The Federal Trade Commission today sent Congress its ninth annual report on protecting older consumers, and the numbers in it have moved sharply in one direction. People aged 60 and over reported losing more than $3 billion to fraud in 2025, up from about $2.4 billion in 2024 and about $600 million in 2020, according to the FTC. Investment scams alone accounted for $1.059 billion, a 42% rise in a year, with victims often reporting that the scammers first reached them on social media.

In Short

The FTC counts the fraud complaints Americans send it, and this year it found that people over 60 said they lost about $3 billion to scammers in 2025, five times what they reported in 2020. Most of that money went in a small number of very large losses, often to fake investment schemes found on social media and to people pretending to be government agencies or banks. Because most victims never report, the FTC thinks the real cost to older adults was somewhere between $13.3 billion and $119.5 billion, and it is asking Congress to restore its power to win refunds in federal court.

What the FTC sent to Congress

The report is titled Protecting Older Consumers 2025-2026: A Report of the Federal Trade Commission. It runs to 58 pages including four cover letters and a 15-page appendix, and every page that carries a date says October 19, 2026. The cover letters, signed by Commission Secretary April J. Tabor, went to Representatives Jim Jordan and Jamie Raskin of the House Judiciary Committee and to Senators Charles E. Grassley and Richard J. Durbin of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who received the letters as chairman and ranking member respectively.

The filing is a statutory obligation. Section 101(c)(2) of the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act of 2017 requires the FTC to list every enforcement action from the preceding year "in each case in which not less than one victim was an elder or that involved a financial scheme or scam that was either targeted directly toward or largely affected elders." The reporting period runs from October 1, 2025, through September 30, 2026, the agency's fiscal year 2026. Data on fraud reports, by contrast, covers calendar year 2025. Those two windows overlap only for the last three months of 2025, a distinction that matters when reading the enforcement and data sections side by side.

The Commission voted 2-0 to issue the report, according to the press release. Only two commissioners are listed on its title page: Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson and Commissioner Mark R. Meador.

The press release carried a quote from Christopher Mufarrige, Director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "The FTC is committed to protecting older Americans from scams, including by taking every action necessary to shut down fraud operations," Mufarrige said. "This latest report showcases our enforcement actions, outreach efforts and other initiatives the FTC has undertaken to defend older adults from fraudulent enterprises and educate Americans on how best to protect themselves from scams."

The report defines older adults as people 60 and over, following the definition of "elder" in the Social Security Act that the 2017 law references.

The data: $3 billion in reported losses

The numbers come from the Consumer Sentinel Network, the FTC's database of consumer complaints, which also takes in reports from law enforcement agencies and other contributors. During 2025, Sentinel received more than 6.2 million reports, according to the FTC. Over 3 million were about fraud, nearly 1.4 million about identity theft and nearly 1.9 million about other consumer problems. Consumers of all ages reported losing about $16 billion to fraud.

Age is optional on a complaint, and only about 46% of 2025 fraud reports included it. Of those that did, about 33%, or 469,597 reports, came from people 60 and older, and about 123,000 of these indicated a monetary loss. Reported losses from that group totaled over $3 billion.

Figure 1 of the report breaks the trend down by year: about $600 million in 2020, $1.0 billion in 2021, $1.6 billion in 2022, $1.9 billion in 2023, $2.4 billion in 2024 and $3.0 billion in 2025. The press release describes this as an increase of "about fivefold." The report text calls it "a 400% increase." Both are the same arithmetic, since a fivefold total is a 400% rise.

A small number of very large losses

The growth did not come from more people losing money. The number of older adults filing loss reports rose 78% between 2020 and 2025, from about 69,000 to about 123,000. Losses grew far faster because the size of individual losses changed.

According to the FTC, reports of losses over $100,000 from older adults rose 496%, from 1,136 in 2020 to 6,769 in 2025. Reports of losses between $10,000 and $100,000 rose 225%, from 6,965 to 22,655. Losses under $10,000 rose only 53%, from 60,930 to 93,135 reports.

