This episode of Boomer Banter dives deep into the alarming rise of financial fraud targeting older adults. Join host Wendy Green and fraud expert Kathy Stokes from the AARP Fraud Watch Network as they unpack the sophisticated tactics scammers use, the emotional toll on victims, and essential steps for securing personal information.

Wendy Green begins the episode by sharing her own near-miss with a copyright infringement scam, underscoring the importance of being vigilant. Kathy Stokes delves into common scams such as tech support fraud, where scammers pose as legitimate tech support to gain access to financial information. The conversation highlights the use of heightened emotional states by scammers to manipulate victims, urging everyone to pause and assess suspicious messages logically.

Takeaways:

1. Use strong passwords and two factor authentication to access online accounts. Try a password manager to create and store your unique passwords.
2. Let calls from unknown callers go to voicemail. Criminals do not tend to leave messages.
3. Avoid using open Wi-Fi networks without a VPN and refrain from plugging into public USB ports
4. If you suspect you've been a victim of fraud, report it to the police and use AARP's helpline for support (877) 908-3360
5. We are not helpless! What we know inoculates us. What we share inoculates others.

Links:

Follow the AARP Fraud Watch Network on Facebook

Connect with the AARP Victim Support Network

Register for the Virtual Fraud Prevention Summer Series - July 8: 10:00-12:00ET

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Welcome to Boomer Banter, the podcast where we have real talk about aging. Well, my name is Wendy Green, and I am your host. And this podcast is about supplying you with knowledge that informs you, inspires you, and motivates you to take action on the things that will help you age well. And feeling a sense of security is an important part of aging. Well, we think about our physical safety, and maybe we are more careful as we go up and down the stairs or we walk on slippery surfaces. And if we have aging parents, or even in our own homes, we may think about installing safety bars and showers or check out tripping hazards in our homes. We build emotional safety by surrounding ourselves with people who care about us, don't judge us, listen to us, and are quiet with us when we just need to be quiet. Without these types of people in our lives, we may feel unedged, worried, and depressed.

But this month we are talking about financial security. And feeling like we have financial security to last our lifetime absolutely helps us to age well. So you've been doing the right things. You have saved, you've invested, you made long range plans, and you are all vulnerable to the malicious hackers who are targeting our financial security. They are getting more sophisticated and their attempts to get our money. I worked in the security industry from 2007 to 2017, and I learned a lot about the tricks these hackers use. And even with that knowledge, I am also vulnerable to being caught in their schemes. A couple of months ago, I got what looked like a warning from meta, the parent company of Facebook, telling me that my page was going to be shut down due to copyright infringements.

I was panicked. No way could I afford to lose all of the content that I have been putting out on that page. I almost clicked on the link, and then I stopped for a minute and I thought logically, I knew that I had not done anything to violate a copyright. So I reached out to Facebook, who is notorious for not getting back to you. So I never heard back from them. But over the next few months, I started to get a lot of these warnings, and my page was never shut down. I realized these were all scams to try to get access to whatever information they were fishing for, and now I just delete them when I see them. So today we're going to talk about the tricks these scammers and hackers and imposters use to take advantage of us and get access to our money and our personal information.

My guest today, Kathy Stokes, is a nationally recognized leader in the fraud arena. She's the director of fraud prevention programs. With the AARP Fraud Watch Network, Cathy leads social mission work to educate older adults on the risks that fraud represents to their financial security. Since 2019, she and her team have expanded AARP's leadership in this space by mounting a national campaign to change the narrative on how we talk about fraud victims and guiding an effort to fundamentally transform how our country addresses fraud. We have a lot to learn and unpack in this episode, so I have two asks for you today. First, listen closely to what we talk about today. Take notes if you can, or replay the episode when you can, take notes and then share all that you learn about protecting yourself from these malicious fraudsters. With freedom, friends, family, and on social media, help us prevent another person from becoming a victim of fraud.

And when you share this information, point people to where you found it on the boomer banter page. Encourage them to subscribe to our newsletter so they will know about every new topic that we are covering. It's super simple. Tell them to go to Heyboomer.biz and click on connect with us. And then they will be enrolled in getting our newsletter and know about everything that we're doing. One of the advantages I love about doing this show live is that you can interact with us in the chat. So don't be shy if you have a question or thought, you can bet somebody else does, too, so just put it out there in the chat. Kathy and I will do our best to get to it.

