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The scammers are winning.
Sophisticated foreign criminals steal tens of billions of dollars from Americans every year, a crime wave that is only expected to get worse as the U.S. population ages and technology like AI makes it easier than ever to commit fraud and get away with it.
Internet and telephone fraud has grown “exponentially,” overwhelming police and prosecutors, who can catch and convict relatively few perpetrators, said Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention at AARP’s Fraud Watch Network.
Victims rarely get their money back, including elderly people who have lost their life savings to romance scams, grandparent scams, tech support fraud and other common scams.
“We are at a crisis level for fraud in society,” Stokes said. “So many people have joined the fight because it’s quite easy to be a criminal. They don’t have to follow any rules. And you can make a lot of money with it, and then the chance of being caught is very small.”
A recent case from Ohio, in which an 81-year-old man was targeted by a scammer and allegedly responded with violence, illustrates the challenge for law enforcement.
The police say the man fatally shot an Uber driver after falsely believing she was involved in a plot to obtain $12,000 in purported bond money for a relative. The driver fell victim to the same scammersent to the home halfway between Dayton and Columbus to pick up a package for delivery, according to authorities.
Homeowner William Brock was charged with murder in the fatal shooting at Lo-Letha Hall on March 25, but the scammer who threatened Brock by phone and set off the tragic chain of events remains at large more than three months later.
Brock pleaded not guilty and said he feared for his life.
Benefit scammers
Online and phone fraud have become so common that law enforcement agencies and adult protective services don’t have the resources to keep up.
“It’s kind of like drinking from a fire hose,” said Brady Finta, a former FBI agent who oversaw investigations into elder fraud. “There’s so much of it, logistically and reasonably, that it’s almost impossible to overcome at this point.”
Grifts can also be difficult to investigate, especially if they originate abroad, with stolen funds quickly converted into hard-to-trace cryptocurrency or transferred to offshore bank accounts.
Some police departments don’t take financial fraud as seriously as other crimes, and victims become discouraged and demoralized, said Paul Greenwood, who has prosecuted older financial abuse cases in San Diego for 22 years.
“There are a lot of law enforcement agencies that think that because a victim voluntarily sends money through gift cards or through wire transfers, or to purchase cryptocurrency, that they are essentially engaging in a consensual transaction,” says Greenwood, who travels the country teaching the police. how to detect fraud. “And that’s a big mistake, because it’s not. It’s not a consensus. They have been scammed.”
Federal prosecutors typically don’t intervene unless the fraud reaches a certain dollar amount, Greenwood said.
The U.S. Department of Justice says it is not imposing a blanket monetary threshold for federal prosecution of financial abuse of the elderly. But it confirmed that some of the 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country may set their own thresholds, prioritizing cases where there are more victims or a greater financial impact. Federal prosecutors file hundreds of elder fraud and abuse cases every year.
The Federal Trade Commission says the “vast majority” of frauds go unreported. Victims are often hesitant to come forward.
Recently a 74 year old woman accused of robbing a credit union north of Cincinnati was the victim of an online scam, according to her family. Authorities say they believe the woman was targeted by a scammer, but there is no evidence she has been formally charged.
“These people are very good at what they do, and they are very good at deceiving people and taking money,” said police Sgt. Fairview Township, Ohio. Brandon McCroskey, who investigated the robbery. “I’ve seen people almost want to fight the police and the bank tellers with their fists because they… believe in their heads that they have to get this money out.”
A devastating plan
As a group, older people own more wealth and are a ripe target for scammers. The impact can be devastating, as many of these victims are out of their working years and do not have much time to make up for the losses.
Older fraud complaints at the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center increased by 14% last yearwith losses increasing 11% to $3.4 billion, according to a recent FBI report.
According to other estimates, the annual loss is much higher.
A 2023 AARP study calculated that Americans are over 60 years old loss $28.3 billion to fraud every year. The Federal Trade Commission, which tries to account for unreported losses, estimated fraudsters stolen as much as $137 billion by 2022, including $48 billion from older adults. The authors of that study acknowledged a “significant degree of uncertainty.”
In San Diego, 80-year-old William Bortz said criminals stole his family’s piggy bank worth nearly $700,000 in an elaborate scheme involving a non-existent Amazon order, a fake “refund processing center” in Hong Kong, falsified bank statements and an instruction that Bortz had to “sync bank accounts” to get his money back.
Bortz’s scammer was ruthless and persuasive, harassing him with dozens of phone calls and at one point taking control of his computer.
Although he is the victim of a crime, Bortz struggles with self-blame.
“I now understand why so much elder abuse fraud is never reported. Because when you look back on it, you think, ‘How could I be so stupid?’” said Bortz, who retired after a career in banking, financial services and real estate.
His daughter, Ave Williams, said local police and the FBI tried diligently to track down the overseas scammer and recover the money, but they encountered several dead ends. The family blames Bortz’s bank, which Williams says ignored several warning signs and facilitated several large wire transfers by her father over the course of eight days. The bank denied wrongdoing and the family’s lawsuit against it was dismissed.
“The scammers are getting better,” Williams said. “We need our law enforcement to get the tools they need, and we need our banks to get better because they are the first line of defense.”
The Justice Department argues that the industry must do more and says the US cannot solve the problem through prosecution.
“The private sector – including the technology, retail, banking, fintech and telecommunications sectors – must make it harder for fraudsters to defraud victims and harder to launder victims’ proceeds,” the agency said in a statement to The Associated Press.
A way forward
Banking industry officials told a Senate subcommittee in May that this is the case invest heavily in new technologies to stop fraud, “and some hold great promise.” The American Bankers Association says it is working on a program to coordinate real-time communications between banks to better identify suspicious activity and reduce the flow of stolen money.
But industry officials said banks cannot prevent fraud on their own. They said the U.S. needs an overarching national strategy to combat scammers, and called the federal government’s current efforts disjointed and uncoordinated.
Law enforcement agencies and the industry must join forces to fight fraud faster and more efficiently, said Finta, the former FBI agent who founded a nonprofit called the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center to improve cooperation between law enforcement agencies and major corporations like Walmart , Amazon to achieve. and Googling.
“There are very, very smart people and there are very powerful, wealthy companies who want this to stop,” he said. “So I believe we have the ability to make a greater impact and help our brothers and sisters in law enforcement who are struggling with this tsunami of fraud.”
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