The scams targeting you most, by age group

Ahead of Cybersecurity Awareness Month this October, there’s no better time to focus on your risk of falling victim to a scam.

In 2025, the Federal Trade Commission logged a record $15.9 billion in fraud losses from 3 million fraud reports. When thinking about a scam, you might picture an older adult getting tricked out of their retirement fund, but the harsh truth is that anyone can fall victim to a hoax.

It is true that older victims lose more per incident, as FTC data shows, but younger adults actually file reports for loss due to fraud more frequently. Age isn’t a predictor of whether you’ll get scammed, but the kind of scam you might face often depends on your age. Spokeo has put together a list of the different kinds of scams that are most prevalent today, leveraging fraud data from the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network and its general data banks.

What the matrix measures

No two scams are exactly the same. The matrix below breaks down the most common scams faced by each age group, calculated based on the FTC Consumer Sentinel Network 2024 fraud reports:

The data used to calculate the percentages is the share of fraud reports per category where the person claimed they actually lost money. It can be treated like a proxy for the success of a scam. Younger age groups report losing money at a remarkably higher rate than their older counterparts. For instance, adults aged 20-29 lost money in 79% of cases involving online shopping scams and 83% of investment-related scams.

Those rates decline with age. People aged 60-69 lost money in only 70% and 76% of the same cases, and those even older, aged 70-79, lost money in only 64% and 72% of cases.

This trend flips when the type of scam specifically targets older adults, such as lottery or government impersonation tactics.

Additionally, as people age, the midpoint dollar amount reported lost rises sharply. Based on the FTC’s 2024-2025 Protecting Older Consumers data, those 80 and older reported a median loss above $1,600, the highest of any age group and well above what the average young adult loses in a single incident. Younger people may get defrauded more often, but older victims usually lose the most per scam.

The impact of severe cases of fraud

The data showing younger adults being scammed more but older adults losing more is a year-over-year trend. Total fraud losses reported by older adults (ages 60 and over) increased about fourfold from 2020 to 2024, skyrocketing from about $600 million in 2020 to $2.4 billion in 2024.

To be fair, a small share of severe cases of fraud skews the picture further. The earlier FTC report outlines how losses of $100,000 or more, while rare, account for the majority of the dollars older adults lost across the grand total.

Scam profiles by cohort

The efficacy of scams by age group may depend on the type of scam itself. Digital-based scams are likely to have the most success against younger individuals, whereas more traditional scams fare better against older adults. The type of scam often comes back to how the scammers first made contact.

For people under 30, social media is the first point of contact for many scammers, while adults over 30 tend to be targeted via a website or apps. For adults over 80, the No. 1 method of contact is a phone call.

Around the age of 60, the primary contact method of scammers seems to change. Phone calls climb steadily in their share of first contact, while social media falls.

For every age group, online shopping is the top scam, followed by business and government impostors. Older adults tend to be more targeted for hoaxes related to prizes, sweepstakes and lotteries.

What readers should do

To protect yourself, you need to know what to watch for. That means knowing the specific type of scam you’re most likely to be targeted by and how they intend to reach you.

If you’re young, investment pitches and marketplace deals arising from social media should raise your suspicion. If you’re middle-aged, it might be a business or job opportunity that seems too good to be true. Those on the older side might want to pause if there are any unusual tech support claims or government contact in their life. Regardless of age, the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network and the FBI’s IC3 both remain good places to check whether a certain scam tactic is prevalent before responding to a cold contact.

This story was produced by Spokeo and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.