The first call came just before Thanksgiving last year. She didn’t recognize the phone number, but she answered anyway.
“The person said he was an officer of the Department of Criminal Investigations looking into 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 occupation; and her current address in Washington County, R.I.
On her phone, he showed her a convincing badge and a photo ID with his name (“‘Frank’ something”), plus an article describing the supposed investigation. The woman, a 76-year-old retiree, denied any involvement.
“You can hire a very expensive criminal defense attorney, or you can cooperate with me,” Frank told her.
“Now, when you think about it, it doesn’t make any sense,” the woman acknowledged recently. But persuaded by the badge and ID, she agreed to cooperate. Otherwise, “I thought they were going to come and arrest me.”
Frank called each morning to learn where she was going, what she was doing. His team would be watching, he warned. The woman, feeling “petrified,” started looking around as she drove to garden club meetings. Was somebody following her?
It was all a scam.
Because victims’ sense of shame often leaves them reluctant to report such crimes, the extent of elder financial exploitation is hard to calculate. The Federal Trade Commission put reported losses at $2.4 billion in 2024, largely driven by investment and romance scams and impersonations, with total losses much higher.
Americans over 60 lose more than $28 billion annually to financial exploitation, AARP estimated in 2023.
As those numbers rise, because the population is aging and predators are growing increasingly resourceful, banks and investment firms are becoming the first line of defense.
Frank’s initial target: her account at Fidelity Investments. He instructed her to shift about $250,000 into her checking account, telling the financial adviser at her local office that she and her family intended to buy real estate.
That scheme fizzled when the adviser said Fidelity could not approve the transaction without more information on the property.
So Frank sent her to her local branch of Washington Trust Company to take $70,000 in cash from a home-equity line of credit. “We don’t give out that much in cash,” the teller said, quietly messaging the branch manager, who had known the woman and her husband for years.
The manager ushered the woman into her office to talk, and the scam stopped there, with a call to the local police. The woman’s assets remained intact, but the experience proved so mortifying that she has not told even her family how close she had come to losing much of her life savings. The New York Times is withholding her name to spare her embarrassment.
“I felt so stupid,” she said. “I felt like a fool.”
Financial predators targeting older adults represents “a heightened focus for us now,” said Mary Noons, president and chief operating officer of Washington Trust.
A regional community bank, Washington Trust cranked up its efforts last fall to advise older customers and their families about finances, including the dangers of elder fraud and exploitation. It published and distributed a booklet called “Age With Wisdom” and brought in an expert on dementia to speak with staff members.
And it became one of the 1,500 financial institutions to date that have used BankSafe, a free AARP video program that trains frontline employees to spot the red flags indicating possible elder exploitation and to intervene. Everyone at the branch where the 76-year-old banked had taken the training.
“Some older customers visit their bank far more frequently than they see their health care providers,” Ms. Noons pointed out.
Until recent years, financial institutions placed “more of an emphasis on the autonomy of the client,” said Pamela Teaster, director of the Virginia Tech Center for Gerontology and an elder abuse researcher. Their approach was, “an adult has the capacity to make poor choices, and we’re going to let them make them,” she added.
But changes in government and industry policies and practices have encouraged greater vigilance. Congress passed the Senior Safe Act in 2018, protecting banks and financial firms from liability if they reported suspected exploitation to authorities.
That year the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority began requiring member firms to ask for a trusted contact person when investors open or update accounts. (The account holder isn’t obliged to provide one, however.) And since 2022, it has allowed firms to place holds on older investors’ transactions if they suspected exploitation was involved.
About half of states have enacted laws that permit financial institutions to deny suspicious transactions or impose holds for specified periods to allow investigations, said Jilenne Gunther, the director of BankSafe.
“It adds friction,” she explained. “With space and time, the criminal gets worried and might move on. And the potential mark has time to stop and think.”
Dr. Teaster’s analysis of data from BankSafe, during a six-month pilot in 82 financial institutions, found that participants were much more likely to report suspected cases and save customers money than a control group was.
Not all of older adults’ losses result from predators, however. They can, on their own, get caught up in investment fads, take on too much debt or make otherwise unwise decisions, even without criminals pulling the strings or relatives looting their accounts.
Managing finances presents complex cognitive challenges, said Dr. Mark Lachs, co-chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. “It requires a lot of brain,” he said, including: “Memory, remembering that a bill is due. Executive function, the ability to manage your time. Abstraction, hypothesizing about your future.”
He added, “Financial errors are not infrequently the first sign of impending dementia or a neurocognitive disorder.”
A 2024 study by the New York Federal Reserve, for instance, found an increased probability of delinquent payments and deteriorating credit ratings in the five years before a dementia diagnosis. Those errors can reduce seniors’ access to credit and raise their interest rates on loans at the very point when caregiving expenses are likely to soar.
Dr. Lachs has called on fellow doctors to recognize what he calls Age-Associated Financial Vulnerability, a syndrome that can affect even older people with normal cognition, especially if they contend with medical illnesses, sensory deficits or social isolation.
And he remains skeptical about the financial industry’s claims of heightened attention to its oldest customers. “I still see concerning financial transactions executed that should have received far greater scrutiny,” he said.
Training more frontline staff members and increasing emphasis on establishing trusted contacts for older customers would help, Ms. Gunther said, because “once the money leaves the account, it’s near impossible to ever retrieve it.” More states could enact laws allowing financial institutions to deny suspicious transactions or impose holds.
Several related bills with bipartisan support are also working their way through Congress. The National Strategy for Combating Scams Act would require the F.B.I. to take the lead in coordinating efforts to protect seniors. A bill that restores an I.R.S. deduction would at least provide the consolation of excusing scam victims from paying taxes on money they no longer have.
However, new weapons like artificial-intelligence voice cloning — in which the supposed grandson four states away who urgently needs $5,000 in gift cards actually sounds like the victim’s grandson — keep advocates and bankers awake at night.
In the Washington Trust branch where the Rhode Island woman didn’t lose her money, employees just days earlier had stopped a scam similar to the one that had targeted her.
But more recently, nobody spotted any danger signs when an older woman withdrew $9,000 for a kitchen renovation, until it went to a scammer instead of a contractor.
The New Old Age is produced through a partnership with KFF Health News.
The post Banks Are Becoming Bulwarks for Vulnerable Seniors appeared first on New York Times.
