As my father approached his 90s, the daily stack in his mailbox grew—a dozen appeals for donations some days. He was impossibly frugal with himself: frayed canvas shoes and a tattered windbreaker for all seasons. He abhorred wastefulness. He would put down the phone when solicitors called. But the entreaties for money that flooded his mailbox, including many from firefighter, law-enforcement, and veterans’ funds, typically wound up on his desk. Often, generosity eclipsed suspicion, meaning that he sent out a lot of smallish checks. This despite his telling me, in his early 90s, “I suspect they sell your information and then everyone asks you for money.”
The checks my father wrote did him no harm, but knowing when it’s safe to give away money is not easy. This is just one aspect of an important yet overlooked threat to older adults: financial exploitation. It can take many forms. Fundraising requests that seem legitimate might cross the line into excessive pressure. Sometimes existing relationships, such as with an accountant, turn predatory. Family members and friends, too, take financial advantage of older people in their life. Then there are strangers who devise outright scams to prey on aging Americans, posing as charities, relatives, even potential romantic partners.
I was introduced to these issues as a civil-fraud prosecutor and in launching an initiative at the Department of Justice focused on protecting older people. After I left DOJ, my research, including for my book, The Measure of Our Age, revealed to me the often invisible harms that older adults can face when targeted for their money.
We don’t know the full scale of the problem. But we do know that victims of financial exploitation are disproportionately over the age of 60; people in their 70s report higher median losses than their younger counterparts, and people 80 and older report the highest median losses of all. Estimates for the cumulative amount of money lost annually to elder financial exploitation vary widely—from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of dollars. The numbers are hard to pin down in part because people over 60 are less likely to report fraud in the first place. What’s clear is that the pool of potential targets is getting bigger: People 85 and older are the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, slated to more than double from 6.6 million in 2019 to 14.4 million in 2040. Our society is not remotely prepared to protect this growing demographic group from financial exploitation.
Being exploited is obviously an injustice in its own right. But less obvious are the extent and gravity of the harm that these incidents inflict on older adults. Some victims lose their houses or treasured belongings such as wedding rings, or can no longer pay for care they need. Some cower in their own homes, fearing theft and threats by family members seeking funds to support a drug addiction. The financial loss can compound and hasten declines in physical and mental health, tipping lives from independence to dependence.
Mark Lachs, a co-chief of geriatrics and palliative medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, has found that elder mistreatment, including financial exploitation, triples rates of premature mortality and quadruples nursing-home admissions among victims. Falling for a scam, regardless of one’s age, can usher in embarrassment, hopelessness, and dread—How could I have been so stupid?—and cause severe stress or even sometimes lead to suicide. Think of the impact on older people like Jenga late in the game: There are wobbles, but the tower still stands. Then some event yanks out a crucial block, toppling the structure.
When an older person’s assets are stolen, others also suffer. Adult children might lose a family home, see their inheritance dwindle, or be thrust into caregiving. Trying to protect an older person from exploitation and other mistreatment can cause significant distress for concerned relatives or friends who want to help.
Anyone can become the victim of financial exploitation, but cognitive impairment increases risk. As memory and executive function decline with age, so too can financial capacity, the ability to, for example, pay bills or manage assets. In some people, financial capacity declines long before any diagnosis of dementia. When someone calls unexpectedly to ask for money, our brain parses thousands of social cues. “Gut feelings,” in fact emanating from the brain’s anterior insula, send Something’s not right here! signals. Aging can dim those signals, or mute them altogether, making some older people less suspicious. Isolation and loneliness, epidemics among older Americans, also exacerbate risk.
The most egregious scams rely on countless fictions, which artificial intelligence and other technologies will make only more real-seeming. Con artists might impersonate a cop, a lawyer, or hospital staff reporting a fake emergency to trigger fear. Being “Grandma’ed” has entered the lexicon to describe people getting calls to help a supposed grandchild in crisis who needs cash right away. The government reported a surge in scammers demanding money to resolve false Social Security–related problems in 2019 and 2020; the greater the victim’s age, the more money they lost. “Romance” frauds, also known as “sweetheart” scams, are the type of stranger scheme to which people 60 and older lose the most money. Many con artists use religious dating sites such as BigChurch, Christian Mingle, and Jdate to find people who can’t imagine that they might be swindled by someone who shares their faith.
Some scammers targeting the elderly pose as charitable organizations. But even development professionals from real and respected institutions—universities, advocacy organizations, cultural groups, political entities—might not stop to consider whether a potential donor has financial capacity and thus whether aggressively pushing them to give is ethical or fair.
Then there are people who start out in legitimate roles but become predators. Ron Long, who co-founded a Wells Fargo Advisors initiative to train employees to detect and respond to elder exploitation, told me about a hairdresser who had become both power of attorney and sole beneficiary for several wealthy clients. Lawyers, brokers—virtually anyone in whom an elder places trust—can veer toward deception. “All it takes,” Long said, “is for one person who knows their financial and cognitive situation to be dishonest.”
Sherrie Kaplan, an assistant vice chancellor at UC Irvine’s medical school, told me about how her late mother was exploited through a home-repair project. Despite having heart disease and mild dementia, and having lost her husband, Kaplan’s mother had done well living on her own. Then her bathtub backed up. Not wanting to burden her children, she picked a plumber from the phone book. The initial estimate of $800 ballooned to more than $8,000. The job grew too. Suddenly men were digging up her driveway. Then came dunning calls and workers banging on her door demanding payment. She didn’t tell her kids for fear that they’d think she couldn’t live alone anymore. Instead, feeling scared and ashamed that she had been taken advantage of, she stopped going out, missed doctors’ appointments, and didn’t refill her prescriptions. Then her heart failed, requiring emergency cardiac surgery. She never totally recovered, losing not just her money but likely years of her life.
