Those “Unknown Caller” Scams Aren’t Random. Here’s Who’s Really Behind Them.

Sponsored by: Incogni

You know the calls. The car warranty that expired on a car you don’t own. The “grandchild” in trouble who needs money wired today. The fake Medicare agent who somehow already knows your name, your age, and the town you retired to.

Most of us have learned to hang up. But the calls keep coming—a few a day, sometimes a few an hour—and every so often one of them sounds just convincing enough to give you pause.

What almost nobody realizes is this: those calls aren’t the luck of the draw. Scammers don’t dial numbers at random. They buy your information first, and then they call. And older Americans are the target for which they’ll pay the most.

The numbers are hard to ignore

The Federal Trade Commission reports that Americans 60 and older lost $3 billion to fraud in 2025. Back in 2020, that figure was around $600 million. That’s an almost fivefold jump in just five years. The FBI’s separate tally of elder-fraud losses came to $7.7 billion in a single year.

And this isn’t simply bad luck. When Incogni analyzed the FBI’s elder-fraud data, it found that exposed personal information played a role in 72% of reported cases.

In other words, most of these crimes started not with a phone call, but with a file—a set of details about you that a criminal was able to look up, buy, and use. The more of your information floating around online, the easier you are to find, and the easier you are to fool.

So where do the scammers get your information?

From companies called data brokers. You’ve almost certainly never heard of them, and that’s rather the point—but they’ve heard plenty about you. Quietly and legally, they gather your name, age, home address, phone number, income range, the value of your home, and even the names of your relatives. Then they organize it all into profiles and sell it to whoever is willing to pay.

Some of those buyers are ordinary advertisers. But some of them are criminals—and they shop for their victims deliberately.

Investigators have found brokers marketing lists with names that spell out exactly who’s being sold: seniors living alone, retirees with money in the bank, people thought likely to answer the phone and stay polite. It’s a catalog, and your neighbors may well be in it.

This isn’t a theory. The Justice Department has prosecuted data brokers for knowingly selling lists of elderly Americans to scam operations. In one 2025 case, a broker was sentenced to 10 years in prison for selling the personal details of more than 7 million older Americans to a lottery-scam ring.

So when the caller already knows your name, when the “IRS agent” already has your address—understand that you didn’t do anything wrong. You didn’t fall for a trick or click the wrong link. You were simply on a list that someone bought.

The good news? You can get yourself off those lists—and you don’t have to do it alone. Start protecting your information today.

Getting your name back

The good news is that your information doesn’t have to stay for sale. You have two ways to take it back.

Doing it yourself

You are allowed to contact data brokers and ask them to remove you, and it costs nothing to do so. If you have the time and the patience, this is a real option worth knowing about.

The catch is the sheer scale of it. There are hundreds of these companies, each with its own opt-out form buried somewhere on its website, each with its own process and its own weeks-long waiting period.

And here’s the part that wears people down: many brokers quietly put your information right back a few weeks later, which means the job is never actually finished. You’d be filling out the same forms, over and over, for the rest of your life. For most of us, that’s simply not realistic.

Letting Incogni do the work

That’s why we recommend Incogni—because it hands you the result without the second job.

Here’s what that looks like for you. You get fewer strangers able to pull up where you live and who your family members are. You get less raw material sitting out there for a scammer to weaponize on the next phone call.

You get back the hours you’d have spent hunting down opt-out forms. And you get all of it on autopilot: you fill out one short form, one time, and from then on Incogni does the chasing for you.

Behind the scenes, Incogni sends removal requests to data brokers, people-search sites, and marketing databases on your behalf, and—this is the part that matters most—it keeps watch and sends the requests again whenever your information reappears. Your protection keeps working for as long as you’re a member.

It’s worth being honest about what it can and cannot do. Incogni won’t scrub every last corner of the internet, and no service that respects you would promise that the scam calls will stop overnight.

What it will do is steadily shrink the pool of information criminals are able to buy about you—and the smaller that pool, the harder you are to find, the less convincing the callers sound, and the more peace of mind comes back into your day.

For folks living on a fixed income, who have spent a lifetime carefully building their savings, that peace of mind—and the money it protects—is worth a great deal.

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Protect your information. Protect your savings.