Money followed the same pattern. Combined losses over $100,000 rose from $306 million in 2020 to $2.1 billion in 2025, nearly sevenfold. These six-figure reports made up just 6% of older adults' loss reports in 2025, yet they accounted for 70% of aggregate reported losses. Controlling for population size, older adults were more than twice as likely as younger adults to report a six-figure fraud loss. These reports "were often about investment scams, romance scams, and scammers impersonating the FTC, banks, Publishers Clearing House, and Microsoft," according to the report.

The concentration is not unique to older people. Across all ages, just 3% of people who reported a loss in 2025 said they lost $100,000 or more, but those losses totaled $11 billion, about 69% of everything reported to Sentinel.

Medians climb only for the oldest

Median losses tell a different story from totals. The combined median for people 60 and over held steady at about $900. For people 80 and over, the median rose 21% to $2,000, far higher than any other group, according to Figure 2. Medians fell for every age band under 70: $200 for 18 to 19 year olds (down 20%), $305 for people in their 20s (down 27%), $356 in their 30s, $408 in their 40s, $500 in their 50s and $640 in their 60s. People aged 70 to 79 stayed flat at $1,000.

Third parties play a larger role at the top of the age range. About 17% of reports filed for people 80 and over were submitted by someone else, such as an adult child, spouse or caretaker, compared with 6.4% for people in their 70s and 3.8% for people in their 60s. Those third-party reports showed much higher medians: $6,500 for people 80 and over and $5,994 for people aged 70 to 79.

Older adults also report fraud without losing money far more often. About 74% of their fraud reports indicated no monetary loss. Adjusted for population, they filed no-loss reports at a 34% higher rate than people aged 18 to 59, and reported losing money at a 14% lower rate. The FTC says this "suggests that older adults may be more likely to avoid losing money when exposed to fraud, more inclined to report fraud when no loss has occurred, or a combination of these or other factors."

Text messages and phone calls dominated those no-loss reports, at 32% and 29% respectively. No-loss text scams often impersonated state motor vehicle offices and toll road operators; no-loss phone scams often impersonated Medicare, banks, Amazon and the FTC.

Investment scams and social media

Which scams cost the most? Figure 5 of the report ranks fraud types by older adults' total reported losses in 2025:

  • Investment scams: $1,059 million, up 42%, from 10,578 loss reports
  • Government impersonators: $448 million, up 20%, from 12,183 reports
  • Business impersonators: $422 million, up 12%, from 24,820 reports
  • Romance scams: $384 million, up 17%, from 6,832 reports
  • Prizes, sweepstakes and lotteries: $143 million, down 1%, from 5,280 reports
  • Tech support scams: $126 million, down 21%, from 5,334 reports
  • Online shopping: $59 million, up 22%, from 31,116 reports
  • Job scams and employment agencies: $57 million, up 72%, from 2,431 reports
  • Fake check scams: $54 million, up 57%, from 1,846 reports
  • Vacation and travel: $45 million, up 27%, from 2,630 reports

Investment losses were "once again far higher than on any other fraud type," according to the report, and victims "often described being lured to fake cryptocurrency-investment platforms after being targeted on social media." In 2025, far more investment scam reports identified social media as the first contact than any other method, for older and younger adults alike.

There is a paradox in that ranking. Adjusted for population, younger adults were 30% more likely than older adults to report losing money to an investment scam, according to Figure 4. Older adults lose money to investment fraud less often, but when they do, the sums are large enough to make it the costliest category by a wide margin.

The categories where older adults were more likely than younger people to report losses were different. Tech support scams stood out at 324% more likely, followed by prize, sweepstakes and lottery scams at 112%, romance scams at 48%, and government impersonation and family or friend impersonation scams at 15% each. Online shopping fraud generated the most loss reports from older adults of any category, even though younger adults were 64% more likely to report losing money to it.

