The first call came just before Thanksgiving last year. She didn’t know the phone number, but answered anyway.
“The person said he was an officer in the criminal investigation department, which investigates drug trafficking and money laundering,” the woman recalled. He seemed to know a lot about her: the states where she and her late husband had lived; his name and profession; and her current address in Washington County, RI
On her phone, he showed her a convincing ID and photo ID with his name on it (“‘Frank’ something”) and an article describing the alleged investigation. The woman, a 76-year-old pensioner, denied any involvement.
“You can hire a very expensive criminal defense attorney or you can work with me,” Frank told her.
“If you think about it, it doesn’t make sense,” the woman recently admitted. But the ID card and ID card convinced her and she agreed to work together. Otherwise, “I thought they were going to come and arrest me.”
Frank called every morning to find out where she was going and what she was doing. His team would be watching, he warned. The woman, feeling “petrified,” began looking around as she drove to garden club meetings. Was someone following her?
It was all a scam.
Because victims often shy away from reporting such crimes due to feelings of shame, the extent of financial exploitation of older people is difficult to quantify. The Federal Trade Commission puts reported losses in 2024 at $2.4 billion, largely due to investment and romance scams and impersonations, with overall losses much higher.
Americans over 60 will lose more than $28 billion annually to financial exploitation in 2023, according to AARP.
As these numbers rise, the population ages and predators become more resourceful, banks and investment firms become the first line of defense.
Frank’s first target: her account at Fidelity Investments. He instructed her to transfer approximately $250,000 to her checking account and told the financial advisor at her local office that she and her family planned to purchase real estate.
That plan fell apart when the adviser said Fidelity couldn’t approve the transaction without more information about the property.
So Frank sent her to her local Washington Trust Company branch to withdraw $70,000 in cash from a home equity line of credit. “We don’t spend that much in cash,” the cashier said, writing quietly to the store manager, who had known the woman and her husband for years.
The manager escorted the woman to her office to talk to her and the scam ended there with a call to the local police. The woman’s fortune remained intact, but the experience proved so humiliating that she didn’t even tell her family how close she came to losing much of her savings. The New York Times is withholding her name to spare her embarrassment.
“I felt so stupid,” she said. “I felt like an idiot.”
Financial predators targeting the elderly “represent an increased focus for us now,” said Mary Noons, president and chief operating officer of Washington Trust.
Washington Trust, a regional community bank, increased its efforts last fall to educate older customers and their families about finances, including the dangers of fraud and elder exploitation. It published and distributed a booklet called “Age With Wisdom” and brought in a dementia expert to speak to employees.
And it became one of the 1,500 financial institutions to date that have used BankSafe, a free AARP video program that trains frontline workers to recognize warning signs that indicate possible elder exploitation and to intervene. Everyone in the branch where the 76-year-old banked had taken part in the training.
“Some older customers visit their bank much more often than their doctor,” Ms Noons pointed out.
Until a few years ago, financial institutions placed “more emphasis on customer autonomy,” said Pamela Teaster, director of the Virginia Tech Center for Gerontology and a researcher on elder abuse. Her approach was: “An adult has the ability to make bad decisions, and we let them make those decisions,” she added.
But changes in government and industry policies and practices have led to greater vigilance. Congress passed the Senior Safe Act in 2018, which shields banks and financial companies from liability if they report suspected exploitation to authorities.
This year, the financial industry regulator began requiring member firms to ask for a trusted contact when investors open or update accounts. (However, the account holder is not required to provide one.) And since 2022, companies have been able to withhold transactions from older investors if they suspect exploitation.
About half of states have enacted laws that allow financial institutions to reject suspicious transactions or impose blocks for certain periods of time to allow for investigations, said Jilenne Gunther, the director of BankSafe.
“It increases friction,” she explained. “With space and time, the criminal worries and may move on. And the potential perpetrator has time to pause and think.”
Dr. Teaster’s analysis of BankSafe data during a six-month pilot at 82 financial institutions found that participants were much more likely to report suspected cases and save customers money than a control group.
However, not all losses of older adults are due to predation. They can get caught up in investment trends, take on too much debt, or make other unwise decisions of their own accord, even without criminals pulling the strings or relatives plundering their accounts.
Managing finances presents complex cognitive challenges, said Dr. Mark Lachs, co-chief of geriatrics and palliative care at Weill Cornell Medicine. “It requires a lot of brain power,” he said, including: “memory, remembering that a bill is due. Executive functioning, the ability to manage one’s time. Abstraction, hypothesizing about one’s future.”
He added: “Financial mistakes are often the first sign of impending dementia or a neurocognitive disorder.”
For example, a 2024 study by the New York Federal Reserve found that there is an increased likelihood of default and worsening credit scores in the five years before a diagnosis of dementia. These mistakes can limit seniors’ access to credit and increase their loan interest rates at the very time when care costs are likely to skyrocket.
Dr. Lachs has urged his fellow physicians to recognize what he calls “age-related financial vulnerability,” a syndrome that can affect even normally cognition older people, especially if they struggle with medical illnesses, sensory deficits or social isolation.
And he remains skeptical of the financial industry’s claims to pay more attention to its oldest customers. “I still see that certain financial transactions were carried out that should have been subject to far more scrutiny,” he said.
Training more frontline staff and a greater focus on building trusted contacts for older customers would help, Ms. Gunther said, because “once the money leaves the account, it’s almost impossible to ever get it back.” More states could enact laws that allow financial institutions to reject or impose blocks on suspicious transactions.
Several related bills with bipartisan support are also making their way through Congress. The National Strategy for Combating Scams Act requires the FBI to take the lead in coordinating efforts to protect the elderly. A bill restoring an IRS deduction would at least provide the consolation of exempting fraud victims from paying taxes on money they no longer have.
New weapons like artificial intelligence voice cloning — where the supposed grandson four states away in desperate need of $5,000 in gift cards actually sounds like the victim’s grandson — are keeping advocates and bankers sleepless nights.
At the Washington Trust branch where the Rhode Island woman didn’t lose her money, employees had stopped a scam similar to the one that targeted her just days earlier.
But more recently, no one noticed any danger signs when an elderly woman withdrew $9,000 for a kitchen renovation until the money went to a scammer rather than a contractor.
The New Old Age is produced in collaboration with KFF Health News.