Marti DeLima

Privacy is a myth.

Our information is out there and it is available to the highest bidder.

There is a lot of variation in estimated prevalence of scams and fraud.

The best estimates, and I'm about to do a meta-analysis on this actually, indicate that fraud affects 10% to potentially 20% of Americans per year.

It means that they transferred money to the criminals.

And the base rate of exposure is incredibly high.

Give me a day that you haven't received a bogus text message, a phone call, a scam email.

I mean, imagine if other types of crimes targeted us at that same base rate.

I'm very oriented towards the older adult who's the victim of scams.

So scam is a type of trauma.

It's a betrayal trauma.

We definitely need trained clinical mental health workers in this area.

Scam victimization often leads to suicide.

It's often not known, unfortunately.

But what's been striking is talking to providers in this space, people who counsel victims and their family members.

They're always surprised by how raw victims are and how their life view kind of shatters, how they hold themselves, their self-efficacy, and then the financial costs as well.

It often leads to the sense of deep hopelessness that results in suicide.

There's a myth that older adults are more trusting and that they lack sophistication with different forms of technology that causes many young adults and middle-aged adults to think that they're less susceptible to scams.

But that's just not what we see necessarily in the data.

You typically see that it's middle-aged adults.