The Scale of the Problem: What the Data Actually Says
Among the millions of Americans who lost money to scammers in 2024, older adults lost the most, according to numbers from the Federal Trade Commission, and the losses are staggering: a record $12.5 billion was reported stolen through scams and fraud, up 25 percent from $10 billion in 2023.
The FTC found that among victims who included their ages in their complaints, adults in their 70s reported losing a median of $1,000, compared with a median of about $417 reported by those in their 20s. That gap is not coincidental. It reflects a set of vulnerabilities that scammers have spent years learning to exploit.
Because most fraud goes unreported, the FTC estimates the real losses experienced by older adults in 2024 may be as much as $81.5 billion. The reported figures, as alarming as they are, likely represent only a fraction of what’s actually happening.
Reason 1: Cognitive Changes That Come With Age
An older adult’s vulnerability to financial abuse and scams can stem from social, emotional, psychiatric, and cognitive problems. Cognitive deficits and dementia can affect a person’s ability to use good judgment in financial decisions. These changes are not a character flaw. They are a biological reality of aging that scammers are specifically trained to exploit.
Older age has emerged as a major risk factor in falling for deceptive emails, according to a study led by University of Florida researchers, which found that the ability to correctly distinguish between phishing emails and safe ones steadily declined from the youngest participants to the oldest.
Recent studies have demonstrated that older adults are more vulnerable to scams because of social isolation, economic affluence, mental disorders, struggles with technology, and cognitive impairments. Gen Z, by contrast, grew up surrounded by digital interfaces and tends to maintain sharper pattern recognition for digital deception, even if they’re not immune to it entirely.
Reason 2: Social Isolation Creates a Window for Scammers
Limited social network size, loneliness, and social isolation are risk factors for elder financial abuse. This is one of the most consistent findings across the research literature, and it helps explain why older adults living alone face a disproportionately higher risk.
Elderly individuals tend to be more socially isolated, especially after the loss of a loved one. They become vulnerable to scammers because they are willing to let others in, even if only for conversation’s sake. Current research indicates people are more likely to be victimized if isolated and lacking someone to discuss an investment proposal with.
Fraudsters often strike during times a senior’s life may be more vulnerable, like a health crisis or after the death of a loved one. Scammers gather personal details from obituaries and social media posts and use this information to target their victims. Gen Z, on the other hand, maintains dense, fast-moving social networks that make it easier to get a quick second opinion before acting on something suspicious.
Reason 3: Older Adults Control a Disproportionate Share of Wealth
According to the Federal Reserve, Americans aged 55 and older control over 70% of the nation’s wealth. Scammers are rational actors in a disturbing way: they go where the money is. Targeting a 70-year-old with a retirement account simply yields a higher potential return than targeting a 24-year-old with a starter salary.
Older adults are often seen as more financially stable after years of working. Scammers assume older people have retirement accounts, savings, and good credit. That assumption is often correct, and it shapes which demographics get targeted most aggressively.
Investment-related frauds are a type of fraud particularly targeted at older adults because many have retirement funds to invest. From 2020 to 2024, the number of reports from older adults who lost $10,000 or more to these scams increased more than fourfold. When older adults reported losing more than $100,000, the trend was even more striking: during the same period, the number of reports increased nearly sevenfold, and the combined reported losses went up eightfold.
Reason 4: Lower Digital Literacy and Greater Trust in Authority
Older adults remain the largest demographic excluded from the digital realm, with many unable to access or benefit from online services due to insufficient digital literacy. Older adults face unique challenges in adopting AI tools, including fears of scams, fraudulent activities, or malicious attacks, and AI advancements are increasing the frequency, potency, and effectiveness of those scams.
Older adults are particularly vulnerable to scam calls because many are more trusting of people who present themselves as having authority, power, or influence. Generational and cultural factors, like a belief that decision-making authority rests with others such as doctors or family members, can make an older person more prone to scams, especially when fraud involves decisions about healthcare and finances.
Older adults are especially susceptible to fake news online, possibly because they are less digitally literate compared to younger individuals. Gen Z has grown up navigating information overload and, while not immune, tends to apply a baseline skepticism toward digital communications that many older adults simply were never trained to develop.
