Your Parents' Biggest Scam Risk Isn't the Gift Card Call. It's the Investment Pitch, and It Runs Six Figures.

If you’ve warned a parent about gift card scams, good. You warned them about the small one.

The FTC’s annual report on fraud against older adults landed October 19, and the money isn’t where the warnings are. People 60 and over reported losing about $3 billion to fraud in 2025, up from about $600 million in 2020. Most of that came from a sliver of reports. Losses over $100,000 were 6% of their loss reports and 70% of the dollars.

The scam that does that kind of damage usually isn’t a phone call about a warrant. It’s an investment pitch.

Where the big money goes

Investment scams took more than $1 billion from people 60 and over last year, up 42% in one year. The FTC says victims often described being lured to fake cryptocurrency-investment platforms after being targeted on social media. Social media was the costliest way scams reached older adults, and those losses are about twelve times what they were in 2020.

Bank transfers carried the biggest losses, then cryptocurrency. Since 2020, losses paid by bank transfer are up more than tenfold. Losses paid in crypto are up more than twenty-sevenfold.

Gift cards still show up all over the report. They’re the most common way older adults paid tech-support, romance and grandkid-in-trouble scammers. But a fake trading app that shows a balance climbing every week doesn’t stop at a few cards from the drugstore. It can keep going until a retirement account is gone.

The math nobody puts on the warning flyer

We ran the FTC’s own counts. Older adults filed about 122,600 fraud reports with a dollar loss in 2025. About 93,000 of them, roughly three in four, were under $10,000. Just 6,769 were over $100,000.

Those 6,769 reports averaged roughly $300,000 each. That’s our math from the report’s rounded figures, not an FTC number.

Here’s the other tell. When an adult child or caregiver filed the report for someone 80 or older, the median loss was $6,500. The median for everyone 80 and over was $2,000. Translation: when the family is the one filing, the hole is usually deeper.

And $3 billion is only what got reported. The FTC estimates the real 2025 cost to older adults landed somewhere between $13.3 billion and $119.5 billion.

What to do this week

Call a parent and ask one question: “Has anybody online shown you an investment that’s doing really well?” Not “have you been scammed.” Nobody answers yes to that.

Set the rule out loud: no money moves to any platform, adviser or “safe account” that showed up through Facebook, a text or a dating app until two people have looked at it.

Look up any adviser by name at Investor.gov. Don’t trust a certificate. The SEC warned in August that scammers point to SEC “exempt reporting adviser” filings to look legit. Those advisers aren’t registered with the SEC and can’t advise individuals, and the SEC doesn’t issue certificates to advisers at all.

Get named as the trusted contact on their bank and brokerage accounts. We covered how in our posts on brokerage fraud holds and bank holds on suspected exploitation. The fake bank call has its own playbook here.

If money already moved, call the bank’s fraud line that day, then file at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. You can file for them.

The detail

The figures come from the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel database, which only counts what people report. The FTC took no reports from October 1 to November 13, 2025, during the funding lapse, and estimated that gap in its cost math. The $13.3 billion low estimate assumes everyone who lost $10,000 or more reported it. The $119.5 billion high estimate assumes only 2.0% to 6.7% of losses get reported, rates drawn from a study matching FTC cases to complaints.

How Candid Yak makes money. Some of the products we write about pay us if you apply or sign up through our links. That never changes our verdict, our rankings, or the numbers in this article. We call a bad deal a bad deal whether it pays us or not. Some brands shown in our comparison tools are placeholder examples while we finalize partner agreements, and we label them as such.