CATFISH Act of 2026

Congress finds the following:

(1) The senior citizens of the United States have spent lifetimes earning the retirement they now live in. The savings, home equity, and Social Security and Medicare benefits that sustain older Americans represent decades of labor, discipline, and deferred reward—hard-won property that should not become a target of opportunity for international criminal syndicates or for the domestic fraud ecosystem that feeds them.

(2) According to the Federal Trade Commission, Americans aged 60 and over reported losing approximately $2,400,000,000 to fraud in 2024, a fourfold increase from the approximately $600,000,000 reported in 2020.

(3) The Federal Trade Commission further estimates that, accounting for chronic underreporting, the true annual losses sustained by older Americans may reach as high as $81,500,000,000—losses that largely represent retirement savings, home equity, and inheritances that can never be recovered.

(4) Individual losses exceeding $100,000—often driven by romance fraud, investment fraud, and government-impersonation schemes—account for 68 percent of all dollars reported lost by older Americans, confirming that the fraud crisis facing seniors is not a problem of nuisance-level theft but of retirement-erasing financial destruction.

(5) In 2024, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, confidence and romance fraud generated more than 17,000 complaints and at least $672,000,000 in reported losses nationally. Older Americans bore a disproportionate share of the harm: victims aged 60 and older filed more than 147,000 complaints of internet-enabled crime, reported aggregate losses of approximately $4,800,000,000 (a 43 percent year-over-year increase), averaged approximately $83,000 per reported loss, and included approximately 7,500 victims who each reported individual losses of $100,000 or more. Of the losses reported by victims aged 60 and older, $389,000,000 was attributable to confidence and romance fraud specifically.

(6) The Department of the Treasury, through its Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have each publicly identified the hybrid romance-and-investment fraud commonly known as pig butchering—a scheme overwhelmingly operated by transnational criminal organizations based in Southeast Asia—as a predominant threat to American consumers, with losses from cryptocurrency-related investment fraud alone reaching an estimated $5,800,000,000 in 2024.

(7) Cryptocurrency kiosks, commonly referred to as Bitcoin ATMs, have proliferated across the United States from approximately 4,250 machines in January 2020 to approximately 32,000 machines by mid-2024, concentrated in convenience stores, gas stations, and grocery stores outside the supervisory architecture that governs traditional financial institutions. According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers reported losing more than $65,000,000 to scams routed through these kiosks in the first six months of 2024 alone, with Americans aged 60 and older reporting 71 percent of those losses and reporting such losses at a rate more than three times that of younger adults.

(8) Gift cards remain among the most common payment methods demanded by perpetrators of romance and confidence fraud targeting older Americans, with scammers routinely directing senior victims to purchase prepaid cards—frequently in amounts exceeding $500—at the checkout counters of national retailers while remaining on the phone with the perpetrator throughout the transaction.

(9) The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and Federal banking regulators have issued extensive guidance identifying the red-flag indicators of elder financial exploitation, but that guidance remains voluntary, unevenly adopted, and unaccompanied by meaningful enforcement, leaving the seniors whose savings those institutions hold without the baseline protection that comparable anti-money-laundering and fraud-prevention frameworks routinely afford in other contexts.

(10) Congress has an enduring obligation to the Americans who have spent their working lives contributing to Social Security and Medicare, and who have entrusted their life savings to this Nation’s financial institutions, to ensure that those institutions and the retailers that serve as payment conduits are required to detect and report, and encouraged to disrupt, the fraud schemes that are stripping older Americans of the retirement they have earned.