Elder Fraud: Protecting Older Americans from Financial Exploitation

Tracking Financial Fraud Schemes

The department is taking a number of steps to both highlight its efforts to the public and to bolster efforts to track elder financial fraud nationwide.  With regard to better tracking of its prosecutorial activity, the department has taken steps to collect press releases issued by the department and the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices regarding federal actions against elder fraud exploitation and to display that information on the Elder Justice Website.  Those press releases can currently be found at https://www.justice.gov/elderjustice/press.

In order to develop a more comprehensive and timely picture of evolving elder financial fraud and scams nationwide, the department’s Civil Division is working closely with the FTC to improve its Consumer Sentinel Network (CSN).  The CSN is a secure online database of millions of consumer complaints available only to law enforcement.  In addition to receiving complaints from the FTC, the CSN includes complaints from state consumer affairs agencies, state Attorneys General, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Internet Crime Complaint Center, Better Business Bureaus, MoneyGram and Western Union.  Moreover, the CSN accepts complaints on a wide range of issues, including identity theft, debt collection, credit reports, mortgage assistance scams, Do Not Call violations, imposter scams, telephone and mobile services, prizes and sweepstakes, Internet services, job scams, privacy/data security, auto-related scams and a variety of other frauds.

Although the CSN is the most robust repository of scam-related data, to date, CSN has had limited ability to inform users of repeat offenders or offenders targeting elderly victims.  As such, the department has been assisting the FTC to implement improvements to the CSN in order to help identify those bad actors and types of crimes more easily.  The modified CSN will better allow users to identify frauds targeting the elderly in a manner that should enhance the ability of investigators, prosecutors and civil enforcement attorneys at the federal, state and local levels to stop them more quickly.  At the same time, the department is currently working with several federal agencies to develop a resource locator to help direct victims to available federal resources and complainants to the appropriate federal agency to report allegations of financial abuse.  By making this resource locator available to the public, the department hopes to channel complaints to the right place, including the FTC’s CSN, and hopefully provide as comprehensive a view as possible of elder financial exploitation on the federal level.