Elder Financial Abuse Statistics: Losses, Victims, and AI Trends

Elder financial abuse statistics vary dramatically depending on who is counting and how. Reported losses among Americans aged 60 and older reached $7.7 billion in 2025, according to the FBI, while broader estimates that correct for unreported cases put the annual toll at roughly $28.3 billion. Prevalence studies suggest that somewhere between one in twenty and one in five older adults experiences some form of financial exploitation, and family members are responsible for most cases by count even though strangers cause the largest individual losses.

What the Loss Figures Show

Three federal sources produce the numbers cited most often in policy discussions, and each measures a different slice of the problem.

The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 201,266 complaints from people aged 60 and older in 2025, with reported losses of $7.7 billion. That was a 37 percent jump from the $4.8 billion reported by the same age group in 2024.¹² These figures reflect only losses that victims themselves reported to the FBI’s online portal, and Bureau officials acknowledge that shame and embarrassment keep many cases out of the data.³

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which collects Suspicious Activity Reports from banks, analyzed filings from June 2022 through June 2023 and counted 155,415 reports covering roughly $27 billion in suspected elder financial exploitation. About 80 percent of those filings involved money sent to strangers or imposters, and 20 percent involved theft by people known to the victim, most often adult children.⁴

The broadest estimate comes from a 2023 AARP Public Policy Institute study, produced with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It synthesized three national data sets, corrected for underreporting based on the perpetrator’s relationship to the victim, and de-duplicated overlapping cases to arrive at $28.3 billion in annual losses. Of that total, 72 percent (about $20.3 billion) was caused by people known to the victim, and 28 percent by strangers.⁵

The Federal Trade Commission takes yet another approach. It estimated the total cost of fraud to older adults in 2024 at somewhere between $10.1 billion and $81.5 billion, depending on assumptions about unreported cases. Aggregate reported losses by people 60 and older grew from about $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2024, driven largely by a surge in individual losses over $100,000.⁶

How Common Is It?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the widely cited benchmark was that roughly one in ten Americans aged 60 and older had experienced some form of elder abuse. A pandemic-era study found the rate had doubled to about one in five, a figure that has been echoed by other organizations citing the Investor Protection Trust’s 2010 finding that 20 percent of older adults reported being taken advantage of financially.⁷⁸⁹

Academic population studies produce more conservative figures. A 2014 study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine surveyed over 4,100 community-dwelling New Yorkers aged 60 and older and found a one-year prevalence of 2.7 percent and a lifetime prevalence since age 60 of 4.7 percent.¹⁰ A systematic review of 18 international studies put the global mean one-year prevalence at 4.7 percent, with country-level rates from 1.0 percent to 13.1 percent in Nigeria.¹¹ A separate worldwide estimate placed prevalence at 6.8 percent among adults aged 60 and older.¹²

The wide range is real. Studies that ask only about outright theft produce lower numbers; those that also count inappropriate fees, deceptive products, and coerced transactions produce higher ones.

Why Every Number Undercounts

Every major study on this topic stresses that official data misses the majority of cases. The New York State Elder Abuse Prevalence Study found that for every case of elder abuse known to programs and agencies, roughly 24 went unreported. For financial exploitation specifically, the ratio was 44 to 1.¹³¹⁴

The AARP’s $28.3 billion estimate adjusts for underreporting by varying the correction based on whether the perpetrator was known to the victim. When the victim knows the perpetrator, an estimated 87.5 percent of incidents go unreported. When the perpetrator is a stranger, the unreported share drops to about 33 percent.¹⁵

Who the Victims Are

Data from the 2017 National Crime Victimization Survey’s Supplemental Fraud Survey found that among fraud victims aged 60 and older, 56.2 percent were female, 79.7 percent were non-Hispanic white, and 22 percent were widowed, a significantly higher share than among younger fraud victims. Income was fairly evenly distributed, with no meaningful difference from the broader fraud victim population.¹⁶

A Pennsylvania study found the average victim was 79 years old, female, and non-Hispanic, with more than 70 percent of victims above federal poverty guidelines. Nearly half were widowed, and 43 percent lived alone.¹⁷ An Allegheny County, Pennsylvania study found that African American older adults reported financial exploitation at substantially higher rates than non-African American participants: 23 percent versus 8.4 percent since age 60.¹⁸

Cognitive Decline as a Risk Factor

Cognitive impairment consistently ranks among the strongest predictors of victimization. A 2025 study found that 95 percent of older adults without cognitive impairment can fully manage their finances, compared to 82 percent of those with mild cognitive impairment and only 20 percent of those with dementia. People with mild cognitive impairment were significantly more likely to experience financial exploitation, and each additional risky financial behavior was associated with a twofold increase in the likelihood of being victimized.¹⁹