If we can't get to it live, we will definitely respond to you after the show. And with that, let me bring Kathy on. Hello, Kathy.

Hey, Wendy. Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our discussion.

Oh, me too. This is so important. And I think you could tell from my intro how angry this all makes me. So tell me about some of the most, let's start, to start, common frauds that you're seeing today.

I think probably the one I'm most aware of that happens to anybody of any age at any time of day. And that's what we call the tech support scam. You're sitting on your laptop or on your tablet, and all of a sudden this pop up comes up and it's from Norton or Microsoft or some other well known tech company saying, we have found a serious virus on your device and you need to call us right away. Sometimes it even comes with audio so it sounds like the blaring of sirens.

Yeah.

So what do we do? Oh, my God. I can't lose the stuff on my keyboard, just like you couldn't lose the stuff on your Facebook page. So you call the number, right? And they answer. Microsoft support. How can I help you? Well, I've got this problem on my computer. Okay. Yep, we're seeing it, too. Let me show you how you can allow me to access your device so that I can show you what's happening.

And then, of course, it's Microsoft. So you allow them to remotely access your device, and they show you some things that are in your files that look to you to be horribly nefarious, and they aren't, but it's to scare you, to make you do one of a few things. One of them could be, well, you know, for a fee, we can go ahead and fix this for you, and then we can charge you a subscription every month to make sure this doesn't happen again. That's, like, the least nefarious. The worst is that they're there to do either get you to access your financial account while you're with them, and believe me, they have a way of making you do that where it seems like, completely plausible, or they're putting logging software onto your device so that they can watch you as you're typing in your username and password to every account that you have. It includes, it could be your doordash account, or it could be your Netflix account, or it could be your bank account, and they will seek to wipe you out. And the unfortunate thing about this is, when these happen, and let's say someone does this and they access your bank account and wipe you out, that money's gone. There's no getting that money back unless quickly enough, you realize it was a scam, and you call your bank and they're able to stop the payment going from point a to point b.

Not very quick.

Which has to be very quick.

Has to be very quick. Yeah. So that's a big one, you know, and as you hopefully you heard in that and what you experienced when you had that Facebook message, you're in that instant moment of panic, oh, my God, there's something wrong, and I have to fix it right now.

Right?

That's the playbook. See, these criminals have a playbook. All of them share it. They use it. It's why it's so successful. Successful. It's brain physiology. When we're in that heightened emotional state, whether it's panic or fear, maybe excitement, and you love that's going.

It's really hard to back out and access logical thinking. To take that pause like you did, and to think, now, wait a minute. Is there really, could this be, you know, and to disengage. And so that's why they're so successful.

And so that's true. That is why they know how to play us. But if you see a message like you just described, you know, blaring and your computer is infected, just turn it off.

Yeah. You can try to just x out of the web page that you're on, and if that doesn't work, you try to shut down and restart. If that doesn't work, do a hard shutdown.

What do you mean by that?

That means just instead of trying to do the, you know, the, at least I'm on a PC, so it's control alt delete. To get to the shutdown, just hit your power button and hold it until it shuts down and then wait for five minutes and go back on. And if you have concerns, then you might want to take your machine to, you know, best buy, places like that that have, you know, for a small fee, they can take a look and see what's going on with your system. Chances are there's nothing on there unless somebody actually did remote in, and then you've got to have some software removed.

Yeah. Yeah. So another one that I read about just the other day in the AARP newspaper that came out was these election frauds that are going on now because it's election season and everybody wants to talk to us.

Yeah.

Tell me about that one.

There's a whole range of them. I know that. I think one of the things that we covered in that one is people coming up and saying that they're going to sign you up to make sure that you're on the poll so you can go and record your vote. And that's, I mean, that's how some people that are out there, you know, these sort of civic organizations trying to get people signed up to vote. So it seems realistic, but you just can't trust anyone coming up to you and asking for personal information, even if it's just your name and address. You can't do that anymore. And then there's the whole matter of disinformation, purposefully putting information out there to deceive you, to make you believe something about a candidate or about an issue. It's pretty fraught year, I'm afraid.