Contact method: social media first, phone for the oldest

Figure 6 is the part of the report closest to the advertising business. Older adults reported $750 million in losses to fraud that started on social media in 2025, up 34%, across 26,000 loss reports. That is about twelve times the 2020 figure, according to the FTC. Phone calls came second at $578 million, up 15%, followed by websites or apps at $393 million, text messages at $296 million, email at $170 million and online ads or pop-ups at $148 million.

The online ad and pop-up category grew just 1% in dollars but produced 11,000 loss reports, up 11%, with a median loss of $170, down 41%. Text-scam losses grew fastest, rising 61% to $296 million, with the median text loss up 60% to $2,500.

Medians reverse the ranking. The median reported loss on social media fraud was $599, down 8%, while phone fraud carried a median of $3,000, up 36%. For people 80 and over, phone calls rather than social media produced both the highest losses and the most loss reports, with social media "a distant second" in aggregate losses.

That finding fits the Data Spotlight the FTC published in April. As PPC Land reported, that analysis found Americans of all ages reported $2.1 billion in losses to social media scams in 2025, about eight times the 2020 level, with Facebook alone linked to $794 million. Today's report confirms that social media was the most costly contact method by aggregate losses for every age group under 80.

What happens inside the social channel varies by scam. When social media was the contact method, older adults most often reported losing money to online shopping scams (34% of loss reports), but investment scams took 56% of the money and romance scams 23%. On phone calls, business impersonation accounted for 36% of loss reports, government impersonation 26% and prize scams 15%, while government imposters took 41% of older adults' aggregate phone losses. On texts, 31% of loss reports involved messages impersonating well-known businesses, "particularly Amazon, Apple, and banks."

Impersonators and payment methods

Government impersonation losses were led by scams pretending to be the FTC, the Social Security Administration and the FBI. Across all ages, scams impersonating the FTC cost $161 million, the SSA $144 million and the FBI $28 million in 2025, according to a footnote. Older adults accounted for 92% of the FTC-impersonation losses where age was given, 85% of the SSA losses and 75% of the FBI losses.

The agency describes how the FTC version works. Scammers tell people their money is at risk from a security issue or identity theft and that the FTC can help. "People are often directed to 'protect' their money by mailing cash, handing cash to couriers, buying gift cards and sharing the codes, or depositing funds into Bitcoin ATM machines," the report says. These scammers "coach people on what to say to bank employees and tell people not to speak to friends or family members." The FTC says it has placed prominent warnings on its own websites, and staff contact older adults who report losing money to FTC impersonators, or who appear to be in the middle of the scam, to tell them to stop all contact.

Business impersonation losses were highest for scams pretending to be banks. Reports "continue to show an increasingly blurred line between government and business impersonation, with many scammers impersonating more than one entity in a single scam," according to the FTC. The agency's rule against such conduct took effect in April 2024; at the time, reports of impersonation scams approached 500,000 for 2023 with losses above $1.1 billion.

Bank transfers and crypto carry the money

Figure 7 shows where the money went. Bank transfers or payments accounted for $1,033 million of older adults' reported losses, up 24%, and cryptocurrency for $603 million, up 33%. Cash followed at $196 million, wire transfers at $142 million, gift cards at $139 million, checks at $129 million, payment apps at $110 million, credit cards at $94 million, debit cards at $39 million and money orders at $16 million.

Since 2020, losses on bank transfers have increased more than tenfold and losses on cryptocurrency more than twenty-sevenfold, according to the FTC. Most of that money went to investment scams and to scammers impersonating banks and Microsoft.

Frequency is a separate matter. Credit cards appeared in 28% of older adults' loss reports, the most of any method, and nearly half those credit card payments were for online shopping fraud. Payment apps and debit cards each appeared in 15% of loss reports. Gift cards, at 12%, were "overwhelmingly" linked to impersonation scams and were the most frequently reported payment method for tech support, romance, family and friend impersonation, and prize scams.

