July 24, 2025

By Jamie Towey

People have been getting mugged, robbed, pickpocketed, conned, “Ponzied” and even bamboozled since, well, forever. Phishing attacks on seniors flush with cash is just another entry in the long line of seventh commandment (and combinations therein) trespasses, right? Sure, it’s sad to see and sure it has a bit more of a modern flavor than a 12^th century Viking raid – what, with the slimy texts and chatting with a person a world away who can’t even speak English – but perhaps that’s just the way it goes these days.

Even the fact that these crimes are part of organized operations – that’s not new, right? Desperate people may commit one-off offenses just to survive (looking at you, Jean Valjean), and others can sink into a life of misanthropy by repeatedly trying to dig their way out of a hole. But most crime over the past few centuries has occurred under the auspices of an organizing entity. Think of the mafia, Bloods and Crips, MS-13, even the Barbary slave traders of the Ottoman Empire; for centuries, if your pockets got turned out, chances are the perpetrator was merely a cog in a larger machine.

This raises the question of scale. Yes, the mafia basically ran entire US industries for a while, but the scale of elder fraud in America today is simply staggering:

• $16.6 billion was lost to fraud in the past year
• Nearly 150,000 seniors were harmed by scams in 2024
• An estimated 4 billion phishing emails are sent each day globally
• 7,500 seniors lost more than $100K in 2024

The pillaging of the Greatest Generation and Baby Boomers is, indeed, different. In fact, as I’ve eased us into this subject, I’ve avoided using the specific term devised for this type of criminal activity – “pig butchering.” It’s actually a Chinese term that literally means “pig-killing plate,” or sha zhu pan (杀猪盘). As detailed in a Wall Street Journal interview with Troy Gochenour of the Global Anti-Scam Organization, scammers “fatten” the victim through emotional and social engineering, then “butcher” them; you can figure that part out on your own. There are many other types of Elder Fraud (the term used by the FBI for these financial crimes) which can include people impersonating tech support, the government, and even family members to ultimately obtain an elder person’s sensitive information or simply extort them for money.

Most of these scamming operations come from southeast Asia. While it’s easy to point fingers at the scammers (who themselves often are victims of human trafficking operations), we ought to be pointing fingers at ourselves. Many banks have done a wonderful job incorporating new security features and fraud alert systems, but the Wall Street Journal’s recent profile of a man who lost over $5 million makes it very clear that some institutions aren’t doing nearly enough to protect their customers – sometimes blithely standing by while victims wire as much as $300,000 to shady overseas accounts. Social media platforms like Meta are notoriously reluctant to act on scammers since that would put a major dent in their $160 billion in advertising revenue. And our government has dragged its feet for decades to protect consumers in the online space. They’ll always chalk it up to buzzwords like “personal responsibility” and “free market” to shut down debate, but the fact of the matter is that America’s seniors are being used and abused.

And it’s about to get so much worse.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here. Most phishing attempts we run into these days still give off telltale signs that they’re illegitimate: poor spelling, lack of contextual awareness, stilted grammar… but not with AI. ChatGPT already speaks better English than most of us native speakers. And you think that almost $20 billion in a year lost to scams is a lot? Wait until these thugs start to outsource to AI. These scams are already up over 100% this past year, putting more than $12 billion into thieves’ pockets in 2023. We are not remotely prepared for what’s coming.

Tech accelerationists will always deflect to avoid anything that resembles regulation. “It’s your job to protect yourself.” Imagine that mentality with home defense. One night, armed and masked intruders breach your door with explosives and come in guns blazing. Oh, you only had a measly home security system or a baseball bat by your bedroom door? Too bad, you should have had a howitzer!

That’s seems to be the message we are sending to our vulnerable elderly.

If we truly care about defending them and protecting those who once protected us, we better act now to stay ahead of these threats, or our parents and grandparents could be left with empty pockets.

Resources on how to best protect against Elder Fraud:

“How We Can Help You: Elder Fraud” | The FBI

“How to Stay Safe when Having Conversations Online” | National Council on Aging

(The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Aging with Dignity and/or its Board of Directors.)