The call sounds official. A calm voice says he’s from your bank’s fraud department, your account has been compromised, and your savings need to be moved to a protected account today. He stays on the line while you log in. You feel rushed, which is the point.
In its December 2025 report on older consumers, the Federal Trade Commission warns about exactly this kind of pitch: a caller insisting money must be moved to keep it safe. The stakes are large. In 2025, people 60 and older reported $7.7 billion in losses to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, which collects complaints about internet-enabled crime. That figure was up 59% from a year earlier.
It would be easy to read those numbers as proof that aging minds are easy marks. The research says something more precise. A national expert committee concluded in 2015 that cognitive aging is not a disease. Some abilities do slow, and earlier than most people assume. Others keep growing into the 60s. And the changes show up most in exactly the conditions a scammer creates: speed, novelty and stress.
Cognitive aging is a process, not a diagnosis
In 2015 the Institute of Medicine published, through the National Academies, a consensus report called Cognitive Aging: Progress in Understanding and Opportunities for Action. Its committee defined cognitive aging as gradual, continuing change in thinking abilities that varies widely from one person to the next. The report calls it a lifelong process and says plainly that it is not a disease. It is also not a clinically defined condition like Alzheimer’s disease, and it does not inevitably lead to dementia.
Three points from the report change the usual conversation:
- Speed slows. Most older adults take in and work through information less quickly than they once did. The changes can touch memory, decision-making, judgment and learning.
- Some things improve. Wisdom and knowledge grow with age, and on average stress, worry and anger decline in later life.
- Variation is the rule. People differ enormously from each other, and the same person can vary over time. Experience, expertise and simple supports such as lists can make up for some losses.
The committee also noted where the changes become visible: in fast-paced situations, when learning something new and under stress. That explains much of what follows.
So two common beliefs are both wrong. Slower thinking at 70 does not mean dementia is on the way. And it is not true that nothing changes until illness arrives; healthy brains change too. Where ordinary aging ends and a change worth a medical look begins is the territory of the library’s article on memory changes.
Different abilities peak at different ages
The idea that the mind peaks at 25 and slides downhill afterward doesn’t survive a close look. In a 2015 study in Psychological Science, Joshua K. Hartshorne, then at Harvard, and Laura T. Germine of Massachusetts General Hospital combined test results from 48,537 people online with the normative data behind two standard intelligence and memory test batteries. They charted when each ability tops out.
| Ability | Approximate peak |
|---|---|
| Processing speed, measured by a timed symbol-matching task | Late teens |
| Working memory, holding information briefly while using it | Around 30 |
| Recognizing emotions from the eye region of faces | A broad plateau from about 40 to 60 |
| Vocabulary | About 50 in older test norms; about 65 in recent online data |
The vocabulary result had a twist. Its peak arrived later in more recent samples, a shift the authors linked to generational change, with people continuing to learn words further into adulthood. Their broader conclusion: there may be no age at which a person is at their best on all, or even most, mental tasks at once.
These were cross-sectional data, meaning different people of different ages were compared at one time, which can mix up aging with generational differences. The authors checked by comparing datasets collected about 20 years apart and found similar peak ages for the speed and memory tasks.
When does the slowing begin? Researchers disagree
Timothy A. Salthouse of the University of Virginia argued in a 2009 paper in Neurobiology of Aging that following the same people over time understates decline, because people improve at tests they have taken before. Drawing on several ways of estimating that practice effect, along with other evidence, he concluded that some aspects of decline begin in healthy, educated adults in their 20s and 30s.
The claim drew a pointed reply in the same journal issue from K. Warner Schaie of the University of Washington, whose title charged Salthouse with the cross-sectional fallacy, a term for mistaking differences between age groups for change within people. So a headline claiming that decline starts at 27 reports one side of an open argument. The Institute of Medicine’s broader point stands either way: most older adults process information more slowly than they did when they were younger.
Money: where slower processing meets fast-talking fraud
What federal data show
The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, known as IC3, received 201,266 complaints from people 60 and older in 2025, up 37%. Reported losses reached $7.748 billion, with an average loss of $38,500, and 12,444 people lost more than $100,000. Investment fraud did the most damage, about $3.5 billion, followed by tech and customer support scams at about $1 billion, romance and confidence schemes at $584 million and government impersonation at $413 million. These counts reflect only complaints filed, and giving an age is optional.