Family members can present some of the greatest financial threats to older adults: People who exploit their older relatives are estimated to steal on average two and a half times as much as strangers in each instance. In family settings, the symbolic freight that money carries can contribute to conflict and exploitation. Some family members might feel entitled to take an older relative’s money with justifications such as “I’ll get it anyway,” “I’ve earned it,” or “I need it more.”
Page Ulrey, a Seattle elder-abuse prosecutor whose work I’ve chronicled for more than a decade, told me that most of her family-exploitation cases are fueled by gambling and shopping addictions, such as with two sisters who pleaded guilty to theft after wiping out more than $85,000 of their mom’s savings, including “by gambling at casinos and bingeing on crappy Home Shopping Network jewelry.” Long told me that many cases identified by Wells Fargo Advisors have involved daughters, who tend to handle the bulk of the care for their aging parents. “Then if Mom says she’s dividing up her estate even stephen among the siblings, the daughter thinks, That’s not fair. I’ve been doing all the work,” he said. “It doesn’t justify exploitation, but she has a point.”
There’s still much more to learn about precisely which older Americans are most likely to be victimized, but data suggest that older people of color lose more than their white counterparts. One study found that 23 percent of older African Americans were financially exploited, about three times the rate of non–African Americans. And a small pilot study of low-income Latinos in Los Angeles found that four in 10 reported being victimized by elder neglect or abuse, including financial exploitation. (Dementia rates are slightly higher among people of color and those with less education.)
The wealthy are not immune: The son of the New York philanthropist Brooke Astor was convicted of grand larceny for giving himself a retroactive $1 million “raise” for wielding power of attorney for his cognitively impaired mother. But the losses are usually more precarious for those with fewer means. Keren Wilson, an assisted-living pioneer, aging expert, and coal miner’s daughter, called me a few years ago, troubled by what she was seeing in McDowell County, West Virginia. Crime spiked just after the Social Security checks arrived, she said, and elders facing serious pain and end-of-life declined hospice services, fearing that if word got out that they had painkillers in the house, they’d be robbed.
Although our society has some mechanisms in place to tackle this complex social problem, they aren’t nearly adequate. As with many other aspects of aging, we focus disproportionately on reacting after crises strike. We’ve done little to advance our understanding of what steps prevent the financial exploitation of older people. This subject deserves more consideration and conversation, both in families and among policy makers.
Some states have criminalized various types of exploitative conduct and deemed certain older victims to be “vulnerable” to allow for enhanced penalties. But I have been unable to find any evidence that such measures prevent or reduce financial loss. Although there are cases deserving of prosecution, when a family member is the alleged perpetrator, the victim might be reluctant to seek help because they don’t want a loved one to face criminal punishment. Organizations such as the FTC and AARP regularly publish Look out for this one! lists and guidance about new scams. But how much loss this kind of consumer education prevents isn’t clear either, especially when the person targeted has cognitive impairment. Such warnings also leave the burden on potential victims to protect themselves.
We should focus more on the drivers and means of extraction, and how to interrupt them. For example, credit and gift cards or reloadable cards (like a prepaid debit card) are used in more than half of scams involving older people, yet we have done little to make those cards less inviting instruments of theft. Wire and bank transfer frauds are used in fewer than 10 percent of fraud events, but they represent by far the largest amount of money lost. Here, recent financial-industry practices and federal and state policy changes show promise. In 2018, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), mandated that the broker-dealers it oversees adopt certain protections: allowing trained employees to temporarily freeze suspicious transactions and, if appropriate, investigate or report them, and inviting clients to authorize a “trusted contact” for their accounts, someone a financial institution can reach out to with concerns. Researchers who tracked the rollout of these protections found that allowing brokers to freeze suspicious transactions reduced suspected fraud cases and personal bankruptcies by about 5 percent each. But bank regulators have not mandated such protections.
These and other preventive measures should be available to all Americans and easy to enroll in and use—as easy as signing up for direct deposit of paychecks or automatic retirement savings. That could mean creating a suite of protections that people can opt into when they enroll in Social Security, including access to free or inexpensive fraud-alert programs, financial management and planning assistance, and a trustworthy elder-friendly helpline.
The medical community should look for solutions too, such as finding ways to reduce risk. Duke Han, a neuropsychologist at the University of Southern California, is studying factors that might be related to older peoples’ susceptibility to exploitation, such as feeling financially insecure or being unfamiliar with cultural norms around what’s expected when a stranger calls.
When my siblings and I cleaned out our father’s apartment after he died at 93, we found dozens of cheap pens, trinkets, and notepads he had received from organizations encouraging him to keep his checks coming. Their solicitations kept coming too, long after he died. We were fortunate. But for many, the massive machinery to extract money from older Americans leads to tragedies that inflict pain long after the people targeted are gone.
This article has been adapted from Connolly’s book, The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life.
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M. T. Connolly is a researcher focused on elder justice and a 2011 MacArthur Fellow. She was the founding head of the Justice Department’s Elder Justice Initiative.