment demands.
Social Security. These scammers claim that the victim's Social Security number has been suspended or linked to criminal activity such as money laundering or drug trafficking. Victims are told they face arrest and must pay immediately or verify their SSN. This is not how the SSA works, of course. The actual SSA explicitly states it will never suspend a Social Security number, threaten arrest, or demand immediate fees.
Medicare. Fraud on this front takes multiple forms: Crooks offer "free" genetic testing kits requiring Medicare numbers, claim that victims need new Medicare cards, offer free medical equipment, or claim refunds are available for plan changes. All lies, of course.
These few examples are just the tip of the iceberg, say experts, with scams growing in number and technical sophistication by the day. Staying one jump ahead of them is the challenge.
We’ll offer some tips for avoiding scams in next month’s blog. Here’s a preview: Listen to your inner voice. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Thanks to James Spitler, founder of Aktoh Cyber, (www.aktohcyber.com), a provider of cybersecurity services, for help in compiling information for this blog.
Sources
www.ic3.gov/ and its 2024 Elder Fraud Alert
https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2024_IC3Report.pdf
https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/fbi-report-fraud-2024/
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/13/financial-fraud-seniors-ftc.html