The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report came out last month. I've been sitting with the numbers since.

Americans 60 and older reported $7.75 billion in losses to cybercrime last year. That's a 59 percent increase from 2024. The average loss per victim was $38,500. More than 12,000 older adults lost over $100,000 — each.

Those are the reported numbers. Fraud is among the most underreported crimes in existence. The actual figure is almost certainly higher, and we don't know by how much.

Here's what I keep coming back to: none of this happened because older adults are stupid. It happened because scammers are sophisticated, AI has made their tools dramatically more convincing, and there's a specific neurological reason why people with dementia — and people on the path toward dementia — are more vulnerable than the general population. Not as a character flaw. As a matter of biology.

That's what I want to talk about today.

Let me start with something that should reframe how you think about this entire problem.

In 2024, researchers at USC Dornsife published a study in the journal Cerebral Cortex. They were looking at a brain region called the entorhinal cortex — an area that degenerates early in Alzheimer's disease, often before any symptoms appear. What they found was this: the thinner a person's entorhinal cortex, the more vulnerable they were to financial exploitation, even when they showed no signs of cognitive impairment.

Read that again. Before the memory problems. Before the confusion. Before any diagnosis. The brain changes that come with Alzheimer's disease may already be making a person more susceptible to being defrauded.

The entorhinal cortex sits at the crossroads of memory retrieval and value judgment. It's what allows you to draw on past experience and project yourself into future consequences when you're evaluating a decision. When it starts to thin, that capacity erodes. You become less able to ask, wait — have I seen something like this before? and what happens to me if I'm wrong? Those are the exact cognitive functions that scam resistance depends on.

Alzheimer's disease also erodes insight. People in the early-to-middle stages often don't know what they're missing. They feel confident in decisions that would have alarmed them five years ago. That's not stubbornness. That's the disease. It dismantles the very faculties that would otherwise serve as a warning system.

Frontotemporal dementia compounds this differently. Where Alzheimer's gradually erodes memory and judgment together, FTD can attack social cognition more directly — reducing suspicion, weakening the instinct to hesitate, making a person more trusting of strangers in ways that feel to them entirely normal.

Now layer in what the scammers are actually deploying.

Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the threat environment. Voice cloning technology can now recreate a person's voice from a few seconds of audio — scraped from a voicemail, a social media video, anything. Your mother could receive a phone call that sounds, in every perceptible way, like you. The voice is yours. The cadence is yours. The fear in it is real. And it's asking her to help you, urgently, quietly, before it's too late.

This is not hypothetical. The FBI confirmed over 22,000 AI-related fraud complaints in 2025 alone, with losses exceeding $893 million. And the bureau was explicit: most victims never knew AI was involved. The true number is almost certainly higher.

The most common version is what they call the grandparent scam, and it works precisely because it exploits the most intact part of a dementia patient's inner life: love. The emotional circuitry is often the last to go. Your loved one may not be able to tell you what day it is, but she will absolutely try to help her grandchild who sounds like he's in trouble.

Tech support scams were the second largest fraud category for older adults last year: $1 billion lost to people impersonating Apple, Microsoft, or a bank, claiming the target's device has been compromised, asking for remote access. The mechanics are simple. The caller creates a plausible emergency, then positions themselves as the solution. A person with dementia, who already may be confused about their devices, is poorly equipped to evaluate whether the emergency is real.

There's one more thing worth saying plainly. Financial problems — struggling to manage bills, making uncharacteristic decisions, falling for solicitations — are often among the first observable signs of Alzheimer's disease. Research from the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Research Center found that people who were less able to detect scams had a significantly higher rate of subsequent Alzheimer's diagnosis. The scam isn't just a consequence of the disease. In some cases, it's a signal that the disease is coming.

Which means that if your loved one has already been defrauded, that's not just a financial problem to solve. It may be diagnostic information worth sharing with their doctor.

I want to be specific here, because the usual advice — "don't answer unknown numbers," "be suspicious of urgent requests" — is advice for a person whose suspicion is intact. Your loved one's suspicion may not be intact. So the work falls to you.

A conversation where you warn someone with dementia about scams is largely useless. It doesn't stick, and it can feel condescending. What does work is structural protection. Get a second person on the accounts. Set up transaction alerts. Call the bank and ask about elder financial protection settings — most major banks now have them. For some families, a limited power of attorney that requires dual authorization for large transactions is worth exploring.

You can also place a credit freeze on your loved one's credit at all three major bureaus (Equifax, Experian, TransUnion) for free. This prevents new accounts from being opened in their name. It does not affect existing accounts. If they're at a stage where they're unlikely to need new credit, this is a straightforward precaution with no meaningful downside.

The call filter. Most cell carriers now offer free spam call filtering. Most landline providers have similar tools. These don't eliminate the problem, but they reduce the exposure. Set it up for them; don't ask them to do it.

Talk to other family members and establish a specific, private code word. If anyone calls claiming to be a family member in trouble, the code word is required before any action is taken. Scammers can clone voices, but they can't clone a word that doesn't exist anywhere in a recording.

Finally, if your loved one has been defrauded, report it to the FBI at ic3.gov and to your state's Adult Protective Services. Many families skip this because it feels futile. It’s not. The FBI's Recovery Asset Team froze $679 million in attempted elder fraud in 2025 alone. They can't act on what isn't reported.

Additionally, the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline (877-908-3360) is free and staffed by trained people, not robots. You can also find resources at their website.

Something bothers me about the way this topic usually gets framed.

It gets framed as a technology problem, or a crime problem, or an education problem. And it is all of those things. But for families dealing with dementia, it's also a caregiving problem.

Your loved one cannot be talked out of vulnerability that is rooted in dementia. They cannot be trained to be suspicious when the disease has taken their suspicion. The burden of protection falls to the people around them, and it requires structural solutions, not lectures.

You already know how to carry things they can't carry anymore. This is one more thing on that list.

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