Yeah. And I read also it was about the surveys. You know, they'll, I mean, I think what I'm hearing, bottom line is if somebody just reaches out to you, don't trust it right away. Don't initially trust it.

And that's such a shame because it.

Is such a shame.

There are companies that are expert in political surveys and they can't get through to anybody. AARP. We do a lot of surveys, nationally representative surveys with national companies, and it's increasingly difficult to get people to respond to surveys because of this. But we're in that situation. We can't trust what's coming into us right now. Not by phone, not by email, not by text, not a pop up on your device, not someone reaching out to you on social media. And we should be angry about that.

I am very angry about that. And I meant, you know, my mother, who's gonna be 94 this weekend, still gets on Facebook and does her emails and, you know, writes articles for her local community. And it's so aggravating that people try to get to her through these links. And I was like, don't click on a link, mom. Just don't click on a link. But how do we enjoy our time online if we're so afraid of everything that comes our way now?

There are some ways that we can harden the target, so to speak. I have an old mentor of mine who uses that term. There are things we can do to set up the protections, and some of them are not necessarily setting them up, but just knowing. So for right now, we're not going to click on links, even if it looks like it's coming from. If I think it's coming from my bank, I think it's coming from Amazon, from my account. I'm not trusting those right now. If I get sort of an urgent message from Amazon that they just want to make sure that I bought those 17 iPads, no problem. If you didn't do it, you don't have to respond.

But if you did call this number, click this link. Well, no, thank you. I have the app on my phone. I'm going to log into my app and I'm going to see if there's an issue. And 100% of the time, if there's an issue, it's going to show up on my device and on my app or at the website if you log in that way. But more likely than not, it was an attempt to try to steal something from you. So we can't trust the links on emails, either go to the website, type in the web address as you know it to be, because all of these fake websites are showing up that look exactly like the brand's website. But there are things like we can protect ourselves.

So passwords are hugely important. And, you know, you hear people saying, you know, people don't know how to use a strong password. I was like, well, you know what, maybe that's a little bit too much for us to have to do. To have a twelve digit password that is unique and strong and we have a hundred accounts online and we're supposed to remember them. We need to move away from the password, but until we do, we need to be really good about having a unique and strong password for each account. Some people find comfort using a password manager, which sort of sets them up for you and then logs you into the, into the website. However you do it, it's just really important because the criminals have, have bought technology and they'll just keep knocking on the door until they figure out what your password is. And if you've used that for another account, then the jig is up.

Yeah, I love a password manager. So tell me what you would say is a strong password.

Well, I mean, we follow what the federal government's agency and I can't remember what it is now they say it has to be twelve digits at least. There should be at least one capital letter in it. There should be at least one special character in it. I have been using a password manager recently. I've stopped using the free ones that are built into my web browsers. I don't think that those are safe. You know, it's like, well, at least it's something, but you yet something that someone's going to steal. So, you know, try to make a phrase out of something instead of trying to come up with something that's complicated and hard to remember.

Sometimes I just look around my house and I see utensils, bread and paper towels and I put those together somehow.

Right, but would you use your daughter's name? Would you use your pet's name? Even if you put a question mark and an exclusive?

No. Anything that ties to your personal life, your kids, grandkids, where you live, the street you grow up on, pets, those are all just easy for criminals to catch, you know, there are criminals, it's. Fraud is an industry these days, so these criminals specialize and you'll have specialists who are going out on social media and scraping information from every account they can access because we haven't locked them down, you know, all the information is out there for everybody. Instead of saying, nope, only my friends and family can see this stuff. And so they're pulling the name of your dog and where you travel and what your grandkids name is. And those lists are aggregated and bought and sold to criminals. And so the next person, the next criminal uses that for their phone scans, for example.

Yeah, yeah, it's awful. So if you've been hijacked, you know, so if I call my friend Susan and I say, you know what, Susan? I'm getting these emails from you that say, oh, look, I found these pictures, and here, click on this link. What should she do? Is just changing her password enough?

Typically. Typically, yeah, change the password. Make it a strong password. Make sure it's not a repeat password. That's typically the thing that you can do to stop it right there in its tracks.

Okay, and what if I've heard about people taking over your Facebook account? They become you and they're not really you. Well, what do you do about that?

