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The Scams Targeting Americans Over 60 Right Now — and How to Lock Down Your Identity

An orange rotary phone on a wooden table, with a sticky note reading “Code word?”.
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

In 2025, people 60 and older told the FBI they'd lost $7.7 billion to fraud. Was it clumsy emails with bad spelling? Mostly not. The money went out over the phone, in calm conversations with someone claiming to be a bank, a federal agent or a grandchild, and the newest twist uses software to copy a real voice. What still works on a bad day is mostly free, and setting it up takes about an hour.

See the one-hour lockdown checklist

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By Ray Castellano · Updated Sep 29, 2026 · Reviewed against FBI IC3 (2025 Internet Crime Report), FTC, IRS, USA.gov

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None of this calls for becoming a security expert. These calls lean on two pressures, urgency and secrecy, and they want money sent in a way that's very hard to get back: a wire, crypto, a payment app, gift card numbers read over the phone. Once you see those two moves coming, most of the scripts fall apart.

The stakes are real, since each reported loss topped $38,000 on average. And there's a quieter risk alongside the calls. After years of data breaches, Social Security numbers and birth dates may already be sitting in files criminals buy for a few dollars, and nobody can pull that back, though you can make it much harder to use.

Close the tax and benefits doors

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Five scripts and the giveaway in each

A handful of scripts, on the phone or on a screen, account for most of the losses. Every one of them gives itself away somewhere, and you'll usually hear it in what the caller asks for rather than in the story.

  1. A grandchild in trouble. It's a shaky young voice, an accident or an arrest, and then the begging: please don't tell Mom and Dad. That plea for silence gives it away.
  2. A call from "your bank." There are suspicious charges, says the caller (or the text), so you'd better move your money to a "safe account." Your real bank won't ask you to move money to protect it.
  3. Someone "from the government." Your Social Security number is supposedly tied to a crime, and the fix involves crypto, cash or gold handed to a courier. The U.S. government never asks anyone to buy gold.
  4. A pop-up on your screen. It lists a number to call, and whoever answers wants remote access. Real security warnings don't ask you to call anyone.
  5. A new friend with a trading site. Somebody friendly online shows you "profits" piling up, and while deposits go through easily, withdrawals never do.

Spotting the script helps on a good day. The harder part is the settings that still protect you on a tired one, and what to do in the first hour if money already went out.

See how a family code word works

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