What the FTC’s October 19, 2026, older-adults report actually says

Reported losses, median amounts, and the limits of those figures — taken from the official PDF.

Written November 12, 2026. Source report dated October 19, 2026.

On October 19, 2026, the Federal Trade Commission published its report to Congress, Protecting Older Consumers: 2025–2026. The report is the official source for the figures in this article. You can read it as a PDF from the FTC’s own file server. The numbers describe reports people filed. They are not a forecast that any one reader will lose money, and they are not proof that a product will prevent a loss.

Reported losses rose again in 2025

According to the report, reported fraud losses from people ages 60 and over totaled over $3 billion in 2025, up from about $2.4 billion in 2024. Looking further back, those reported losses increased from about $600 million in 2020 to about $3 billion in 2025, which the FTC describes as a 400% increase. The report says this rise was driven largely by growing reports of extraordinarily large individual losses, not by a matching jump in the number of people who reported any loss at all (reports indicating any monetary loss rose 78% over that same period).

In 2025, the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel system took in more than 6.2 million consumer reports in total. Consumers overall reported losing about $16 billion to fraud. About 46% of fraud reports included age information. Of reports that included age, about 33% (469,597) came from people 60 and older, and about 123,000 of those indicated a monetary loss.

Sentinel data is self-reported. Not every person who is cheated files a report, and not every report includes age or a dollar amount. The FTC states those limits in the report.

Median losses, and the 80-and-over figure

The combined median reported loss for people ages 60 and over held steady at about $900 in 2025. For people 80 and over, the reported median loss was $2,000. The report also notes that older adults who reported a loss continued to report higher median individual losses than younger adults, even though older adults continued to report losing money to fraud at lower rates than younger adults and filed no-loss fraud reports at much higher rates.

Which scams stood out for older adults

Controlling for population size, the report found that in 2025 older adults were:

• over four times (324%) more likely than younger people to report losing money on a tech-support scam;
• over two times (112%) more likely to report a loss on a prize, sweepstakes, or lottery scam;
• 48% more likely to report a loss on a romance scam;
• 15% more likely to report a loss on a government-impersonation scam; and
• 15% more likely to report a loss on a scam impersonating a friend or family member.

Investment scams, government-impersonation scams, and business-impersonation scams were the top fraud types based on aggregate reported losses by older adults. Online-shopping fraud was still the most commonly reported category in which people of all ages said they lost money, but older adults remained much less likely than younger adults to report a loss in that category.

On how the scam started: both aggregated reported losses and the number of money-lost reports from older adults were highest for frauds that began on social media. Reported losses by older adults on social-media-initiated scams in 2025 were about twelve times higher than in 2020. Median individual losses remained far higher for phone fraud, at $3,000, compared with $599 for fraud that started on social media. Aggregate reported text-scam losses by older adults were up 61% compared with 2024.

The wide range for “overall cost”

Because many frauds are never reported, the FTC also estimated an overall 2025 cost of fraud to older adults of between $13.3 billion and $119.5 billion, depending on the method and on assumptions about underreporting. The report is direct about the uncertainty: “These figures reflect a considerable degree of uncertainty because the scale of underreporting, particularly when losses are high, is not well understood.” That range is an estimate, not a precise count.

What to do with this

If you want a free step that can make it harder for someone to open a new credit account in your name, see how to freeze your credit at all three bureaus. If a scam already happened, report it at ReportFraud.ftc.gov and, for identity theft, use IdentityTheft.gov. Those government sites are free.

A freeze, a report, or a paid monitoring plan cannot honestly be described as a promise that you will not be scammed.