$13.3 billion or $119.5 billion

Reported losses are a floor. The press release states that the overall cost of fraud to older adults in 2025 "could be as high as $119.5 billion." The report presents that as the upper end of a range, with $13.3 billion as the lower end, and calls the result subject to "a considerable degree of uncertainty."

The method rests on how few victims report. A study cited by the FTC found that only 4.8% of victims of mass-market consumer fraud complained to a Better Business Bureau or a government entity. A second study matched consumers in nine FTC enforcement cases to Sentinel complaints and found a 2.0% reporting rate in cases with average losses below $1,000 and 6.7% in cases above $1,000. None of those nine cases had an average loss of $10,000 or more.

Applying those rates gives an estimated $261.5 billion in total fraud losses across all ages for 2025, up 33% from the 2024 estimate on the same method, and $119.5 billion lost by older adults, up 47%. A more conservative approach assumes that everyone who lost $10,000 or more filed a report. That yields $38.1 billion overall and $13.3 billion for older adults, increases of 22% and 32%.

The FTC is open about why the gap between the two is so wide. Losses of $10,000 or more came from just 14% of people who reported a loss in 2025, yet they made up 94% of all reported dollars. How often those large-loss victims report is, in the agency's words, "not well understood."

A six-week hole in the data

One caveat applies to every 2025 number in the report. "Due to a lapse in funding, the FTC did not take reports from consumers from October 1 to November 13, 2025," a footnote says. The $3 billion reported figure therefore covers roughly ten and a half months of complaints, not twelve. The press release does not mention the gap.

The estimates handle the missing weeks differently. For the $13.3 billion to $119.5 billion range, the FTC filled the gap by averaging reported losses over the 30 days before and after the shutdown. The resulting inputs were $178 million in losses under $1,000 and $16.9 billion in losses of $1,000 or more, which include a subset of FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center data. That combined base of about $17.1 billion is higher than the "about $16 billion" in reported losses stated elsewhere in the report. The two figures are measuring different things, and the year-on-year comparisons in the report do not adjust the reported totals for the shutdown.

Age data introduces another assumption. About 77% of the losses used in the estimate included age, and 46% of those were reported by adults 60 and older. The FTC assumed that consumers who left age blank had the same age distribution as those who gave it, within each loss bracket, and says this "may be conservative."

Enforcement: 39 actions, two highlighted

Appendix A lists 39 new enforcement actions filed between October 1, 2025, and September 30, 2026. The FTC includes every new case because "older adults are affected in nearly every consumer-protection case," including children's privacy matters, since an older parent or grandparent may be caring for a child. By the appendix's own outcome column, 19 ended in full settlements, seven in administrative consent orders, two in partial settlements, and 11 remain in litigation.

The report singles out two new cases as likely to have had a significant impact on older adults.

In American Tax Service, filed October 6, 2025, in Nevada, the FTC sued nine companies and two individuals over an alleged tax debt relief scheme that impersonated the Internal Revenue Service and state and local tax authorities. The defendants mailed threatening letters to generate inbound telemarketing calls and, according to evidence the FTC submitted, targeted older adults with fictitious add-on services "often for tens of thousands of dollars at a time." The individual defendants settled. They are banned from debt relief, tax preparation, impersonation and nearly all telemarketing, and must give up $8 million in cash and frozen accounts plus assets worth nearly $2 million. A suspended judgment of $77.7 million reflects what the scheme took between roughly 2022 and 2025. Litigation against the corporate defendants continues.

