The Federal Bureau of Investigation recently released its annual report on data gathered from reports made to its Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) in 2025. You can contribute to this data in the future by reporting to https://ic3.gov when you fall victim to a scam. The top level overview of the report is that:
- Older adults (aged 60+) made 20% of the complaints but lost 37% of the total losses reported.
- Older adults lost more on average in 2025 than 2024.
- Older adults’ average losses outpace those of other age groups on across the board, even as to cryptocurrency and AI-related fraud.
- Over half of the total losses reported by all age groups were caused by cryptocurrency scams.
- Phishing is extremely common but less likely to lead to a large dollar loss.
- Losses to investment scams across all age groups greatly exceed losses to other scams.
More specifically, people aged 60+ made 201,266 complaints, 19.96% of the 1,008,597 total. Yet they reported $7.749 billion in losses, or 37.12% of the $20.877 billion total reported losses. This calculates to an average loss of $38,501, an amount 1.86 times higher than the total average loss of $20,699. And although the number of older adults’ complaints increased 37% from 2024, their losses increased 59%.
The top three reported crimes for older adults were phishing, customer support, and investment scams, but the investment scam losses substantially exceeded other categories at $3.519 billion. Second place’s customer support saw losses of $1.041 billion. Notably, although phishing was the most reported crime by older adults, it had only the twelfth highest losses at $77.02 million.
Some scams saw a greater year-over-year jump than others. For example, older adults reporting government impersonation scams rose from 4,521 to 8,628, almost doubling. Investment scams grew by 1.79 times, going from 9,448 in 2024 to 16,926 in 2025. Finally, phishing more than doubled from 23,252 reports to 48,064 reports.
Only 181,565 complaints (18% of the total) involved cryptocurrency-related fraud. But consumers reported $11.367 billion lost to such fraud, 54.45% of the total lost. Adults aged 60+ made 23.28% of these complaints; their losses came to 38.24% of the total, though. Similarly, AI-related fraud saw 22,364 complaints (a mere 2.22% of the total) but involved losses of $893.35 million, 4.28% of the total. 14.05% of AI-connected complaints came from older adults, who lost 39.46% of the total reported losses.
As far as cyber-enabled fraud goes, almost one-quarter of respondents were aged 60+ (24.2%). (Note: 16.4% of respondents did not report their age, so the data are not fully representative.) Critically, extortion easily outpaced other crime types with complaints numbering to 89,129 (investment scams came second at 72,984). However, investment scams robbed respondents of $8.649 billion, 2.84 times the second highest loss category ($3.047 billion).
A feature of 2024’s data continued into 2025. Adults aged 60+ made only 6,121 of the 64,283 reports of sextortion (9.52%). Yet their adjusted loss amounted to $14.89 million, 33.67% of the $44.23 million total.
The significance of gold also made an appearance in 2025. Only 0.072% of complaints involved gold courier scams. Nonetheless, the $311.8 million lost represents 1.49% of total losses.
Finally, California edged out Texas with the highest number of complaints: 116,414, compared to Texas’ 97,912. Californians also lost far more, reporting $3.675 billion in losses, compared to second-place Texas’ $1.826 billion. Looking at complaints per 100,000 residents, the District of Columbia came first with 448.8; California had only the thirteenth most complaints per 100,000 residents. California did, however, come second for losses per 100,000 residents: $9.34 million. The nation’s capital, again first, saw $14.04 million lost per 100,000 residents.
