United States: Last year, scammers hit Americans aged 60 and above to steal more than USD 3.4 billion of their savings, according to the FBI report released on Tuesday, which showed an increase in losses due to the advanced and cruel schemes designed to take advantage of these vulnerable people.
Increase in Elderly Victims Reporting Losses
People over the age of 60 reported the total losses in scams last year to the FBI, which was up by 11% from the figures of the previous year. Investigators are warning about a surge in broad-daylight cash or gold snatching, which involves sending brain-washed couriers to collect money or gold from the victims personally, as reported by the Associated Press.
“It can have a devastating impact on older Americans who lack the ability to go out and make money,” said Deputy Assistant Director James Barnacle of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division. “People lose all their money. Some people become destitute.”
The FBI received complaints from over 100,000 elderly scam victims last year. More than 6,000 victims lost more than USD 100,000. This shows an escalation in the number of victimizations among older Americans, which followed the 2020 pandemic of COVID-19 during the two years of dry-up when scammers could reach their victims over the phone.
Barnacle said that investigators are spotting organized, transnational criminal networks using a number of schemes, with romance scams and investment fraud among them, against the elderly.
Common Frauds
The most common fraud scam among the aged last year was a tech-support scam, wherein criminals pose themselves as either technical or customer support representatives over the phone. One of these schemes that is supposedly trending is when fraudsters pretend to be tech, banking, or government officials to convince the victims that they have traces of foreign hackers in their bank accounts and that they need to transfer their money to a new account via their help; this account is, in fact, controlled by the fraudsters themselves.
The FBI observed this type of fraud become more prevalent between May and December as live couriers took the money from victims who thought they were actually cashing their checks or transferring the money from their compromised accounts. In those types, scammers inform their victims about their bank accounts that have been hacked and that they need to convert their savings into cash, gold, or other precious metals to protect their funds from being stolen. After that, the scammers hire a courier to do the task in person.
“A lot of the fraud schemes are asking victims to send money via a wire transfer or a cryptocurrency transfer. When the victim is reluctant to do that, they’re given an alternative,” Barnacle said. “And so the bad guy will use courier services.”
Rise of In-Person Courier Scams
Early this month, an 80-year-old Ohio man was reported to have killed an Uber driver he thought was trying to rob him after getting scam phone calls, authorities say.
This man was receiving a lot of calls from somebody pretending to be an officer from the local court and asking for money to settle some issue. The Uber driver had been instructed to collect the parcel from a man’s house, and this could possibly have been the order placed by the same scam call or the accomplice, as reported by the Associated Press.
Challenges in Reporting and Addressing Scams
A very massive number of tragedies in the senior community is probably underreported. The latest numbers from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center still confirm that only about half of more than 880,000 records contained the age of the victim.