For Researchers, Academics & Data Journalists

This page is for researchers and analysts who want to cite, replicate, or build on the analysis published by HCSK Inc. All data is freely downloadable. All methodology is open. All content is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY 4.0).

Quick start: Jump to datasets, methodology, how to cite, or research collaboration.

Available datasets

All datasets are derived from publicly available federal sources. We have parsed, normalized, and time-aligned the data so it can be loaded directly into pandas, R, Stata, SPSS, or Excel without further cleaning.

License: CC-BY 4.0. Reproduce, transform, and integrate freely with attribution.

Methodology

Primary sources. The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center publishes annual elder fraud reports as HTML pages, one per state. These include victim counts and reported losses by crime type for adults aged 60 and over. We parse these state-level reports across all 52 U.S. states and territories for 2021-2025.

Categories. We extract the four major scam categories on which the FBI consistently reports across all five years: investment fraud, tech support fraud, romance/confidence fraud, and government impersonation.

Per-capita calculation. Uses U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-year estimates for adults 65 and over. The FBI data covers 60+; the slight category mismatch is documented in the per-capita dataset.

5-year growth. Calculated as (2025 value − 2021 value) / 2021 value × 100. For states with very low 2021 baselines, growth rates can be dramatic; we always report absolute 2021 and 2025 values alongside the percentage.

News corpus. We maintain an original corpus of more than 1,600 elder-fraud news articles collected through daily Google Alerts monitoring. This is qualitative signal intelligence, not statistically representative data. It is useful for surfacing emerging patterns and real cases, not for prevalence or demographic analysis.

Cross-validation. Key figures are cross-validated against FTC Sentinel Network, FinCEN bank-flagged SARs, DOJ Elder Justice Initiative statistics, and academic literature. Discrepancies are documented in our published analysis.

Limitations. FBI IC3 data captures only complaints filed with IC3. The FTC estimates fewer than 5% of fraud victims report to any government entity, so reported losses are a small fraction of actual harm. Loss is the reported dollar value at the time of filing; no adjustment for recovered funds.

How to cite our work

Dataset citation

HCSK Inc. (2026). Elder fraud by state — FBI IC3 2025 data with five-year growth rates [Data set]. https://seniors.hcsk.org/for-researchers/

Journalism short form

“…according to HCSK Inc., a nonprofit publishing original elder-fraud research and free datasets.”

Research collaboration

We welcome inquiries from academic researchers, policy researchers, graduate students, data journalists, and cross-disciplinary teams.

We can provide additional datasets, coding documentation for the news corpus, cross-tabulations we have not published, co-authorship discussions on appropriate projects, speakers for academic events, and replication assistance.

Contact: [email protected] or [email protected]

License and attribution

All content on this page and all linked datasets are released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0).

You may: copy, redistribute, adapt the work; use commercially; build derivative works (translations, visualizations, software tools).

You must: give appropriate credit using one of the citation formats above; indicate if changes were made; not imply HCSK Inc. endorsement of your derivative work.

Federal source data (FBI IC3, FTC, FinCEN, DOJ, SSA) remains in the public domain.