Cybersecurity Awareness Month: Helping Older Adults Avoid Online Scams – About Meta

According to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report , people aged 60 and over in the US lost a combined $4.8 billion to fraud in 2024 alone. Criminals use a variety of tactics to gain trust and in certain circumstances compromise people’s online accounts, often with the goal of targeting their close contacts for scams.  This Cybersecurity Awareness Month, as part of our ongoing global anti-scam awareness campaign, we’re sharing the latest trends in scams targeting older adults, new safety tools, and tips for how to spot and avoid scammers online. Scams to Watch Out For In addition to our ongoing investigations, we partnered with open source researchers at Graphika to find and disrupt scams targeting older adults across the Internet. Where these scams showed up on our apps, we took action: blocking scammers’ websites on our platforms and taking down their accounts.  Fake home remodeling services and debt relief: Scammers created websites designed to solicit personal information under the pretense of providing fictitious government benefits for senior citizens, including debt relief and low- or no-cost home renovations. They attempted to drive people to these websites using online ads, including on Facebook and Google. Fraudulent money recovery services: Scammers created
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