In Nuvei, filed September 3, 2026, in Arizona, the FTC settled charges that a payment processor and its subsidiaries helped overseas operators run a tech support scam using fake virus alerts and pop-ups impersonating Microsoft and McAfee. According to the FTC, the defendants enabled those schemes to access the U.S. credit card system and evade detection by merchant banks and card networks. Nuvei must turn over $4.85 million for refunds and stop processing payments for tech support telemarketers. The case grew out of an earlier settlement with Restoro Cyprus and Reimage Cyprus, which paid $26 million in 2024.

Four resolved cases

Four older cases reached resolution during the year. In Accelerated Debt Settlement, three individuals who ran a debt relief program that "primarily targeted older consumers, some of whom are veterans" agreed to give up about $12.8 million in assets. In Golden Sunrise Nutraceutical, a California court granted summary judgment on September 30, 2025, and issued a permanent injunction on October 20, 2025, against defendants who marketed a $23,000 treatment plan as a cure for COVID-19.

Greystar, which the FTC calls the nation's largest multifamily rental property manager and whose portfolio includes senior housing, agreed to pay $23 million to the FTC for consumer redress over mandatory fees added on top of advertised rents. The press release cited in the report puts the total settlement at $24 million, because Greystar also paid $1 million to Colorado.

The largest judgment came in Square One Development Group, a timeshare exit operation that targeted older Americans through direct mail. On March 30, 2026, a court ordered the remaining individual defendant, Christopher Carroll, to pay about $95 million in redress and a $45 million civil penalty for violating the FTC's Cooling-Off Rule.

Advertising cases on the list

Several actions in the appendix concern advertising and marketing practices directly. The most significant for digital advertisers is the August 31, 2026, lawsuit by the FTC and 22 state partners against Amazon. The appendix describes it as alleging that Amazon "covertly and substantially increased prices that more than one million sellers were required to pay to advertise on its platform costing sellers tens of billions of dollars in increased costs, some of which were passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices." PPC Land reported on the lawsuit over alleged hidden ad surcharges the day it was filed, and on internal figures showing Amazon charged advertisers their full bid 79% of the time on Sponsored Products clicks. The case remains in litigation.

Three consent orders dated May 21, 2026, cover the "Active Listening" service, which, according to the appendix, was marketed as "an AI-powered service that could help small businesses target localized ads based on conversations captured from consumers' smart devices." The respondents were CMG Media Corporation, MindSift LLC and 1010 Digital Works LLC. As PPC Land reported, Cox Media Group agreed to pay $880,000, with MindSift and 1010 Digital Works paying $25,000 each.

Fake reviews and fake listings appear twice. In Vanilla Chip, the FTC alleged that a seller of children's height-growth supplements used reviews written by its own employees and "fake social media profiles that were operated by bots," a textbook case of astroturfing under the Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule that the FTC finalized in 2024. In B.E.S.T. GDR, filed May 11, 2026, with Illinois, the defendants allegedly created thousands of fake online business listings for home repair companies and padded them with fake reviews.

Subscription and fee cases make up another cluster. Instacart, filed December 18, 2025, and settled, concerned fees and refunds; PPC Land reported that Instacart agreed to pay $60 million. JustAnswer, filed January 13, 2026, remains in litigation over subscriptions that cost up to 26 times the advertised price. Shutterstock, Hims & Hers and GM HSG Universeapps were all charged under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act, the law behind most FTC actions on negative option billing. StubHub and Hopper settled under the Rule on Unfair and Deceptive Fees over advertised prices that left out mandatory charges.

Three "Made in USA" cases, against Oak Street Manufacturing, TouchTunes Music and Americana Liberty, were filed on April 14, 2026. Oak Street and Americana Liberty had been among the companies named when the FTC sent warning letters over Made in USA claims in July 2025.

Payment processing completes the picture. Besides Nuvei, the FTC settled with 5967 Ventures, doing business as Humboldt Merchant Services, which allegedly processed payments for 1,000 merchants that were shell entities fronting for unauthorized billing schemes.

