WASHINGTON — Older Americans are losing an estimated $28.3 billion annually to elder financial exploitation (EFE), according to a new report from AARP.
AARP said its report further shows 87.5% of adults age 60 and older who are victimized by someone they know never report these incidents to authorities. In contrast, just one-third of victims of stranger-perpetrated EFE do not report it, the organization said.
“While strangers often rely on quick and irreversible transactions such as gift cards or wire transfers, perpetrators who know the victim are more likely to gain direct access to their victims’ bank accounts. But financial exploitation of any kind wreaks havoc on the lives of older adults and their families,” Jilenne Gunther, National Director of AARP’s BankSafe Initiative and lead author of the report, said in a statement. “The keys to stopping this growing problem are consumer education, frontline employee training and strengthened technology to flag suspicious activity.”
New Approach
According to AARP, to combat underreporting and other barriers to finding the true cost of EFE, the report uses a first-of-its-kind approach that gathers data from several of the nation’s most highly regarded sources on consumer-reported losses and eliminates duplicate reports while integrating estimated unreported losses.
Key findings of the report include:
- Criminals steal an estimated total of $28.3 billion from older adults each year.
- Of that $28.3 billion, known others, such as a friend, family member or caregiver, steal $20.3 billion, or 72%.
- EFE perpetrated by strangers accounts for the other $8 billion per year, or 28%.
- Of the $28.3 billion in estimated annual EFE losses, only $7.8 billion of stolen funds are reported to authorities.
- $20.5 billion is stolen each year but likely never reported to authorities.
AARP said that through its BankSafe’s collaboration with more than 1,000 financial organizations, BankSafe-trained employees are estimated to have stopped more than $200 million from being stolen from older adults since 2019.