Marti DeLima

They tend to report victimization at the highest frequency.

And it is true that for different types of scams, we see different age groups being more likely to be targeted and victimized.

For example, fake job opportunities and online shopping scams, that's way more likely to be young people.

We also know that some of these extortion scams are targeting young men, like young boys.

teenagers and preteens, but there are some scams that do seem to affect older adults at greater rates.

One example is the tech support scam.

We do see that when older adults are victimized, they have far more money stolen on average.

So it could be that older adults are experiencing certain types of scams where more and more money is being requested by the criminals and it's not getting reported until the person discovers this is a scam.

And by that point, it adds up to $10,000.

But it also could be that older adults have more assets to exploit.

It's possible that scammers are asking for more money from those individuals.

Looking at the most recent data from the Federal Trade Commission, we see that adults, I believe, 80-plus

report somewhere around a median amount of $1,400.

And then adults 50 and younger, it's closer to $400, $500.

So it's like three times more.

When I was a graduate student, I actually sat in as part of a research project on the Los Angeles County Elder Abuse Forensic Center.

That's a multidisciplinary team of law enforcement, adult protective services, health care workers.

Some of the cases involved scams and fraud, and I was fascinated by those cases because in many of them, the older adult didn't seem to have clear indicators of vulnerability or cognitive impairment.

So they didn't look necessarily like some of our other victims in those cases who were incredibly vulnerable, sometimes bedbound.

And the perpetrators weren't individuals that they had this lifelong relationship with, like an adult son or daughter.