Well, I've heard people who have had to just entirely give up. I don't think people have a ton of success reporting these things to Facebook and getting Facebook to give them a solution. And I'm only saying that as a person who used to use Facebook, and I don't anymore because of things like this. It's not something AARP is saying about the organization, but, and then I understand if you try to set up a separate profile, then there's problems because it's looking at your new profile and suggesting that maybe you're trying to spoof your, your original profile that's been stolen from you.

It's ugly.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's ugly. And, you know, I always tell people when I see that happen, you know, put out a notice, let everybody know this is not, you don't accept that new friend request. You're already friends, those kinds of things. But.

And if you're able to get to your account and change your password, absolutely do that. A lot of the social media scams that we see involve, you know, pretending you're. You've taken over a friend's account, and then they're pushing out messages that look like they're individual, like, hey, Wendy, it's Kathy. Did you hear about this new government grant? All you have to do is call this number. I got $12,000, and it was no questions asked.

Yeah, yeah.

What person would walk away from the potential of getting that kind of money with no strings attached? Right? And it's that excitement.

Right?

Wait a minute. Would Kathy actually send something like that to me? Didn't she tell me once that there are no such thing as government grants for individuals? Hmm.

Maybe I should call Kathy.

Just disengage.

Yeah, phone scams. Like, we're getting more and more of those, too. I have a call watch thing on my phone that tells me when it's a spam call coming in. But what do we do when those phone. Spams, phone calls come in? And, I mean, some of them are awful, right? Like, this is your granddaughter calling. And please don't tell mom, but I need this money. I'm in really serious trouble.

You know, it is so hard to give this message, but I'm going to give it anyway. If you get an emergency phone call from a loved one, especially if it's a grandchild saying they're in deep trouble, don't tell mom and dad. I have to tell you to just hang up. If that grandchild is in trouble, they're going to find a way to you. But as soon as you hang up, you then contact that loved one, that grandchild. How you know, to reach out to them. And if you don't have their phone number or cell number, call mom and dad. Hey, I just got this call from Wendy.

She says she's in a mexican prison. Tell me she's okay. Yeah, yeah, she's sitting over here right now. We're having dinner. So quite often when those happen, the criminals behind it, it's multiplayer, not just one person. They'll call you from a number that is a spoof from a police department in a certain state. They may even have the name of a detective that works at that police department. And as I'm pretending to be your grandchild, I'm going to put you on the phone with Detective Smith, who's going to explain to you what you can do to help me not spend the night in jail.

And if you look up that information, you know, if you're like, wait a minute, I'm not so sure about that. That information will show up as legitimate. That's how, that's how sophisticated these are. Which is why it's just like, you know what? Don't engage. Just hang up, make sure your kid's okay, your grandkids okay, and get on.

With your day like everything else. Don't click on the link. Don't answer the call. Just check, check. Just. You know, maybe this is going to sound weird, but maybe this is the positive way to look at it. It gives you an opportunity to reach out and call a loved one or check on somebody and say, kathy, did you send me this email?

You know, let me ask you, Wendy, when you had that, that Facebook scare, you figured out a way to sort of stop yourself before you took action. Do you remember what it was that brought you back to, like, that spot in your brain that has our logical thinking abilities?

I think that's an important question. And I think it was because I have been working in this area before. And so I was aware of scams and all of the criminal minds. And it, after the initial, oh, my God, I can't lose this, I thought, wait a minute. That I didn't do anything fraudulent. I did not steal a copyright. I did not post something that was, you know, illicit. So it made me stop.

Now, I was disappointed that Facebook didn't respond. And.

Yeah, but that's, that's a really important message to get out. You knew because of your past experience. Once you got past the reaction that you had that emotional reaction, you were able to go, wait a minute. And we've learned through research, not ours, 2019 Better Business Bureau, FINRA Investor Education foundation did this study which determined that if you know about a specific scam, you're 80% less likely to engage with it. And if you do engage, you're 40% less likely to lose or have money or sensitive information stolen from you. Whether it's 80% or 50%, whatever it is, that's inoculation. Which is why we need to be having a national conversation about fraud. And when you, at the beginning, how you told people, hey, if you're hearing something new, share it.

