Elder Financial Abuse Statistics (2026)

Financial institutions filed 155,415 Bank Secrecy Act reports flagging elder financial exploitation between 15 June 2022 and 15 June 2023, covering roughly $27 billion of suspicious activity.

FinCEN counted filings that either used the key term from its June 2022 advisory or checked elder financial exploitation as a suspicious activity type.

Filing has continued at pace since: an average of 15,993 reports a month between June 2023 and January 2024.

FinCEN divides elder financial exploitation into scams and theft, and they behave very differently.

A scam moves money to a stranger or imposter in exchange for a benefit the older adult never receives. That was about 80% of filings.

Theft is an otherwise trusted person taking an older adult's assets, funds or income. That was about 20%.

Elder scams carried an average reported amount of $129,483 and a median of $33,499.

Elder theft carried an average of $98,863 and a median of $23,762.

FinCEN is careful about what the gap means: it could indicate victims lose more to scams, or that theft happens less often, or that banks simply detect theft less well and therefore report it less. The third possibility is the uncomfortable one.

Adult children were the most frequently identified perpetrators of elder theft, appearing in nearly 40% of the theft cases FinCEN reviewed manually.

Where filings included addresses, the adult children tended to live near the parent they were victimising, and that held even when the money moved through a digital payment app.

FinCEN's summary is blunt: those closest to the victim, in relationship or in physical proximity, were the most frequently identified perpetrators.

In scam filings the most frequently reported pattern was account takeover, with unauthorised transactions out of a customer's account.

The outgoing transactions were typically peer-to-peer transfers, bank transfers or fraudulent cheques, and institutions responded by closing the account, reissuing online banking credentials or replacing a card.

FinCEN notes that perpetrators mostly relied on unsophisticated methods chosen to minimise direct contact with bank staff, which is a detection problem rather than a technical one.

Banks filed 72% of all elder exploitation reports, and two banks alone accounted for 33% of the total, or 50,670 filings.

Money services businesses filed 15%, of which virtual asset service providers were nearly 42%.

That concentration says more about which institutions have built detection programmes than about where exploitation happens, so the geography of this data is partly a map of bank compliance capability.

This is not the same measurement as the FTC's fraud reports, and the two should never be added together.

FTC data is what victims report. FinCEN data is what institutions flag, which includes cases the victim never reported and, crucially, cases the victim would not report because the perpetrator is their child.

That is the single strongest argument for reading both: consumer complaint data structurally cannot see the 20% of this problem that happens inside families.

The population aged 65 and over holds a disproportionate share of US household wealth, and much of it sits in accessible accounts rather than illiquid assets.

Retirement accounts, home equity and decades of savings are concentrated at exactly the ages where cognitive decline becomes a factor for some people, and where social isolation is more common.

The losses land on savings, checking, retirement accounts and investments, at a stage of life with no earnings runway to replace them.

Naming a trusted contact on brokerage and bank accounts costs nothing and lets an institution reach someone if it sees something wrong. Most people never do it.

Transaction alerts on every account catch account takeover early, which is the dominant scam mechanism in this data.

A second set of eyes on statements, arranged in advance and by choice, is the only defence that works against the theft category, because the perpetrator there is frequently the person who would otherwise be the safeguard.

Giving one adult child financial control is normal, sensible and the single most common structure in this data's theft cases.

Splitting oversight from authority is the standard mitigation: one person holds power of attorney, a different person receives duplicate statements.

It is an awkward conversation to have with a family that trusts each other, and it is far cheaper than the alternative, which FinCEN puts at a median of $23,762.

A BSA filing is a report of suspicion, not a finding of wrongdoing, and the dollar figures are the amounts flagged rather than losses proven.

It captures only what institutions detected and chose to report, so the true scale is larger by an unknown margin, and FinCEN says as much about theft specifically.

The review period ended in June 2023, with the monthly filing rate reported through January 2024. It is the most recent FinCEN analysis of this kind rather than a current-year figure.

Every figure is from FinCEN's Financial Trend Analysis on Elder Financial Exploitation and its accompanying news release, analysing Bank Secrecy Act filings from 15 June 2022 to 15 June 2023.

FinCEN is the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau of the US Department of the Treasury, and it is the body that receives and maintains the BSA database.

The comparison with FTC consumer complaint data is methodological rather than numerical; no figure on this page combines the two.