Researchers describe people with mild cognitive impairment as, in some ways, the most exposed group. They retain control of their assets and can still engage in transactions, but deficits in memory, judgment, and arithmetic make them susceptible to manipulation. Studies have linked declining numeracy to worse financial decision-making, and reduced gray matter volume in certain brain regions has been correlated with greater susceptibility to telemarketing scams even in people without dementia.⁹

Who Commits the Abuse

When theft and misuse of assets are included alongside fraud, family members are the most common perpetrators. An analysis of nearly 2,000 calls to the National Center on Elder Abuse resource line found that financial abuse was the most commonly reported allegation, at 55 percent of all abuse calls, and family members were the alleged perpetrator in nearly 48 percent of those cases. Among family-perpetrated abuse, financial exploitation was the most frequent type at 61.8 percent.²⁰ The 2014 New York population study found family members responsible in 57.9 percent of financial exploitation cases.¹⁰

Common methods used by trusted individuals include misusing a power of attorney, draining joint bank accounts, stealing ATM cards and checks, and charging for caregiving services that were never provided.²¹ FinCEN’s analysis of bank filings identified adult children as the most frequent perpetrators in the “elder theft” category of suspicious activity reports.⁴

Stranger-perpetrated scams make up a smaller share of cases but drive the dollar losses reported to law enforcement, because they tend to involve larger individual thefts and are more likely to be reported in the first place.

Where the Losses Come From

The U.S. Senate Special Committee on Aging’s 2025 report and the FBI’s Internet Crime Report identify overlapping scam categories that dominate losses among older adults.

Investment and cryptocurrency fraud is the single largest source of losses. Investment fraud accounted for over $8.6 billion in losses across all age groups in 2025. Adults over 60 lost more than $2.8 billion to cryptocurrency-related scams alone in 2024. Many involve “pig butchering” schemes, in which criminals build trust over weeks or months before directing victims to fake trading platforms.²²²³
Imposter scams are the most frequently reported category, with over 847,000 reports to the FTC in 2024. Government impersonation alone accounted for nearly $789 million in losses, alongside grandparent scams in which callers pose as a family member in distress.²³
Tech support fraud produced $2.1 billion in losses in 2025 across all age groups, typically through fake virus alerts or pop-up messages that freeze a victim’s screen and direct them to a fraudulent support number.²²
Romance scams were reported by more than 59,000 consumers in 2024, with combined losses exceeding $1.17 billion.²³
Business email compromise generated $3 billion in losses in 2025, often targeting people involved in real estate transactions or business payments.²²

Why the Numbers Are Climbing: AI

AI-enabled fraud is a major driver of the recent increase. The FBI’s IC3 received more than 22,000 complaints about AI-facilitated fraud in 2025, with reported losses of nearly $893 million.²² Deloitte’s Center for Financial Services has projected that AI-generated fraud damages in the United States could reach $40 billion by 2027, growing at roughly 32 percent per year.²⁴

Voice cloning is among the most concerning developments. Criminals can scrape a few seconds of audio from a family member’s social media account and use it to generate convincing impersonations for grandparent scams. Deepfake video and AI-powered chatbots make more sophisticated romance and investment schemes possible, letting criminals sustain conversations and personas over long periods. AI also makes phishing harder to spot by producing grammatically polished, personalized messages at scale.²⁴

Recovery and Legislative Response

Some stolen money does get recovered. The FBI’s IC3 Recovery Asset Team initiated 642 incidents in 2025 involving victims aged 60 and older, covering $65.4 million in reported losses, and froze approximately $32.9 million. In November 2025, the FBI’s San Diego Elder Justice Task Force targeted an international scam network that had victimized over 500 Americans with combined losses exceeding $40 million.²⁵

Two pieces of federal legislation introduced in the 119th Congress specifically target elder financial exploitation. The Financial Exploitation Prevention Act (S. 2840/H.R. 2478) would let registered investment companies and their transfer agents delay disbursements when exploitation of a senior is suspected, and would direct the SEC to issue recommendations on protecting seniors and vulnerable adults.⁸²⁶²⁷

At the state level, 34 states and Puerto Rico introduced bills addressing elder financial exploitation during the 2023 legislative session, and 17 states enacted legislation or adopted resolutions, several of them authorizing banks and broker-dealers to temporarily delay suspicious disbursements from older customers’ accounts.²⁸

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