Share it with everybody, because that sharing is going to protect the person that you just shared it with, just like you're protected by listening to wendy's show today.

Absolutely. And we have got to stop this. I mean, I don't know if it's ever going to be stopped, but tell me about what you're doing on a national level, Kathy, because AARP is involved in this.

Yeah, very much so. Of course, we're very committed to doing everything we can to sort of meet people where they are, whether it's online, on our website, on social media, in communities around the country, we have state offices that have fraud volunteers that are out all the time with the message of fraud prevention. We also have an amazing array of resources for people who have experienced fraud. We have a helpline you can call that you don't have to be a member or of any age. 877-908 3360. It's not a hotline, so it's not 24/7 but you can call and talk to somebody who's a trained fraud specialist.

Tell me that again. 877338.

Let's try that again. 877-908-3360 yeah. And if you're not sure about something, you want to report a scam that. That you sort of saw but didn't engage with. We share that with the federal government. And if you've been a victim or a family member has suffered a loss or is still in the middle of something, call that number. We can help. We also have a victim support program.

Information about that is at aarp.org/fraudsupport. Small group sessions to try to help begin to deal with the emotional impact.

Okay, I'm gonna put all these in the show notes.

Thank you.

And I want to talk to you about the victim side of things, because when you and I talked, there's two things. When you and I talked, we talked about the fact that so many victims feel such shame that they've been taken advantage of. And you have advice on how to talk to somebody about what happened. Would you share that?

We do. First of all, we studied it to make sure we weren't just seeing it at the helpline. And what we learned, and this was in 2021, we blame fraud victims, full stop. No matter if you're a loved one, if you're in a professional role, we have this tendency to say, well, why did you give them your money? Or what were you thinking? Or how did you get duped by that? That's the oldest trick in the book. This is a crime. And we've kind of lost that thread. We don't say those things to people who have experienced a violent crime or a property crime. So we shouldn't be saying those things to people who have experienced the crime of fraud and immense loss that comes with that.

But what we've learned is that we don't. We use words that sound like we're blaming or we're shaking our head and going, how could you have fallen for that? We don't really mean it. It's just something that's sort of been baked in to how we respond so we can change those things. Instead of saying, you know, how much money did you give them? How about saying, oh, God, I'm so sorry. How much money do they steal from you?

Just a few words. Difference makes such a big difference.

Yeah. How about a headline? Instead of elderly woman scammed of life savings, how about criminal steals, woman's life savings?

Big, big difference. And it reeducates our brains that this is a criminal offense. It's not our fault.

That's right. And we need more people reporting. And there are. There are a variety of reasons people don't report the fraud. One is shame, humiliation, embarrassment, especially if you're an older adult and you're afraid that your adult children are going to believe that you're losing some sort of cognitive capacity which can be further from the truth. Of course, there are situations where people dealing with cognitive decline are going to experience this stuff, but that's not the majority. Right. Of the people who experience this because it happens to people of all ages.

Right.

So it's a misconception. And if you're an adult child and you're older, you know, your mom or your dad has experienced something like that, it's really important to talk to them about it as a crime. I am so sorry this happened to you. This isn't your fault. These are criminals out there. They went after you. They targeted you because they knew x, Y and z. Let's call the police.

The other thing is not knowing where it called.

Yeah. So that was the other thing I was going to ask you. Right. Because you told me the police aren't very responsive about these kinds of things. So what do we do?

Well, quite often they're not trained to. This isn't, this isn't a crime that is very high on the, on the list of things at local police because they have a lot of other things that you're dealing with. It's not their fault. It's just the way their leadership and the leader's leadership looks at this stuff. But if you call and file a police report, it does two things. One is it begins to help law enforcement sort of generally understand how big this problem is. And the second thing is you have that report. Now, what if a couple of years down the road, the federal government, or maybe more likely a more functioning state government may come up with some sort of a restitution program once they have really begun to understand the detrimental financial impact that this causes.

Maybe the thousands of dollars, the hundreds of dollars, whatever it was that was stolen from you, you may be able to get back and you won't if you don't have that police report. Right.

So if they say, well, ma'am, I'm sorry, but we don't take those kinds of reports.

