FBI reports elder fraud on the rise

The Federal Bureau of Investigation yesterday reported the elder fraud complaints to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) increased by 14 percent in 2023, and associated losses increased by about 11 percent, according the IC3’s 2023 Elder Fraud Report, released yesterday. Five takeaways from the report:

• Elder fraud is an expensive crime. Scams targeting individuals aged 60 and older caused over $3.4 billion in losses in 2023—an increase of approximately 11% from the year prior. The average victim of elder fraud lost $33,915 due to these crimes in 2023.
• Older Americans seem to be disproportionately impacted by scams and fraud. Over 101,000 victims aged 60 and over reported this kind of crime to IC3 in 2023. On the flip side, victims under the age of 20 years old seemed to be the least-impacted demographic, with about 18,000 victims in this demographic reporting suspected scams or frauds to IC3 last year.
• Tech support scams were the most widely reported kind of elder fraud in 2023. Nearly 18,000 victims aged 60 and over reported such scams to IC3. Personal data breaches, confidence and romance scams, non-payment or non-delivery scams, and investment scams rounded out the top five most common types of elder fraud reported to IC3 last year.
• Investment scams were the costliest kind of elder fraud in 2023. These schemes cost victims more than $1.2 billion in losses last year. And tech support scams, business email compromise scams, confidence and romance scams, government impersonation scams, and personal data breaches all respectively cost victims hundreds of millions of dollars in 2023.
• Scammers are coming for people’s cryptocurrency. More than 12,000 victims aged 60 and over indicated that cryptocurrency was “a medium or tool used to facilitate” the scam or fraud that targeted them when reporting it to IC3.