Category: Fraud and Crackdowns

The official tally of what older Americans lost to fraud last year is alarming on its own, but federal regulators believe it captures only a fraction of the real damage. Adults 60 and older formally reported about 2.4 billion dollars in fraud losses in 2024. Once chronic underreporting is accounted for, the Federal Trade Commission…

The most expensive way older Americans lost money to fraud was not a stolen card or a hacked password. It was an investment that never existed. In its most recent report to Congress, the Federal Trade Commission found that people 60 and older reported roughly 744 million dollars in investment-scam losses, more than any other…

Federal prosecutors in Rhode Island have secured guilty pleas from two people who helped run a fraud ring built around one frightening message: a pop-up warning that a person’s financial accounts had been compromised. The operation reached older Americans in dozens of states, and by the government’s own accounting it stripped away more than five…

As gold trades at lofty levels this year, a cruel side effect has followed the rally: a surge in scams that convince older Americans to convert their life savings into gold bars and hand them to a stranger. The pitch works precisely because gold sounds safe, and criminals have learned to weaponize that trust. Police…

The amount older Americans lost to impostor scams in six-figure chunks has climbed roughly eightfold since 2020, from about $55 million to $445 million, according to figures drawn from the Federal Trade Commission. The number counts only the largest individual hits, cases where a senior was cheated out of $100,000 or more, and its sharp…

A single data breach at a behind-the-scenes business-services vendor exposed the Social Security numbers of more than 62 million Americans, along with medical information for many of them. Most of the people affected never signed up with the company directly and may not know their most sensitive identifier is now in criminal hands. For older…

A Maryland man has been arrested in connection with a gold-bar scheme that prosecutors say frightened older victims with a phony hacking alert, then convinced them to move their savings into a fake “Federal Reserve account” by converting the money into gold. The ruse ends the way many of these cases do, with a courier…

Federal agents have made 276 arrests and frozen $701 million so far this year in a widening crackdown on “pig-butchering” cryptocurrency scams, the drawn-out cons that empty retirement accounts one trusting victim at a time. The running tally, compiled across 2026, is a measure of both the scale of the problem and the effort to…

A man in Florence, Alabama, lost his life savings to a cryptocurrency con of the type investigators call “pig butchering,” and federal prosecutors moved in late June to forfeit $222,000 tied to the scheme, money the fraudsters had already pushed offshore. The case, made public around June 26, puts a single face on a crime…

Federal agents have dismantled a romance-scam ring that prosecutors say cheated more than 100 older Americans out of $15 million, then spent the proceeds on a fleet of Lamborghinis and Cybertrucks flaunted as trophies. Where a single con artist can do enormous damage, an organized ring multiplies it, running many victims at once and moving…