It is increasingly difficult to trust someone calling from a phone call you don’t recognize. Not only are scammers calling from numbers that seem to be in your area, but they are also impersonating family members in distress.
The dirty little secret about elder exploitation is that almost 60 percent of cases involve a perpetrator who is a family member, according to a 2014 study by Lachs and others, an especially fraught situation where victims are often unwilling, or unable, to seek justice. Such manipulation sometimes involves force or the threat of force
via Bloomberg
This trick has been around for a while, but there are new defenses available to guard against the scam.
On Feb. 5, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an industry body, put into effect “the first uniform, national standards to protect senior investors.” It now requires members to try to obtain a trusted contact’s information so they can discuss account activity. It also permits firms to place temporary holds on disbursements if exploitation is suspected.
Bloomberg
Interesting idea; a two person authentication for account transactions, but it still may be easy to beat the system.
Loewy, who left her job as a prosecutor in 2014 to join EverSafe, a startup that makes software to monitor suspicious account activity, is underwhelmed by the industry projects.
“They may say they’re focused on it, but they aren’t really doing much more than training employees,” she says. “Exploiters know what they’re doing. They take amounts under $10,000 that they know won’t get picked up by fraud and risk folks at banks. And they steal across institutions over time.”
Bloomberg
And remember, if you get a text from a short-code number with 5 or 6 digits, you can verify the identity of the sender with the Short Code Directory.
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