Yeah. And that's tough. You're already in such a headspace. It's so hard. But you know what? Be angry. Want to have this known, you know, get that report so that you have it to hold on to. I even know some people who have found that their homeowners insurance covers fraud loss. Really very rare.

But it's, you know, you need the police report if you're going to try to pursue coverage. Identity fraud. You know, sometimes people have these identity protection products that police report will help you get the support that you're promised, as by having that product.

Interesting. Okay, couple of questions. Susan says, how often should we change our passwords?

You know, I think there's varying ideas. At AARP, I'm required to change mine every three months, some people say more often. I think if you have, like, a super complex, difficult one that you've set up, as you know, through a password manager or something, I don't even know if it's that important. What's most important is making sure that each one is its own password, strong and unique, and does not have anything to do with the next password. And the next password, one of the things you can do, too, that's makes it a little bit easier is like, they have biometrics on a lot of apps now anyway. It doesn't necessarily give you more protection, but if you put in a really hard password and you're afraid you're not going to remember it, you can use your face biometric or maybe a thumbprint or something that pulls that information in for you so you don't have to type it all in. So that's one thing you might want to try to do.

Would you do your banking on your phone?

I do.

You do?

I use my. I use my banking app all the time. And I'll tell you why.

Tell me why. Because I don't.

Even though you would think that it's more risky to bank online than to. Not. If you don't set up that account and somebody steals your identity, they can set it up and take it over.

But if I do it online on the computer, they can't set it up on my phone. On their phone. Right.

Well, I mean, I access an app, or when I go on my. On my computer, I access a website.

Right.

Really? The same thing. Apps actually have better encryption.

Do they?

Yeah.

Okay. Because I've been nervous about doing it on my phone.

But you bank online on the computer, like through websites.

Yeah.

Well, that's great that you do. And that is really. You really want to be careful with your passwords, right?

Yeah.

And have multi factor authentication. That code that comes to you, that's that extra piece of information. However, the criminals are really adept at getting someone to believe that they are talking on the phone with their bank and that they're going to get a code to prove that it's them. And you're supposed to read the code back to them. Them. And even though it says, do not share this code, you think you're talking to the bank. So you have to understand that those are manipulable, if that's a word. But yeah, apps are actually have better protections than the websites I'm told by my financial friends.

Okay, interesting to know. And I've also been told not to use open Wifi. You know, like so many people you see in the airport, like they're on their phones and they're doing all this stuff. Stuff. But they're connected to the airport Wi Fi or the hotel Wi Fi. What do you do when you travel?

So I have and lucky free to me because ERP has great benefits, but I have a password manager and I have what's called a virtual private network or VPN. And I engage the VPN, which basically masks where I am. Anything about my ip address, anything technical that says who I am or where I am is blocked. And that makes it safe for you to connect to anything you want to connect to online. So I use that at the hotel. I use that at the airport. I never plug in straight to a USB at the airport or at the hotel. I go through a plug because those USB's can be packed in some way.

I don't know how it happens, but FBI actually was recently talking about that, so. But never. Yeah. If you're on public Wi Fi, don't be.

Don't be. Right.

Shut it off. Use your cell service if you can't get access with your cell service and you're using public Wi Fi if you have to do it to, you know, catch up on the news or read the sports scores. But don't go on anywhere that you have to put in a username and password it because it's just open season.

What about a hotspot? Is that as good as a VPN?

You know, you'd have to ask somebody a little bit more technically adept. I don't use a hotspot, so I'm not sure. Yeah, but if it's a hotspot that doesn't also have a VPN built into it. Yeah, but it may take the. The protections that are on your device, so. And they may be sufficient.

But I. Yeah, I know it's. It. I mean, you travel and you're like 4 hours layover and you want to plug your phone in so that you don't lose the charge and all of that, but don't connect to their Wi Fi.

Just don't do it or do it with the VPN. I do it all the time with the VPN.

Yeah. And a lot of phones are built in with VPN now.

Even are they okay?

Yeah. So I think if you search an app on your phone, you might find it or find out about a hotspot. But let's see, what else am I seeing? Athel Lord is saying something about most elderly will become a victim of family embezzlement and or scams.

