In its 2025 Internet Crime Report, released in April 2026, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded 201,266 complaints from adults aged 60 and over, with $7.748 billion in reported losses, up 59% from 2024, and an average reported loss of $38,500 per complaint.
Those numbers count only what people reported to the FBI, and most people never report. They still describe the situation an adult child is actually in. The problem is not a parent who is careless. It is a parent who has been chosen.
Most advice to families stops at "tell them to be careful." Being careful is not a plan. It puts the whole job on one person staying alert every single time, against callers who do this for a living and rehearse it.
What works is two things. Close the doors that get opened without anyone noticing. Then agree, as a family, on what to do when the phone rings.
Close the doors that open without anyone noticing
Four protections work while nobody is paying attention. None of them costs anything, and a parent and an adult child can set them up together in an afternoon.
Freeze your parent's credit at all three bureaus. Under federal law since September 2018 a freeze is free, and it must be placed separately with Equifax, Experian and TransUnion. It blocks new credit in your parent's name and leaves existing cards and the credit score untouched. Write the PINs down where you can both find them.
Sign up for USPS Informed Delivery. It is free, and it emails a photograph of each day's letters before they arrive. A stolen statement or an intercepted card gets noticed the day it goes missing, and a quiet redirection of your parent's mail shows up as a gap.
Ask the county recorder where your parent owns a home whether it offers an alert when a document is recorded against the property. Not every office does. Where one exists, make sure the notice reaches someone who will read it.
Ask your parent's bank and brokerage to add a trusted contact. FINRA describes it as a person the firm can call if it reasonably believes an account may be exposed to financial exploitation, and the designation gives that person no authority over the account. It is a phone number on file, not a power of attorney.
Make sure more than one person can see the money
Fraud that runs for months, whether a stranger's romance script or a relative holding the paperwork, has one feature in common. Fewer people can see the account than before. Statements stop arriving. One person becomes the only point of contact.
Ask that a second person receive copies of statements, or have view-only access where the bank offers it. That is not a judgment of anyone's capacity. It is a plain arrangement that makes a quiet change visible to someone.
Agree on three moves before the phone rings
None of the steps above stops a phone call, and the call is where most of the money goes. You do not have to teach a parent to recognise every scam, because the stories change constantly. What every caller needs is the same: your parent's fear, your parent's silence, and a payment that cannot be undone.
Agree on three moves at the kitchen table, and say them out loud so they are rehearsed before they are needed.
Hang up and call back on a number you look up yourself, from the card, the bill or the statement, never the number the caller gave. A real bank, agency or grandchild will still be there in ten minutes. A scammer will not let you go, and that refusal is the answer.
Choose a family password. A caller can copy a grandchild's voice from a few seconds of audio. A word agreed over dinner cannot be copied, and a frightened "grandchild" who does not know it is not your grandchild.
If a warning fills the screen with a number to call, hold the power button until the computer shuts off. Do not click anything, even to close it. The warning is the scam, and nothing is damaged while the machine is off.
If it has already happened
Call the bank first, then report it at ic3.gov, then call Adult Protective Services in your parent's county. Speed matters more than anything else. In 2025 the FBI began its Financial Fraud Kill Chain process on 642 incidents involving victims aged 60 and over and froze $32,865,655 of the $65,367,648 those incidents reported lost.
Those 642 incidents are a small fraction of the 201,266 complaints the FBI received from that age group in 2025. Money can be frozen only where someone acts while it is still moving.
Being targeted is not a failure of judgment. These operations are staffed, scripted and rehearsed. The only part a family can make worse is the silence afterwards.
If this is your family
Agree one rule together, and say it aloud so everyone has heard everyone else say it: "Nobody in this family moves money because of a phone call. We hang up and call back first."
Then spend one afternoon on the four doors above. They work on the days nobody is watching, which is the point.
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