Stephen Dubner

Just how much scamming are Americans dealing with?

That is Marty DeLima, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

And when you say affects someone, that's a very wide verb.

Does that mean there's a loss involved?

DeLima isn't a criminologist or a psychologist.

She is a gerontologist, which means she studies human aging.

And she teaches in Minnesota's School of Social Work.

Her research focus is quite specific.

How well known is that connection?

I could imagine given the private nature of suicide, that could be hard to enumerate.

Are older adults the most common scam targets or maybe the most common victims?

Let's hear about you for a minute.

How did you come to be a gerontologist in academia looking out for fraud?

Can you give me an example of the kind of financial fraud by someone who was not known to the victim that you came across as you were doing your graduate work?

So that sounds terrible.

It also sounds very handmade, right?

It's kind of a one-to-one and it's very time intensive and all that.

So the Internet makes it a little bit easier to be more efficient, I would assume.

What's the lottery scam?

How does that work?