The money problem

The report spends unusual space on a legal constraint. For years, the FTC relied on Section 13(b) of the FTC Act to obtain monetary redress, and that authority "accounted for the overwhelming majority of redress obtained for consumers in fraud cases," according to the report. In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in AMG Capital Management v. FTC that Section 13(b) does not let courts award monetary relief in Commission cases.

The current leadership agrees with the court. "The Commission's current leadership believes that AMG Capital Management was undoubtedly correctly decided," the report says. It then asks Congress to change the law: the FTC "continues to urge Congress to take action that would provide the FTC the ability to seek monetary relief under Section 13(b) of the FTC Act." In the meantime, the agency obtains money by working with state attorneys general or by using Section 19 of the FTC Act, which the report describes as "not a replacement for a tool like Section 13(b)."

That backdrop matters for advertisers watching the agency's enforcement posture. In March, PPC Land reported that the Fifth Circuit set aside the FTC's in-house order against Intuit over TurboTax "free" advertising, a second legal limit on how the agency pursues deceptive advertising claims.

Even so, FTC enforcement in fiscal year 2026 produced relief of more than $513 million for consumers of all ages, according to the report. It lists refund rounds in seven cases with significant impact on older adults:

  • Sanctuary Belize: nearly $23 million sent in February 2026, the second distribution for a land-sale scheme that took more than $100 million, including from many retirees
  • Next-Gen: more than $13.5 million in a second round sent in January 2026, for a sweepstakes scheme that targeted older adults
  • ACRO Services: more than $6.2 million in a second round from May 2026, after $3.8 million in January 2025
  • FloatMe: more than $1 million in April 2026, after $1.5 million in September 2024, for a cash advance service that the FTC alleged refused advances based on Social Security retirement income
  • Restoro and Reimage: checks from March 2026 to people who did not accept PayPal payments, after more than $13.1 million in March 2025
  • AH Media Group: PayPal payments from February 2026 to people who had not cashed checks, after more than $5.1 million paid in 2022 and 2024
  • Golden Sunrise Nutraceutical and Trend Deploy: checks from February 2026, and more than $672,000 returned, respectively

The Walmart wire transfer refunds, which PPC Land covered when the FTC began sending $9.8 million to 65,022 people, do not appear in the report; that release came out on October 15, 2026, after the fiscal year ended. A separate case against Walmart, filed February 26, 2026, over delivery driver pay and tips, is in the appendix.

Criminal referrals and frozen funds

The FTC's Criminal Liaison Unit works with prosecutors on cases that the civil side uncovers. The report cites Brett Blackman, banned for life from telemarketing in a 2011 FTC order, who developed a Medicare scam that defrauded older adults and federal healthcare programs. On May 13, 2026, a jury convicted him of conspiracy to commit healthcare fraud, wire fraud and related charges, based in part on a declaration from FTC staff. He faces up to 20 years in prison.

Referrals to the FBI's Recovery Asset Team produced measurable results. In 2025, the FTC referred 680 reports to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center; 451 went directly to the Recovery Asset Team, which could act on 200. Those 200 reports carried losses of over $18.7 million, and over $10.8 million was frozen with help from banks. One case in the report involved an older adult who received a spoofed text claiming to be Apple Support, was then told by phone that they were under FBI investigation, and sent a $52,000 wire to a U.S. bank holding a custodial account for Coinbase. Over $51,000 was frozen.

In April 2026, the FTC also began connecting older adults who report significant fraud to the Justice Department's National Elder Fraud Hotline. Since then, more than 320 callers have been transferred and almost 6,000 online filers given the hotline number.

Outreach: the Never Ever campaign

The education section includes one figure that marketers will recognize. In April and May 2026, the FTC ran a radio and digital ad campaign about government imposters aimed at adults 65 and over nationwide. The radio ads delivered 2.8 million impressions, and the digital ads drove a 900% increase in visits to the FTC's imposter scam landing page compared with the same period a year earlier, according to the report. The report does not give spend, platforms or targeting method.

