The first call came just before Thanksgiving last year. She didn’t recognize the number, but answered anyway.
“The person said he was from the Criminal Investigation Department, which investigates drug trafficking and money laundering,” the woman recalled. He seemed to know a lot about her. The state where she and her late husband lived. his name and occupation. And her current address is Washington County, Rhode Island.
On her cell phone, he showed her a photo ID with a convincing badge and his name (something along the lines of “Frank”), as well as an article describing the supposed investigation. The 76-year-old retired woman denied any involvement.
“You can hire an expensive criminal defense attorney or work with me,” Frank told her.
“Now that I think about it, it doesn’t make sense,” the woman recently admitted. But his badge and ID convinced him to cooperate. Otherwise, “I thought they would come and arrest me.”
Frank called her every morning to find out where she was going and what she was doing. His team will be monitoring, he warned. The woman felt “terrified” and began looking around as she drove to a gardening club meeting. Was someone following her?
It was all a scam.
It is difficult to calculate the extent of economic exploitation of older people, as victims are often reluctant to report such crimes out of shame. The Federal Trade Commission reported losses of $2.4 billion in 2024, mostly due to investment fraud, romance fraud, and identity theft, but the total losses are much higher.
In 2023, AARP estimates that Americans over 60 are losing more than $28 billion annually to financial exploitation.
As the population grows and predators become increasingly resourceful, banks and investment firms are becoming the first line of defense as their numbers grow.
Frank’s first target was her account at Fidelity Investments. He instructed her to transfer approximately $250,000 to a checking account and told a financial advisor at a local office that she and her family intended to purchase real estate.
The plan died after advisers said Fidelity could not approve the deal without more information about the property.
So Frank sent her to a local branch of the Washington Trust Company to receive $70,000 in cash from a home equity line of credit. The teller quietly sent a message to the branch manager, who had known the woman and her husband for many years, and said, “We don’t hand over that much cash.”
The scam stopped when the manager took the woman to his office to talk, and the scam was reported to local police. The woman’s assets remained intact, but she was so frustrated by the experience that she did not tell her family that she was on the verge of losing much of her life savings. The New York Times is withholding her name to avoid embarrassment.
“I felt really stupid,” she said. “I felt like an idiot.”
Mary Nunes, Washington Trust’s president and chief operating officer, said financial criminals targeting seniors “are of increasing interest to us right now.”
Last fall, local community bank Washington Trust stepped up its efforts to provide financial advice to senior customers and their families, including the risks of senior fraud and exploitation. They published and distributed a booklet called “Age With Wisdom” and invited dementia experts to speak to staff.
The company is now one of 1,500 financial institutions to use BankSafe. BankSafe is a free AARP video program that trains front-line workers to spot red flags of potential elder exploitation and intervene. Everyone at the branch where the 76-year-old bank employee works had undergone training.
“Some older customers visit their banks far more often than they see their health care providers,” Noons noted.
Until recently, financial institutions were “more focused on customer autonomy,” said Pamela Teaster, an elder abuse researcher and director of the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech. Their approach, she added, was that “adults have the ability to make bad choices and we try to make them do it.”
However, changes in government and industry policies and practices are prompting further vigilance. Congress passed the Senior Citizens Safety Act in 2018, protecting banks and financial companies from legal liability if they report suspected exploitation to authorities.
That same year, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began requiring member firms to ask investors for a trusted contact person when opening or updating an account. (However, there is no obligation to provide accounts to account holders.) And starting in 2022, companies will be able to put a hold on older investors’ transactions if they suspect exploitation is involved.
About half of states have laws that allow financial institutions to reject suspicious transactions or hold them for a period of time to allow for investigation, said Gillen Gunter, director of BankSafe.
“It increases friction,” she explained. “With space and time, criminals may become anxious and move on. And potential marks have time to stop and think.”
During a six-month pilot with 82 financial institutions, Tester analyzed BankSafe data and found that participants were far more likely to report a suspected infection and save their customers money than a control group.
However, not all losses in the elderly are caused by predators. They can find themselves caught up in investment fads, rack up large amounts of debt, or make other unwise decisions, even without criminals pulling the strings or relatives plundering their accounts.
Mark Lux, co-chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, said managing finances presents complex cognitive challenges. “It takes a lot of brainpower,” he said, including “memory, remembering when bills are due, executive functioning, the ability to manage time, abstraction, and making assumptions about your future.”
He added: “Financial mistakes are often the first sign of impending dementia or neurocognitive impairment.”
For example, a 2024 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that in the five years before being diagnosed with dementia, people are more likely to miss payments and have a lower credit rating. These mistakes can reduce seniors’ access to credit and increase interest rates on loans at the very point when care costs are likely to rise.
Dr. Lux is calling on fellow physicians to recognize what he calls “age-related economic vulnerability.” The syndrome can affect even older adults with normal cognitive abilities, especially if they struggle with pre-existing medical conditions, sensory impairments, or social isolation.
And he remains skeptical about claims that the financial industry is becoming more interested in older customers. “I still think there were financial transactions carried out that should have been subject to far greater scrutiny,” he said.
Gunther said training more front-line staff and focusing on establishing trusted contacts for older customers would help, as “once money leaves an account, it’s next to impossible to get it back.” More states may enact laws that allow financial institutions to reject or place holds on suspicious transactions.
Several related bills with bipartisan support are moving through Congress. The National Strategy to Combat Fraud Act requires the FBI to coordinate efforts to protect seniors. A bill restoring the IRS deduction would at least give fraud victims the consolation of not having to pay taxes on money they no longer have.
But new weapons like artificial intelligence voice cloning (which makes a grandchild four states away who is in dire need of $5,000 in gift cards actually sound like the victim’s grandson) are keeping advocates and bankers up at night.
At the Washington Trust branch where the Rhode Island woman didn’t lose any money, employees had foiled a scam similar to the one that targeted her days earlier.
But recently, when an elderly woman withdrew $9,000 for a kitchen renovation, no one noticed the warning signs until it ended up in the hands of a scammer instead of a contractor.
New Old Age is produced in partnership with The New York Times.