The FTC’s numbers come from a different system and a different year. In its December 2025 report, adults 60 and older reported nearly $2.4 billion in fraud losses for 2024, up from about $1.9 billion in 2023. Adjusting for the many people who never report, the agency estimated the true cost to older adults at $10.1 billion to $81.5 billion, a range it says carries considerable uncertainty.
Those totals look inconsistent until you notice that IC3 tracks internet-enabled crime complaints to the FBI in 2025, while the FTC tallies consumer reports to its own database for 2024, using different definitions. They are separate windows on the same problem, not a contradiction.
Now the finding that cuts against the stereotype. In the FTC’s data, older adults reported losing money at lower rates than younger adults, and about 74% of their fraud reports involved no loss at all. When older people do lose, though, they tend to lose more. The median loss was $900 for people 60 and over and $1,650 for those 80 and over. A small group of cases drove most of the damage: 5,125 reports of losses above $100,000, about 5% of older adults’ loss reports, accounted for 68% of the dollars.
How the money moves matters. Bank transfers and cryptocurrency produced the largest total losses. For several common scam types, including impersonation, tech-support and romance scams, gift cards were the payment method older adults reported most often.
Not every threat is a stranger. The Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reviewed 155,415 reports that financial institutions filed on suspected elder financial exploitation between June 2022 and June 2023, covering about $27 billion in suspicious activity. Roughly 80% involved scams by strangers or impostors. About 20% involved theft by someone trusted, and adult children were the most frequent offenders in those cases.
Money trouble as an early warning, and its limits
Sometimes a change in money handling signals more than normal aging. Researchers at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago followed 935 older adults without dementia for about six years, asking questionnaire items about how alert they were to scams. In the 2019 study, 151 people developed Alzheimer’s dementia. Lower scam awareness was linked to higher risk, about 60% more for each step down on the study’s scale (a hazard ratio of 1.56), even after accounting for overall thinking ability, and to more of the amyloid protein associated with Alzheimer’s in brains examined after death.
The authors were blunt about the limits: “The measure of scam awareness used here is too weak for prediction at the individual level.”
A 2021 study in JAMA Internal Medicine found a similar faint signal in credit reports. Among 81,364 Medicare beneficiaries living alone, those later diagnosed with dementia were more likely to miss payments as early as six years before diagnosis, 7.7% versus 7.3%. That gap of 0.4 percentage points is tiny for any one household and meaningful only across millions. Subprime credit scores showed a similar small rise about two and a half years before diagnosis.
The fair reading: one scam loss says little about anyone’s brain, given how many people of every age are fooled. A new pattern, such as missed bills, unusual transactions or sudden openness to pitches someone once laughed off, is worth raising with a clinician.
Driving: where cognitive change meets the road
Driving is a fast-paced task full of split-second choices, exactly the kind of situation in which, by the Institute of Medicine’s account, age-related changes show most. The report adds a human complication. Some people hide cognitive difficulties out of fear of losing their driving privileges, and slipping skills can go unnoticed until problems are serious. The federal crash numbers for older drivers, and the case for narrowing driving gradually instead of stopping overnight, are covered in our piece on staying independent.
Training may help some drivers. In the large ACTIVE trial of cognitive training, drivers who received speed or reasoning training had roughly half the rate of at-fault crashes per mile driven over the following six years, according to a 2010 analysis of state records for 908 participants. The trial itself, and its mixed record on dementia, is examined in our article on cognitive stimulation.
When dementia is already diagnosed
A 2010 practice parameter from the American Academy of Neurology, a formal summary of evidence to guide clinicians, addressed driving risk in people diagnosed with dementia. It rated these as useful warning markers:
- Level A, the strongest: dementia severity on a standard rating scale.
- Level b: a caregiver judging the person’s driving as marginal or unsafe.
- Level c: a history of crashes or traffic tickets, driving fewer miles or avoiding certain situations, a score of 24 or below on a common 30-point screening test, and aggressive or impulsive personality traits.
