Why are older adults a preferred target of online fraud?
What if the principal contribution of digital technologies was not the creation of entirely new forms of fraud, but an unprecedented ability to identify and select victims? Recent research on older adults invites us to reconsider cybercrime through the lens of victimology.
In their article “Cybercrime against senior citizens: exploring ageism, ideal victimhood, and the pivotal role of socioeconomics” (2025) , Lazarus, Tickner and McGuire advance a simple yet unsettling argument. Cyber scammers specifically target older adults. Their approach is fundamentally victimological. Older individuals are perceived as more trusting, more socially isolated, less likely to report offences and often in possession of assets accumulated over a lifetime.
Available data, although incomplete, tend to support this hypothesis of targeted victimisation. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the actual losses attributable to fraud may have reached between USD 31.3 billion and USD 195.9 billion in 2024 across the entire American population. Of this amount, between USD 10.1 billion and USD 81.5 billion may concern individuals aged 60 and above, representing approximately 26% to 42% of estimated losses depending on the assumptions adopted. Assuming a relatively even distribution of under-reporting, older adults appear to be over-represented among victims. The FTC itself suggests that these estimates may remain conservative (Federal Trade Commission FTC, 2025).
For Lazarus et al., this phenomenon reflects a form of criminal ageism.
“We argue that ageism serves as a weapon used by online offenders to target older adults, whilst the concept of the ideal victim acts as society’s shield in response to these reprehensible actions.” (Lazarus et al., 2025, p.1)
A weapon specifically designed to exploit vulnerabilities associated with ageing. Meanwhile, the social and institutional shield remains largely focused on assisting victims after the event rather than preventing their prior selection by offenders.
Certain characteristics associated with ageing therefore become criteria for victim selection. The most common explanation is that older people are victimised because they are less familiar with digital technologies. This interpretation is appealing. It is also incomplete.
The work of Ebner et al. (2023) broadens the perspective. The authors demonstrate that vulnerability to fraud emerges from the interaction of multiple dimensions: cognitive capacities, emotional factors, social isolation, trust mechanisms and the characteristics of fraudulent messages themselves. They further show that the consequences of fraud are often particularly severe for older adults, including loss of autonomy, deterioration in health, increased isolation and long-term financial hardship.
The question therefore changes. It is no longer why some older people use technology less effectively. Rather, it becomes how modern technologies enable offenders to exploit vulnerabilities that existed long before the emergence of the Internet.
In this sense, cyber scammers have developed their own form of applied victimology. They seek individuals who are less likely to report offences and whose expected criminal yield is the highest.
Fake advisers, fraudulent representatives, romance scammers and deceptive sales schemes did not emerge with digital technologies. Scammers have long exploited trust, loneliness, authority and hopes of financial gain. What has changed is not the nature of fraud itself. What has changed is the scale of offenders’ capabilities.
Digital technologies make it possible to identify potential victims on a massive scale, personalise approaches, automate contact attempts and multiply operations at almost no marginal cost. Fraudulent campaigns can be adapted to the specific concerns of targeted populations. Some focus on health, autonomy or assistance. Others exploit loneliness through romance scams. Technologies do not create vulnerability. They make it possible to detect and exploit it at industrial scale.
This shift in perspective is broader than it first appears. Debates on cybercrime often focus on malware, crypto-assets, deepfakes or artificial intelligence. Yet beneath these innovations, the underlying mechanisms remain remarkably stable.
Cybercriminals now possess unprecedented capabilities for identifying and exploiting human vulnerabilities. We observe the same geographical and linguistic specialisations that have long characterised non-cyber fraud. The best documented case remains the English-speaking sphere, where victims are primarily located in the United States and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand, while a significant proportion of offenders operate from India, benefiting from a degree of legal and operational invisibility.
What we are witnessing is the industrialisation of fraud, accompanied by a relative lag in countermeasures. The industrialisation of the response is supported by the continuous strengthening of European police and judicial cooperation and, more recently, by the deployment of augmented analytical tools from machine learning to artificial intelligence.
At the same time, both Europe and North America have seen the emergence of a partial privatisation of fraud intelligence gathering through the rise of anti-scammers: private investigators, volunteers and content creators who seek to disrupt scammers and report them to authorities. Their operational impact remains difficult to measure. Nevertheless, their emergence suggests that institutional capacities struggle to keep pace with the industrialisation of online fraud.
This form of cybercrime – distinct from other cyber offences – presents particularly attractive economic characteristics: low entry costs, even lower marginal costs and high scalability, notably through access to large pools of low-cost English-speaking labour. Once again, India provides the best documented example. The French-speaking sphere remains less developed in terms of scale and revenue generation, although available data remain too limited to assess the phenomenon accurately.
Finally, an indirect demonstration of this profitability lies in the increasing adoption of cyber fraud by multi-products criminal organisations. By contrast, ransomware attacks, despite their media visibility and the considerable damage they generate, require higher levels of technical expertise and consequently show lower profitability. As of 2026, ransomware has not been adopted by these same multi-product criminal organisations.
The principal lesson is therefore not technological. Scammers have not invented new human vulnerabilities. They have learned to identify and exploit them on an unprecedented scale.
This observation also highlights one of the challenges addressed by the European ENSEMBLE project. While ENSEMBLE is primarily designed to support law enforcement authorities in the detection and investigation of cybercrime, its analytical approach is based on the reconstruction of criminal configurations through the combination of heterogeneous sources of information, human expertise and AI-enhanced analysis. Such an approach may ultimately contribute not only to a better understanding of offenders and attack mechanisms, but also to a deeper understanding of victimisation processes.
More broadly, one of the long-term expectations associated with these analytical developments is the emergence of stronger anticipation and prevention capabilities. The ambition is not merely to identify criminal acts after they occur, but progressively to improve our capacity to understand how criminal opportunities emerge, how victims are selected and how large-scale fraudulent campaigns are structured.
Written by Paul Labic. Laboratory for theoretical and applied economics (BETA), CNRS UMR 7522. Associate researcher at the research lab of the French police academy (ENSP)
REFERENCES
Ebner, N. C., Pehlivanoglu, D., & Shoenfelt, A. (2023). Financial fraud and deception in aging. Advances in Geriatric Medicine and Research. https://doi.org/10.20900/agmr20230007
Federal Trade Commission FTC. (2025). Protecting older consumers 2024-2025.
Lazarus, S., Tickner, P., & McGuire, M. R. (2025). Cybercrime against senior citizens: exploring ageism, ideal victimhood, and the pivotal role of socioeconomics. Security Journal, 38(42). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41284-025-00482-4
