By Bria Overs

Originally appeared in Word in Black

It usually starts with a phone call from an unfamiliar number. The person on the other line says there is something wrong with your computer that needs to be fixed as soon as possible, and fortunately for you, they know how to do it — for a price. 

This so-called “tech support assistant” walks you through several steps, including one where you give your bank account or credit card information. By the end of the call, they have stolen thousands of dollars and never even fixed the non-existent issue.

Elders, or those over 60, are losing billions to fraud and scams yearly. In fact, they lost over $3.1 billion in 2022, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Elder Fraud report — an 84% increase from 2021. 

Technological advances and an aging population are creating the perfect conditions for bad actors to exploit and abuse older adults. The trend of increased victims and losses has no end in sight, but there are experts in health and justice who seek to get ahead of it.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported receiving over 88,000 complaints from elders, with an average of $35,100 lost per victim in 2022. And nearly 5,500 of those cases lost more than $100,000.

The federal government has been aware of these trends for years. Dr. Duke Han and Dr. Mark S. Lachs also noticed this growing issue through years of work with elderly patients. This prompted them to look deeper into why this is happening and how to stop it. 

Han is a professor of family medicine at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California. Lachs is the director of geriatrics for the New York Presbyterian Health System and professor of medicine at Cornell University.

Patients were giving away money, alarming families and caregivers. This “clear change in behavior,” Han says, was not the early stages of dementia as some thought. With no evidence of cognitive decline, they needed a name for what they felt was an “emerging public health issue”: age-associated financial vulnerability.

“We coined this term to try to give a name to a syndrome that may be either something that precedes cognitive decline and dementia or something else,” Han says. “I think people have gravitated to it because it has helped people understand what might be going on in certain older adults.”

Elders are Collectively Losing Millions

The IC3 started reporting elder fraud, focusing on cybercrime, in 2018, after Congress passed the Elder Abuse Prevention and Prosecution Act in 2017. The law requires several federal and state departments to collect and report data about schemes to exploit older people.

In the last three years, the number of victims has declined; however, the amount of money lost continues to climb.

“We receive hundreds to thousands of complaints daily,” Rebecca Keithley, national program coordinator of the Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative, tells Word In Black. “What the team does is they intake, and they analyze. The big benefit of that is trend analysis — which will point us to where we should allocate resources.”

Keithley says the center also uses the complaints to identify where threats are coming from and by whom. “A lot of times, we’re able to piece different complaints together based upon the information provided. It’s a very powerful tool.”

Among a list of 29 crime types, elders were mainly victims of customer support or call center impersonation, non-payment and non-delivery fraud, data breaches, romance scams, cryptocurrency scams, and extortion. Investment and cryptocurrency fraud incurred the highest losses at more than $990 million and $828 million, respectively.

“In recent years, we identified that there is a big problem with tech support scams and call centers emanating from the country of India, as well as romance scams and confidence-type scams emanating from Western Africa,” Keithley says. To address this, the Department of Justice and the FBI assigned “dedicated personnel” to New Delhi, India and Accra, Ghana to “help work with international law enforcement to identify, disrupt, and dismantle threat actors.”

Preventing Fraud and Protecting Elders

Sometimes, it is not a lost cause if scammers get ahold of money and other assets. The IC3 established a Recovery Asset Team (RAT) in 2018 that works with financial institutions and local FBI offices to assist with the “freezing of funds for victims who made transfers to domestic accounts under fraudulent pretenses.” 

But the goal is to get ahead of these situations and prevent age-associated financial vulnerability before it happens, starting with spotting red flags and changes.

In one example, Han says family members should pay close attention to elders when they “go from being really tight with money to being much more loose with money.”

Here are a few steps families and caregivers can take to protect an older adult from fraud and scams:

  • Get educated on existing threats
  • Become a trusted third-party contact at financial institutions
  • Let their primary care physicians and other medical professionals know about any concerns
  • Practice good “social media hygiene” and monitor online activity
  • Do not answer phone calls from unknown numbers or numbers you do not recognize
  • Do not engage with pop-up messages on the internet

 “Anything that plays on your emotions — stop, take a step back, and call a trusted person in your life or call law enforcement,” Keithley says. “Scammers play off of those heightened emotions, and that’s why they’re so successful.”