It also rated one factor as not useful, at Level A: the person’s own belief that they drive safely. The parameter applies to people with a dementia diagnosis, not to healthy older drivers, and it dates from 2010; the academy reaffirmed it in February 2025.
Notice the contrast. In ordinary aging, choosing daylight trips on familiar roads can be sensible adaptation. In diagnosed dementia, the same avoidance is listed as a marker of risk, perhaps because it signals that the person already senses trouble.
How people keep functioning well
Psychologists A. M. Freund and P. B. Baltes, writing from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, described three life-management habits: selection, focusing energy on fewer priorities; optimization, investing in the skills that matter most; and compensation, finding new ways to reach a goal when old ones stop working. In their 1998 analysis of Berlin Aging Study participants, people who reported using these habits had higher well-being, more positive emotion and less loneliness, even after accounting for personality, intelligence, health and age. The data were correlational, so they show a link rather than proof that the habits cause better aging.
Everyday versions are easy to picture: keeping a written list of bills and due dates, scheduling demanding paperwork for the time of day you’re sharpest, or saying no to any financial decision made on someone else’s deadline.
The Institute of Medicine named three core steps for individuals: stay physically active; reduce and manage cardiovascular risk factors such as high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking; and regularly review health conditions and medications that could affect thinking with a clinician. It also listed social and intellectual engagement, adequate sleep, steps to avoid delirium during hospital stays, and careful scrutiny of products advertised to boost cognition. Separately, it urged regulators to examine over-the-counter medicines with strong anticholinergic activity, meaning they interfere with acetylcholine, one of the body’s chemical messengers, and it named antihistamines and sedatives among them. The evidence on exercise and on supplements is weighed in separate pieces in this series.
What the exceptional agers show
SuperAgers are people 80 and older whose memory for events is at least as good as that of middle-aged adults. Recent work on them comes from the multisite SuperAging Research Initiative, with Emily Rogalski of the University of Chicago’s Healthy Aging & Alzheimer’s Research Care Center as senior author. A 2026 genetic analysis of 231 participants, 142 of them SuperAgers, found that neither the best-known Alzheimer’s risk gene, APOE, nor three polygenic risk scores, which add up many small genetic risks, predicted who was a SuperAger. The authors suggested that rare genetic variants and life experiences deserve study. A separate 2026 study found SuperAgers and cognitively average people over 80 reported similarly favorable emotional well-being. Exceptional memory in old age, in other words, is not simply the absence of common Alzheimer’s genes, and what explains it remains open.
A plan for protecting money and driving decisions
These steps are easier to set up while everything is working well than in a crisis.
Money
- Name a trusted contact. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s 2021 guide explains that a bank or credit union can call this person if it cannot reach you or suspects exploitation. A trusted contact cannot get into your information without your consent. The bureau advises against naming someone who already has authority to withdraw or move money from your accounts, and notes that you can name more than one person.
- Adopt a pause rule. Any request to move money urgently, buy gift cards, send cryptocurrency or wire funds gets a call to someone you trust first. The FTC notes that threats often push people to act before they can check with family, friends or real law enforcement.
- Build safeguards into powers of attorney. The Institute of Medicine called for appropriate safeguards on powers of attorney and shared accounts. Ask whoever drafts yours what oversight options exist.
- Know where to report. Internet-enabled fraud can be reported at IC3.gov, and other fraud at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. The Justice Department’s National Elder Fraud Hotline, 833-FRAUD-11 (833-372-8311), serves victims 60 and older on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern, with case managers who help file reports. The program warns that scammers have impersonated the hotline itself to ask for money or Social Security numbers.
Driving
- Talk before there’s a problem. NHTSA observes that families often wait until driving seems dangerous, which makes the conversation harder. Its approach runs in three steps: gather information, make a plan, follow through.
- Use the federal materials. NHTSA’s older-driver page links to its guide Driving Safely While Aging Gracefully and to a summary of each state’s licensing rules for older drivers.
When to bring in a clinician
- New trouble with money, such as missed bills or unfamiliar transactions after a lifetime of careful management. Whether that reflects a medical condition, a medication or something else is for a primary care clinician to sort out. In research it is an early signal worth checking, not a diagnosis.