The Gen Z Comparison: Not Immune, But Different
It’s worth being precise here: Gen Z is not scam-proof. According to a 2024 Deloitte survey, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are two times more likely to be scammed online compared to baby boomers. The key difference is in the size of the losses, not the frequency of victimization.
In 2024, the Federal Trade Commission reported that people aged 20 to 29 lost money to fraud and scams more often than those aged 70 to 79. However, when older adults do fall for a scam, the financial damage is dramatically worse. The median loss for someone in their 70s is more than double what someone in their 20s loses.
Digital fluency does not automatically translate into security awareness, a point that applies to every generation. Still, older adults face a compounding set of disadvantages that Gen Z largely does not: they have more assets, more isolation, and less ingrained skepticism about digital systems they didn’t grow up with.
The Tech Support Trap: A Case Study in Targeting
Older adults are nearly six times more likely than younger consumers to report losing money due to a tech support scam. This is one of the starkest generational divides in all of fraud data, and it illustrates how scam types are deliberately matched to demographic vulnerabilities.
Older adults were much more likely than younger adults to report losing money on tech support scams, prize, sweepstakes, and lottery scams, romance scams, and government impersonation scams. Older consumers reported $159 million in losses to tech support scams alone in 2024.
Gen Z, in contrast, is more likely to encounter scams through job listings, social media shopping, and phishing links, categories where their comfort in digital spaces doesn’t protect them but does tend to limit how much they hand over at once. The tech support scam specifically preys on people who are uncertain about technology, a profile that fits many older adults precisely.
AI and Deepfakes Are Making It Worse for Older Adults
Older people may be particularly vulnerable due to the added layer of personalization being used by perpetrators through AI-generated impersonation of loved ones. This deepens existing vulnerabilities that older people may have to financial scams.
Notable examples of older adults being specifically harmed by deepfake audio scams include cases where grandparents received a call from someone presenting themselves as their grandchild, telling them that the grandchild needed cash for bail money after landing in jail. The emotional urgency of that scenario is engineered to bypass rational thinking entirely.
Criminals work to exploit certain vulnerabilities more common in elderly individuals, including manipulating their emotions to gain their trust and convincing them to invest in fraudulent schemes. Tactics used by perpetrators are becoming more sophisticated as access to advanced technology increases. For Gen Z, whose skepticism about online content is sharper and more automatic, AI voices and synthetic urgency read differently. For someone who still trusts a phone call from a familiar voice, those same tools can be devastating.
The Emotional and Psychological Cost Beyond Money
The experience of fraud and attempted fraud has a devastating impact on some of the lives of older adults, causing fear, anxiety, and related issues, which affects their quality of life. Losing tens of thousands of dollars in retirement savings is not just a financial setback. For many, it represents the collapse of decades of careful planning.
These significant losses can contribute to financial insecurity at a time when many consumers are already struggling to keep up with rising costs and are worried about running out of money in retirement. The consequences of being a victim of financial fraud go beyond just financial losses and can impact every aspect of a person’s life.
Research has found that fear of fraud is a major problem amongst older adults, particularly females living alone. Even those who haven’t been victimized often live under a cloud of anxiety about it, which itself can diminish quality of life and increase social withdrawal, the very condition that makes someone more vulnerable in the first place.
What Can Actually Help
Older adults often rely on family and friends for cybersecurity advice rather than online resources and show a preference for broadcast media over internet sources for such information. That means family conversations, not just digital awareness campaigns, are genuinely effective channels for reducing risk.
Research from Stanford found that older adults who went through a digital literacy intervention significantly improved their likelihood of accurately discerning fake from true news, moving from 64% accuracy before the intervention to 85% after. Education works. It just has to reach people in the right format and with the right tone.
Regular educational interventions to increase scam awareness for both investors and financial professionals are paramount to preventing individuals from becoming victims of financial exploitation. Reducing stigma around reporting is equally important since scams and financial abuse targeting older adults are vastly under-reported.
The Takeaway
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.