Sophisticated overseas criminals are stealing tens of billions of dollars from Americans every year, a crime wave projected to get worse as the U.S. population ages and technology like AI makes it easier than ever to perpetrate fraud and get away with it.
Internet and telephone scams have grown “exponentially,” said Kathy Stokes, director of fraud prevention at AARP’s Fraud Watch Network. This overwhelms police and prosecutors, who catch and convict relatively few perpetrators.
“We are at a crisis level in fraud in society,” Stokes said. “So many people have joined the fray because it is pretty easy to be a criminal. They don’t have to follow any rules. And you can make a lot of money, and then there’s very little chance of getting caught.”
A recent case from Ohio, in which a scammer targeted an 81-year-old man and allegedly responded with violence, illustrates the law enforcement challenge.
Police say the man fatally shot an Uber driver after wrongly assuming she was in on a plot to extract $12,000 in supposed bond money for a relative. According to authorities, the driver fell victim to the same scammer and was dispatched to the home midway between Dayton and Columbus to pick up a package for delivery.
Homeowner William Brock was charged with murder in the fatal March 25 shooting of Lo-Letha Hall, but the scammer who threatened Brock over the phone and set the tragic chain of events in motion remains on the loose more than three months later. Brock pleaded not guilty, saying he was in fear for his life.
Online and telephone rackets have become so commonplace that law enforcement agencies and adult protective services don’t have the resources to keep up.
“It’s a little bit like drinking from a fire hose,” said Brady Finta, a former FBI agent who supervised elder fraud investigations. “There’s just so much of it, logistically and reasonably, it’s almost impossible to overcome right now.”
Grifts can also be challenging to investigate, particularly ones that originate overseas. Stolen funds are quickly converted into hard-to-track cryptocurrency or siphoned into foreign bank accounts.
Some police departments don’t take financial scams as seriously as other crimes, and victims wind up discouraged and demoralized, according to Paul Greenwood, who spent 22 years prosecuting elder financial abuse cases in San Diego.
“There’s a lot of law enforcement who think that because a victim sends money voluntarily through gift cards or wire transfers, or for buying crypto, they’re engaging in a consensual transaction,” said Greenwood, who travels the country teaching police how to spot fraud. “And that is a big mistake because it’s not. It’s not consensual. They’ve been defrauded.”
The U.S. Justice Department says it does not impose a blanket monetary threshold for federal prosecution of elder financial abuse. However, it confirmed that some 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices nationwide may set their thresholds, prioritizing cases with more victims or more significant economic impact. Federal prosecutors file hundreds of elder fraud and abuse cases annually.
A 2023 AARP study calculated that Americans over 60 lose $28.3 billion annually to fraud. The Federal Trade Commission, seeking to account for unreported losses, estimated fraudsters stole a staggering $137 billion in 2022, including $48 billion from older adults. The authors of that study acknowledged a “considerable degree of uncertainty.”
In San Diego, 80-year-old William Bortz said criminals stole his family’s nest egg of almost $700,000 in an elaborate scheme involving a nonexistent Amazon order, a fake “refund processing center” in Hong Kong, doctored bank statements and an instruction that Bortz needed to “synchronize bank accounts” in order to get his money back.
“I understand now why so much elder abuse fraud is never reported. Because when you look back at it, you think, ‘How could I have been 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 diligently tried to track down the overseas scammer and recover the money but ran into multiple dead ends. The family blames Bortz’s bank, which Williams said ignored numerous red flags and facilitated several large wire transfers by her father for 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 be given the tools they need and our banks to improve because they are the first line of defense.”