The larger effort was Never Ever, a campaign co-led by the FTC with the Justice Department and the Department of Health and Human Services through the Elder Justice Coordinating Council. It ran mainly from June 15 to June 26, 2026, around World Elder Abuse Awareness Day, and over 140 organizations took part. Its message was a list of bright-line rules: government agencies will never tell people to move money to protect it, keep a conversation secret, or pay for a government grant.

Private sector participants included Google, Microsoft, Walmart, the American Bankers Association, CTIA, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, the Retail Gift Card Association and USTelecom, among others. Walmart displayed graphics on screens in 3,500 Supercenters. The campaign generated "over 95 million views, impressions, or other engagements," according to the FTC, a mixed metric that combines different units.

Meta does not appear among the named participants, even though Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp carried the largest share of social media scam losses in the FTC's April analysis. The company has faced reporting that it charged suspected fraudsters premium rates while earning billions from scam ads, and has since sued scam advertisers in Brazil, China and Vietnam over celeb-bait and cloaking and removed 3.7 million West African scam accounts in an operation with police.

Why it matters for advertising

The report is about fraud, but the routes it describes run through the same channels that legitimate advertisers buy. Social media accounted for $750 million in older adults' reported losses in 2025, more than any other contact method, and online ads and pop-ups for another $148 million. The tech support scheme behind Restoro and Nuvei used a free scan "which they also separately marketed through online advertisements," according to the report, alongside pop-ups that impersonated Microsoft and McAfee. That is malvertising in its plainest form, and it reached consumers through payment processors that, the FTC alleged, helped it avoid card network detection.

Search ads are not exempt. PPC Land reported this month on an analytics engineer who was phished through a Google ad for Google Cloud Console, a reminder that phishing pages can sit behind paid listings on the platforms themselves.

For platforms and their advertisers, the payment data adds a second dimension. Bank transfers and cryptocurrency carried more than $1.6 billion of older adults' reported losses, while credit cards, the method with the strongest consumer protections, appeared in the most reports but carried just $94 million. The FTC's own enforcement against Nuvei and Humboldt Merchant Services shows the agency looking past the scammer to the infrastructure that lets the money move.

The appendix also shows how broadly the FTC reads its mandate on older adults. An advertising pricing case against Amazon, "Active Listening" ad targeting claims, fake reviews, subscription traps and fee disclosures all appear on a list Congress requested to track elder fraud. The agency's 2026-2030 strategic plan, approved in April, put ad fraud and Big Tech accountability among its priorities. This report is a record of what that looked like in practice over twelve months, with the caveat that the agency's ability to return money in federal court still depends on Congress.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Federal Trade Commission, which sent the report to the House and Senate Judiciary Committees, with Bureau of Consumer Protection Director Christopher Mufarrige quoted in the release. The data covers U.S. consumers aged 60 and over who filed fraud reports.

What: Protecting Older Consumers 2025-2026, the FTC's ninth annual report, found older adults reported more than $3 billion in fraud losses in 2025, up from about $600 million in 2020, with investment scams at $1.059 billion, up 42%. The agency estimates total fraud costs to older adults at $13.3 billion to $119.5 billion, lists 39 enforcement actions from fiscal year 2026 and asks Congress to restore its Section 13(b) monetary relief authority.

When: The report and press release are dated today, October 19, 2026. Fraud data covers calendar year 2025, with no reports taken from October 1 to November 13, 2025; enforcement covers October 1, 2025, to September 30, 2026.

Where: The United States, with data from the FTC's Consumer Sentinel Network and enforcement actions filed in federal courts and FTC administrative proceedings across multiple states.

Why: The Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act requires the report. For the marketing community, it shows social media as the most costly contact method for fraud against older adults, lists advertising cases including the Amazon ad pricing lawsuit and the "Active Listening" orders, and documents payment processors facing FTC action for enabling scams.