What a Scam Really Costs, From the People Who Help Victims Recover

Key takeaways

• Lifespan of Greater Rochester's fraud team says its average scam victim lost $102,000 this year, about three times the FBI's reported average of roughly $33,500.
• Most scams go unreported. A 2025 Aspen Institute analysis found only about 8% of victims reported to police.
• Most cases Lifespan sees are tech support scams and impostor scams, where someone pretends to be the government, a bank, a romantic partner or an investment advisor.
• Recovery can take months and includes reporting the crime, applying for victim compensation, protecting your identity and even handling surprise tax bills.
• The best protection is checking a suspicious call, text, email or letter before you respond.

When an older adult in the Finger Lakes is scammed, they lose more than money. The people who help them pick up the pieces are often Dan Lyon and Justin McCabe.

Dan is a retired Monroe County Sheriff's deputy who spent nearly 24 years on road patrol, eight of them as a crime prevention deputy. For the last six years he has been the fraud and scam program manager at Lifespan of Greater Rochester. Justin is a former police officer and New York State criminal investigator who worked frauds and forgeries of state identity documents.

Today they help scam victims one on one across 12 counties. As part of our Partner Spotlight series, we asked them what that work looks like.

How much do scam victims really lose?

Lifespan serves adults over 60 through about 30 programs, all aimed at one goal. As Dan put it, the goal is to "keep a man or woman over age 60 in their home for as long as physically possible." They've been doing it for 50 years.

Most of the calls Dan and Justin's fraud team receives involve tech support scams or impostor scams, where someone pretends to be the government, a bank, a romantic partner or an investment advisor.

The losses are staggering. "Our average victim loss this year is $102,000," Dan said. By the end of the year, his team expects to have helped close to 100 victims personally.

Justin compared that to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), where the average loss is about $33,500. And that only counts scams people report. "Only 25% report," Dan added.

The cost you can't put a number on

Money is only part of what a scam takes. Many victims carry shame, grief over a relationship that was never real, and stress that lasts long after the money is gone.

"There's a lot of emotional trauma that comes with this," Justin said. It's especially true with romance scams, where victims may have shared everything with someone for years, only to learn none of it was real.

What does recovering from a scam look like?

When a victim calls Lifespan, the work goes far beyond a single conversation. Justin's team helps them report the crime, apply for New York State victim compensation, and lock down their identity before scammers can open accounts in their name. They also connect victims to a weekly peer support group, and even help with surprise tax bills, since money pulled from retirement accounts can be taxed even after it's gone.

How can you check if something is a scam?

All of that work happens after the damage is done. What Dan and Justin wanted was a way to reach people sooner.

Before SilverShield, the main advice Dan could give was simple: if a number isn't saved in your contacts, don't answer it. But that's hard advice to follow. "Too many times people pick up the phone because they're afraid to miss that call from the doctor's office," Dan said.

SilverShield gave them something more to offer. When a call, text, email or letter looks off, people can send it to SilverShield and get an answer in seconds. Dan's favorite example is the mail: "Simply take a picture of that letter that you got in the mail and send it to SilverShield, and within seconds you'll know if that's legitimate or not."

And because scams don't keep business hours, neither does SilverShield. If someone gets a suspicious message at midnight, Lifespan's office is closed and they can't call Justin's team for help. But as Justin put it, "SilverShield's there."

Why it matters

Scammers often come back to people who have already lost money, trying a new angle each time: tech support, then the bank, then the police, then a promise to recover the money. Justin said SilverShield has been "absolutely so critical in preventing these before they start and on an ongoing basis."

Dan summed it up in one sentence: "Sign up is easy, and the availability to have a tool to provide to others, with the simplicity, makes it a no-brainer."

Recovery can take months, and some of what's lost never comes back. After years of helping people recover, Dan and Justin have seen what a scam costs after the fact. For them, SilverShield is about reaching people sooner, at the moment something looks off and before anything has been lost.