I think it's a lot to say that most will become a victim. It is true that historically, the data suggest that when you're looking at fraud against older adults, it's either what we've been talking about, which is, like, kind of stranger danger scam, or it's abuse by a known perpetrator. That could be a kid, a daughter, a son, a caregiver, a crooked attorney. And that is where most of the reports have historically shown up. But then last year, or actually just a couple of months ago, there's a Treasury Department agency that looked at reports from financial institutions for one year from June of 2022 to 23. And in those reports, they're called suspicious activity reports. 80% of those reports, and these are elder fraud reports, were scams. 20% was the known perpetrator.

Now, does that mean scams are that much bigger than the elder financial exploitation of the known person? Maybe, maybe not. What we do know is that it's grown phenomenally. The numbers are just staggering. And maybe the banks are getting a little bit better at identifying them, so they're doing more reports. But I think that the paradigm of believing that the known perpetrator is much worse than the scammer, I just don't think that stands anymore. Yeah, it's all terrible.

It's all terrible, Kathy. And, you know, you live in this world, right? And it's hard to find the good in people when all you're seeing is all of these people taking advantage. How do you reconcile that?

Well, you know, my role at AARP is mostly about education and supporting our victim support work. But we can't just. If I was just doing that, I'd be hitting my head against a wall. Education's important. Do not get me wrong. And we will continue to commit assets and blood, sweat, and tears into educating people. We cannot educate our way out of this crime. It takes a whole of society solution.

We need technology companies coming to market with products that have already been through a process to be protective so that they are secure by design. If I'm going to set up on a new social media account, I want the default to be, everything is locked down. Nobody sees anything that I post unless I say, okay, I'm going to let my friends that are in my community see this or my family, but not anybody else. You know, now that we have generative artificial intelligence out there, it's been out sort of formally for, what, about a year and a half now. Everything that academics are trying to do to find solutions to prove that a voice is really someone's voice or a video is really someone's video, the genie is out of the bottle, right? We should be doing that. Prior. I think financial institutions are doing what they can here and there, but they really got to get better at looking at ways to prevent the social engineering that's happening, and it's biometrics and it's authentication, and then we don't really do much as a country to go after the bad guys, and we need to. And I'm seeing a lot of energy there.

Oh, good.

One of the things that we see is that a lot of this fraud that's happening is run by transnational crime gangs. They're in India. They're in Myanmar. They're in Africa. They're in Costa Rica and Canada. But they have a lot of people on the ground here. And if we can start to tie cases to each other so that that tech support scam that I talked about before is not just being looked at as one tech support scam in southwest Washington, DC, but it's also being tied to the one in Kalamazoo and the one in Amarillo. And before you know it, you bring all those cases together, and you hit a certain threshold of loss.

Then the FBI will go after those cases and start arresting the bad guys. And this is something that I'm seeing come through as a. As a new nonprofit that's going to be run by a former FBI agent to do exactly that. Pull all of those cases together, do that data analysis to give these well investigated, well determined million dollar thresholds, and hand them off to the FBI, who will then go and arrest these perpetrators, give them real time, and begin to disrupt the business model of fraud.

Well, that's good to know that they're doing that. I think that's awesome. I want to say one more thing, and then I'm going to ask you for a couple of takeaways also. My mother's account was hacked recently, and I knew it because it came in with her name, but I knew to look to the right of her name and to see that email address did not match what her email address is. And so I would also encourage people that if you get something from a friend or a family member that you don't recognize, or that it seems a little odd that they're sending you this with a link in it. Check that email address and see if it's them. And, and if you can't do that, call them and say, did you just send me this? So that's my one big takeaway. What are a couple more that you want to leave us with?

Well, I think that we hear this all the time. I just, and it's hard, but we just can't trust incoming phone calls unless they're coming from someone that's already in our, in our list. You know, it's our doctor, it's our daughter, it's, you know, your best friend. If you get a call and you don't know who it is or it looks like it's coming from your bank, just let it go to, if you have voicemail, go to voicemail. My mom has a little trouble with her voicemail, so I set up an answering machine that clicks in before the voicemail and I said, let it go to the answering machine. If they're really trying to reach you, they'll leave you a message.

Exactly.

Criminals tend not to leave messages.

Right, right.

