The scammers are winning.
Sophisticated foreign criminals steal tens of billions of dollars from Americans every year, a crime wave that is predicted to worsen as the U.S. population ages and as technologies like AI make it easier than ever to perpetrate fraud and get away with it. unpunished.
Internet and phone scams have grown “exponentially,” overwhelming police and prosecutors, who catch and convict relatively few of the perpetrators, said Kathy Stokes, fraud prevention director for AARP’s Fraud Watch Network.
Victims rarely get their money back, including older people who have lost their life savings to romance scams, grandparent scams, tech support scams, and other common scams.
“We are at a crisis level of fraud in society,” Stokes said. “So many people joined the fray because it’s so easy to be a criminal. They don’t need to follow any rules. And you can make a lot of money and there is very little chance of getting caught.”
A recent case in Ohio, in which an 81-year-old man was targeted by a scammer and allegedly responded with violence, illustrates the challenge of law enforcement.
Police say the man fatally shot an Uber driver after wrongly assuming she was planning to extract $12,000 in alleged bonds for a relative. The driver was a victim of the same scammerdispatched to the home halfway between Dayton and Columbus to pick up a package for delivery, authorities said.
Owner William Brock was charged with murder in the fatal shooting at Lo-Letha Hall on March 25, but the scammer who threatened Brock over the phone and set off the tragic chain of events remains at large more than three months later.
Brock pleaded not guilty, saying he feared for his life.
Online and telephone rackets have become so common that law enforcement agencies and adult protective services lack the resources to keep up with them.
“It’s a little like drinking from a fire hose,” said Brady Finta, a former FBI agent who oversaw elder fraud investigations. “There’s so much, logistically and reasonably, that it’s almost impossible to overcome right now.”
Frauds can also be difficult to investigate, especially those originating abroad, with stolen funds quickly converted into hard-to-trace cryptocurrencies or diverted to foreign bank accounts.
Some police departments don’t take financial fraud as seriously as other crimes and victims end up discouraged and demoralized, according to Paul Greenwood, who spent 22 years prosecuting elder financial abuse cases in San Diego.
“There are many law enforcement officers who think that because a victim voluntarily sends money through gift cards or bank transfers, or to buy crypto, they are actually involved in a consensual transaction,” said Greenwood, who travels the country teaching police how to detect fraud. “And that’s a big mistake because it’s not. It’s not consensual. They were defrauded.”
Federal prosecutors typically don’t get involved unless the fraud reaches a certain dollar amount, Greenwood said.
The U.S. Department of Justice says it does not impose a general monetary limit on federal elder financial abuse prosecutions. But he confirmed that some of the 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country can set their own limits, giving priority to cases where there are more victims or a greater financial impact. Federal prosecutors file hundreds of fraud and elder abuse cases annually.
The Federal Trade Commission says the “vast majority” of fraud goes unreported. Victims are often reluctant to come forward.
A 74-year-old woman recently accused of robbing a credit union north of Cincinnati was the victim of an online scam, according to his family. Authorities say they believe the woman was the victim of a scammer, but there is no record of her making a formal police report.
“These people are very good at what they do and they are very good at scamming people and getting money out of them,” said Fairview Township, Ohio, police Sgt. Brandon McCroskey, who investigated the robbery. “I’ve seen people almost want to fight the police and bank tellers because… they believe they need to get this money out.”
Older people hold more wealth as a group and are a perfect target for scammers. The impact can be devastating, as many of these victims are past their working years and do not have much time to recover their losses.
Senior Fraud Complaints to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center increased 14% last yearwith losses increasing 11% to $3.4 billion, according to a recent FBI report.
Other estimates put the annual loss much higher.
A 2023 AARP study calculated that Americans over the age of 60 lose US$28.3 billion every year 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, William Bortz, 80, said criminals stole his family’s nearly $700,000 nest egg in an elaborate scheme involving a nonexistent order from Amazon, a fake “refund processing center” in Hong Kong. , falsified bank statements and an instruction that Bortz needed to “sync bank accounts” to get his money back.
Bortz’s scammer was relentless and persuasive, harassing him with dozens of phone calls and, at one point, taking control of his computer.
Even though he was the victim of a crime, Bortz struggles with self-blame.
“I understand now why so many elder abuse frauds are never reported. Because when you look back, 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 were diligent in trying to track down the foreign scammer and recover the money, but they ran into several dead ends. The family blames Bortz’s bank, which Williams said ignored several warning signs and facilitated several large wire transfers by his father over the course of eight days. The bank denied any wrongdoing and the family’s case against it was dismissed.
“Scammers are getting better,” Williams said. “We need our law enforcement agencies to be given the tools they need and we need our banks to improve because they are the first line of defense.”
The Justice Department says the industry needs to do more, saying the U.S. cannot move forward to resolve the problem.
“Private industry — including the technology, retail, banking, fintech and telecommunications sectors — must make it more difficult for fraudsters to defraud victims and launder victims’ proceeds,” the agency said in a statement to The Associated Press.
Banking industry officials told a Senate subcommittee in May that they are investing heavily in new technologies to prevent fraud, “and some are very promising.” The American Bankers Association says it is working on a program to coordinate real-time communication between banks to better flag suspicious activity and reduce the flow of stolen funds.
But sector officials said banks cannot prevent fraud alone. They said the U.S. needs a comprehensive national strategy to combat coup plotters, calling the federal government’s current efforts disjointed and uncoordinated.
Law enforcement agencies and industry need to join forces to combat fraud more quickly and efficiently, said Finta, the former FBI agent who launched a nonprofit called the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center to cultivate better cooperation between law enforcement and large corporations like Walmart, Amazon. and Google.
“There are very, very smart people and there are very powerful, wealthy companies who want this to end,” he said. “So I think we have the ability to make a bigger impact and help our brothers and sisters-in-law. authorities who are fighting this tsunami of fraud.”
