Older adults reported 7.7 billion dollars of fraud losses last year. These iPhone settings make a scam harder.Older adults reported 7.7 billion dollars of fraud losses last year. These iPhone settings make a scam harder.

People aged 60 and over reported more than 7.7 billion dollars in losses to online fraud in the United States in 2025, according to the FBI.

The figure comes from the 2025 annual report of the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, published in April and summarised by the ABA Banking Journal. Across all ages, the report counted more than a million complaints and nearly 20.9 billion dollars of losses, up 26 per cent on 2024, with people over 60 the largest single group by losses. For the first time, the report included a section on fraud using AI, which it put at more than 22,000 complaints and nearly 893 million dollars. The FBI named voice clones and fake videos of loved ones among the techniques.

Most of the scams in those figures start with a phone call, a text or a request to share a code. Apple ships several settings that make each of those harder. None of them is new in iOS 27, and some may already be on. Others will not be. They are worth setting up together with an older relative, in person, rather than described over the phone.

Which iPhone settings help most?

Each of these comes from Apple's own support documentation:

• Screen Unknown Callers, in Settings, Apps, Phone. Ask Reason for Calling makes a caller from an unsaved number explain themselves before the phone rings. Silence sends them straight to voicemail.
• Screen Unknown Senders, in Messages under Filter, Manage Filtering. Texts from unknown numbers go to a separate folder without a notification.
• Spam filtering, under Call Filtering in the same Phone settings.
• Stolen Device Protection, in Settings, Face ID and Passcode. Away from familiar places, saved passwords need Face ID and an Apple Account password change needs an hour's wait.
• Recovery contacts, in the Apple Account settings. Up to five trusted people who can give a code to help regain access to the account. They get no access to it.

Apple's call screening page adds two practical points. Calls are not screened while roaming, and screening switches off for 24 hours after a call to emergency services. Its first piece of advice is the simplest: put family, doctors and other important numbers into Contacts so those calls always come through.

What Apple says it will never ask

Apple's page on social engineering is specific. It says Apple will never ask anyone to sign in to a website, approve a two-factor prompt, or read out a code, and will never ask anyone to turn off a security feature such as Stolen Device Protection. It also says Apple Gift Cards should never be used to pay other people. Its advice for an unexpected call from someone claiming to be Apple is to hang up.

Our take

The settings above are good, and none of them stops the scam the FBI is now worried about most. A cloned voice of a grandchild asking for money arrives as a call from a number that may well be saved in Contacts, especially if the scammer has taken over the grandchild's number. Call screening lets that call straight through. What helps there is not a setting but a habit: hang up and call back on a number you already have, and agree a family question that a scammer would not know the answer to.

Stolen Device Protection deserves more attention than it gets in this context. It was designed for phone theft, but its rule that a security delay applies away from familiar places is also a speed bump for someone being talked through changes by a caller. Apple's warning that scammers ask people to turn it off is there for a reason. A relative who knows that request is always a scam has the most useful single piece of knowledge on this list.

APPDOOK would add one thing for anyone setting this up for a parent: be their recovery contact, and make sure they know you are. Apple does not know who a recovery contact is, so the person setting it up has to remember. It costs nothing, and it gives an older relative someone to turn to who is not the stranger on the phone. The other defence costs nothing too. As we noted when a fake iPhone Duo pre-order page ran an exploit on unpatched iPhones, the phones at risk were the ones nobody had updated. Turning on automatic updates belongs on the same afternoon's list. For apps, Apple has started going further, and Impersonation Risk Detection in iOS 27 now hands apps a scam risk level, though only in the United States so far.