Around this time every year, the FBI publishes its annual Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report.

The FBI established the IC3 25 years ago when internet crimes, scams and frauds were just sprouting their digital roots.

In 2000, its first year of operations, the center received about 2,000 complaints in a month.

Move the clock forward to 2025, and now the same center is fielding more than 2,000 complaints every day.

For American seniors, the digital landscape continues to be an unlimited playground for common criminals to rob, cheat and steal with impunity.

Scammers operate from all over the world, but the top three destinations for fraudulent wire-transfers are now Hong Kong, Vietnam and Mexico.

I sat in an FBI briefing a few years ago where an agent explained that once a senior loses money to an internet scammer, the funds are usually unrecoverable and lost forever.

The agent stressed the best defense a senior has against computer-based crime is education and information.

Knowing how to spot and avoid a scam requires diligence, attention to detail and awareness every time you toggle your computer on or use your smartphone.

In the fight against elder scams, the agent said “information is everything.”

American senior citizens — those 60 years and older — continue to score at the top of age groups in terms of scam victims and the amount of money lost.

In 2024, seniors reported losses to the FBI totaling $4.8 billion. Which brings us back to why older American adults continue to be scam targets for cyber crooks around the world.

• We trust. We were brought up in a culture of trust, and it’s a hard habit to break. If someone says they are texting from a government agency or a bank, we tend to pay serious attention. The problem is, there is no way of truly knowing nowadays who is actually generating that call or message. Sad to say, but the senior who continues to automatically trust is a bigger scam target than ever.

• We are not technologically “savvy.” Many of us left the workforce for retirement long before every job came with a computer and a smartphone. Information technology marches forward with advances in “apps,” software, hardware, bits and bytes, hard drives, thumb drives, WiFi, the “cloud” and, now to our collective peril, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. The less we understand about all this stuff, the greater the risk of messing around with any of it.

• We have most of the money in America. It’s common knowledge in the world of scammers that American seniors possess more than 70% of the wealth in the United States. Lifetimes of frugality, earning great credit scores, saving and investing have made us fat, lucrative targets for scammers from Akron to Timbuktu.

So, don’t be such a target. Don’t trust anything coming from your smartphone or the internet. If it sounds too good to be true — it is.

If you receive a call from a government agency — hang up because the government never calls.

If anyone is threatening you about anything — disengage and call the police.

Before you run out and buy $5,000 worth of gift cards or cryptocurrency to send to someone in an emergency, stop what you are doing and call a friend before you throw your money away.

Read everything you can about scams and frauds — information is everything.

Print out the FBI’s latest IC3 report for yourself and read it, cover to cover.

You’ll gain an appreciation for the enormity of the scam scourge, how it’s growing and how you can expect the arrival of a fraudster on your own digital doorstep.

Visit the FBI’s IC3 website at https://www.ic3.gov/ and download the 2024 Internet Crime Report.

Ah, the snow is now a thing of the past for at least a few months, and the Valley has turned green again. Enjoy the beauty of the season, turn off your not-so-trustworthy computer and go outside.

This area is one of the country’s hidden gems. We have a wonderful climate and, by and large, damaging weather seems to veer around us, sparing us from serious storms. Enjoy our great area! And remember to keep yourself safe, informed and your nest eggs locked up tight.