- A medicine that might be clouding thinking, including over-the-counter antihistamines and sedatives. Whether a specific drug is contributing is for the prescriber or pharmacist to judge.
- Driving concerns raised by family, new crashes or tickets, or a driver who has started avoiding routine trips. A clinician can evaluate what is behind the change instead of letting age settle it.
- Confusion or garbled speech that comes on suddenly, or sudden difficulty following what others say. A stroke can start this way, and the CDC’s instruction is to call 911 right away and not to drive, or be driven, to the hospital.
How formal memory assessment works, and who offers it, is explained in our guide to getting memory problems assessed.
The Takeaway
Normal cognitive aging slows mental speed while knowledge and emotional steadiness often hold or grow. The FTC’s fraud data fit that picture: older adults report losing money less often than younger people, but lose more when they do, often to pitches built on urgency. The most useful protection is built in advance: a trusted contact at the bank, a rule that money never moves on a stranger’s deadline, and a driving plan the family agrees on before anyone needs it.
Sources
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Institute of Medicine). “Cognitive Aging: Progress in Understanding and Opportunities for Action (2015), Summary.” nationalacademies.org
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (Institute of Medicine). “Cognitive Aging: Progress in Understanding and Opportunities for Action (2015), Chapter 1.” nationalacademies.org
- Psychological Science. “Hartshorne JK, Germine LT. "When does cognitive functioning peak? The asynchronous rise and fall of different cognitive abilities across the life span." Psychol Sci, 2015. PubMed. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614567339.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Neurobiology of Aging. “Salthouse TA. "When does age-related cognitive decline begin?" Neurobiol Aging, 2009. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2008.09.023.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Neurobiology of Aging. “Schaie KW. "'When does age-related cognitive decline begin?' Salthouse again reifies the 'cross-sectional fallacy'." Neurobiol Aging, 2009. PubMed. DOI: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2008.12.012.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Federal Bureau of Investigation, Internet Crime Complaint Center. “2025 IC3 Annual Report (section on complaints filed by individuals 60+).” ic3.gov
- Federal Trade Commission. “Protecting Older Consumers 2024-2025: A Report of the Federal Trade Commission (December 1, 2025).” ftc.gov
- Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, U.S. Department of the Treasury. “FinCEN Issues Analysis on Elder Financial Exploitation (April 18, 2024).” fincen.gov
- Annals of Internal Medicine. “Boyle PA et al. "Scam Awareness Related to Incident Alzheimer Dementia and Mild Cognitive Impairment: A Prospective Cohort Study." Ann Intern Med, 2019. PubMed. DOI: 10.7326/M18-2711.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- JAMA Internal Medicine. “Nicholas LH et al. "Financial Presentation of Alzheimer Disease and Related Dementias." JAMA Intern Med, 2021. PubMed. DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2020.6432.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. “Older Drivers.” nhtsa.gov
- Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. “Ball K et al. "Cognitive training decreases motor vehicle collision involvement of older drivers." J Am Geriatr Soc, 2010. PubMed. DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-5415.2010.03138.x.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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- American Academy of Neurology. “Neurology Resources: Guidelines by Topic (listing for 'Update: Evaluation and Management of Driving Risk in Dementia', published April 2010, reaffirmed February 8, 2025).” aan.com
- Psychology and Aging. “Freund AM, Baltes PB. "Selection, optimization, and compensation as strategies of life management: correlations with subjective indicators of successful aging." Psychol Aging, 1998. PubMed. DOI: 10.1037//0882-7974.13.4.531.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Alzheimer's Research & Therapy. “Piras IS et al. "SuperAging is not the inverse of common-variant Alzheimer's risk: evidence across genetic ancestries." Alzheimers Res Ther, 2026. PubMed. DOI: 10.1186/s13195-026-02124-2.” pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
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- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. “Trusted contact person: consumer guide (November 2021).” files.consumerfinance.gov
- Office for Victims of Crime, U.S. Department of Justice. “National Elder Fraud Hotline.” ovc.ojp.gov
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Signs and Symptoms of Stroke.” cdc.gov