Ben Winters, Director of AI and Privacy at the Consumer Federation of America submitted the following prepared testimony and statement for the record before the U.S. Senate Committee on Aging for a hearing entitled: The AI Deception Machine: Deepfakes, Chatbots, and the New Frontier of Senior Fraud.

The testimony states: “Americans are losing money to scams online at a historic rate. In 2025 alone, Americans reported losing $21 billion, with older Americans reporting losing more than $7.7 billion. The true cost is somewhere between 7 and 25 times higher than this, based off underreporting estimates from the FBI, the FTC, and others. While not the sole cause or reason for scams, Generative AI is a scammer’s dream.”