Losses to Older Victims Jumped Sharply
Romance scams targeting older Americans grew more damaging in 2025, according to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, released by the Bureau’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Victims age 60 and older accounted for 10,188 romance fraud complaints and $584 million in reported losses last year, out of $929 million lost to romance scams across all age groups nationwide, according to the report.
That means older adults, who made up roughly 44% of all romance scam complaints, absorbed nearly two-thirds of the total dollars lost to that category of fraud in 2025, per the same IC3 data. Romance fraud was the third-costliest scam type reported by seniors overall, trailing only investment fraud, which cost older victims $3.5 billion, and tech-support scams, which cost them just over $1 billion.
Part of a Broader Surge in Elder Fraud
The romance scam numbers arrive alongside a steep increase in elder fraud overall. The IC3 report tallied 201,266 fraud complaints from victims 60 and older in 2025, a 37% jump from the prior year, with total losses reaching $7.748 billion, up 59% year-over-year. More than 12,000 older victims individually lost over $100,000 to fraud last year, and the average loss per elder-fraud victim climbed to roughly $38,500.
The trend isn’t new, but it has been accelerating. In an earlier FBI field office release covering 2024 data, the Bureau reported 147,127 elder fraud complaints and $4.885 billion in losses nationally, at the time already a 46% increase in complaints and 43% increase in losses over 2023. Kimberly Milka, then-acting special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston Division, said at the time: “Elder fraud is a growing problem and a shameful crime. Not only does it rob an already vulnerable population of their sense of security, but it leaves them with devastating financial losses.”
How the Scams Typically Unfold
According to the FBI’s own romance scam guidance, perpetrators typically build relationships with victims through dating apps, social media, or messaging platforms, often over weeks or months, before fabricating a financial emergency, a business opportunity, or a supposed investment that requires the victim to send money. Cases the Bureau has prosecuted include losses as large as $2 million from a single victim in one online relationship, illustrating how sustained the schemes can become before they’re detected.
Older adults tend to be more lucrative targets for this particular scheme: larger retirement savings and home equity give scammers more to extract once trust is established, and a scam built on months of relationship-building can pull far larger sums from a single victim than faster-moving schemes aimed at younger targets. The FBI has repeatedly urged the public to independently verify the identity of any online romantic contact who asks for money, to be wary of any relationship that escalates to financial requests without ever meeting in person, and to talk to family members before wiring funds to someone they’ve only interacted with online. Complaints can be filed directly with the Bureau at IC3.gov.