So, you know, and it's the playbook. It's knowing that if you have a contact out of the blue that immediately puts you into that heightened state of panic or anxiety or fear, and it contains urgency. Those three things together are probably going to account for 80% of all scam attempts. If you feel yourself in that space with an out of the blue contact that's demanding an immediate action, disengage. That's your sign. Disengage. Because we can sit and talk about every red flag to every scam we know out there. And at some point people are just going to go, I can't, you know, just, I can't.

And I feel helpless and I'm angry. We're not helpless. What we know inoculates us. What we share inoculates the other. So we need to be having conversations, things that you learn, put them on your social media accounts, call mom, have a nice conversation. When we talk about fraud to the older adults in our lives, instead of the approach that I think a lot of us, because we're protective, don't answer the phone because this, that and the other thing I heard, this scam that's going around where someone's pretending to be Pepco, that's our utility here. And there's a, you know, they're saying there's a balance on the account that you haven't paid the count for three months. You got to pay it right away or they're going to cut off the air.

And I hear it says, kim, have you heard about that? What do you think about that? Have the conversation. Talk together about it. It's almost like you're educating yourselves together instead of playing that role of police. Don't do this. Don't do that. People don't respond to that.

Oh, I like that. And it just scares them. It absolutely just scares them. Yeah.

And if you have somebody who's in the middle of a scam and they're not, they're not willing to believe that's what it is, or they're so, like, sort of sucked into it by telling them, no, mom, it's a scam. You have to disengage. She's just going to dig in. So it becomes that conversation. So tell me, you know, how did you meet this person? What do you know about them? Hey, did you happen to look up and see if they showed up anywhere else online? I can show you how to do that and sort of be detectives together. That tends to be a lot more successful than just saying, mom, you're being scammed.

Mm hmm. I don't always do that.

Well, Kathy, no, none of us do because we're reacting in anger and like, oh, my God, I can't believe they're doing this to my mom.

That's right. Leave my poor mom alone.

Poor mom. When we're talking to her mom, they're trying. They're trying to harm you. And I'm so sorry this is happening.

So aggravating. Okay, so AARP has this page on Facebook, even though Kathy is not on Facebook. It's a great page. Actually, it's AARP Fraud Watch. They have, I think it's weekly podcasts, short podcasts on there. And in fact, one of the podcast guests that I saw on there, Paul Greenwood, he is a retired deputy district attorney from California, and he spent 22 years leading elder abuse prevention unit out there. South Carolina. AARP is running a virtual fraud prevention summer series.

This is on Monday, July 8, from ten to noon.

That's right.

Anybody can join. You don't have to just be from South Carolina, but the event link for that is events.aarp.org/NeG88v And I'm going to put this in the show notes. So that's going to be in the show notes. But I saw Paul. He's amazing, a great speaker.

But everybody go and follow the AARP fraud watch on Facebook. Tons of information there to keep you informed.

And if you can anybody listening, sign up for that July 8 event. Paul Greenwood as you said, wendy, he built his entire career in the United States. He's originally from the UK going after and prosecuting, successfully prosecuting elder fraud and such cases. And he has tremendous empathy and tremendous insights. And he's always, he's a gifted, gifted speaker. I wouldn't miss him.

Yeah, yeah. It's great. Share this share this episode share this information get people to subscribe to the Boomer Banter newsletter. Send them to Heyboomer.biz and have them to connect with us so that they stay up to date with all that's going on. Kathy, this has been amazing. Before I let you go, let me quick tell everybody about next week, which is my turn. So how do I talk about financial security when that is not my expertise area? So what I decided to do was to talk about integrating financial and emotional prosperity. In other words, wealth, as nice as it might be, is not, in my opinion, the ultimate measure of a life well lived.

So we need to integrate health, joy, and relationships into that equation. And I'm going to start by reading the opening page of a book that my dad wrote about recovering from his midlife breakdown. And then I will add some of my thoughts to that. So hopefully you will find that enlightening, inspiring, and motivating. And each episode of Boomer Banter is an invitation to listen, learn, and apply the wisdom you gained to your own life, and in this case, to all of your friends lives. We are a supportive community, so reach out and join the community. Boomer Banter is produced by me, Wendy Green, and the music is from my grandson, who is a student at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Thanks so much, Kathy.

This has been so useful.

Well, thank you for having me. I'll come on anytime.

Oh, good. We'll have you back. Bye.