Americans ages 60 and over lost $4.9 billion to elder fraud scams last year, more than a 40% increase, the FBI said in its 2024 Internet Crime Report.
There were 147,127 complaints filed with the FBI from people ages 60 and up in 2024, a 46% increase from 2023, costing victims $4.9 billion, a 43% year-over-year increase, the report filed Wednesday said.
Victims lost an average of $83,000, though 7,500 people reported losing $100,000 or more.
The most common type of scams targeting seniors, at 23,252 complaints, involved phishing. Phishing scams use email or text messages to bait the victim into clicking on a malicious website link and providing sensitive information.
Rounding out the top five types of scams were 16,777 complaints of fraudulent tech support, 12,618 involving extortion, 9,827 involving personal data breaches and 9,448 involving fraudulent investments. Across the various types of internet crimes, 33,369 complaints mentioned the use of cryptocurrency.
The number of phishing and extortion scams grew the most from 2023, with 2,856 phishing scams and 5,396 extortion scams reported that year.
The most costly type of scam was investment scams, which cost victims $1.8 billion. No other type of scam hit the billion-dollar mark, though tech support scams set victims back by more than $982 million, followed by romance schemes at over $389 million.
Across the various types of scams, $2.8 billion of the money taken from victims was paid in cryptocurrency.
Complaints came in from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and other U.S. minor outlying islands.
The top five states for complaints were California, Florida, Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania, while the five states and territories with the biggest monetary losses were California, Texas, Florida, New York and the District of Columbia.
Scams in the District proved particularly costly, at more than $251 million in reported losses in the nation’s capital.
