How to freeze out scammers
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What pioneering laws in Florida aim to stop scammers targeting older people?
Florida's pioneering laws to stop scammers who prey on older people. I'm David Brancaccio in Los Angeles. First, the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation remained elevated. It went up four-tenths of a percent in February. The report also shows prices went up 2.8 percent in a year, higher inflation than economists see as healthy. Diane Swonk is chief economist at KPMG.
The better gauge of momentum is really the three-month annualized increase and six-month annualized increase, because this is momentum that the Fed is watching closely, and those are accelerating. We also saw the largest increase in core goods prices that's stripping out food and energy that we've seen since the onset of the pandemic inflation in early 2022.
How is inflation measured by the Federal Reserve and what are its current trends?
So this is all very hard for the Federal Reserve, which is weighing whether or not its next move will be up. instead of down on rates.
This isn't the Consumer Price Index, but the one derived from personal consumption data. The CPI for March comes out tomorrow.
There is scientific evidence that as we age, our brains may physically change in a way that makes some, but not all of us, more vulnerable to financial exploitation. In 2019 here, I did a deep dive into a subject that we called brains and losses. As part of that 18-month investigation, I spent time with a school nurse still working, then at age 79, who'd lost $200,000 to fraudsters who kept calling her phones, including the call that came in while I was at her home with my recording equipment.
Say it again. $2.2 million. That's very nice. Where did I get the other .2 from? because your money was sitting at the Federal Reserve Bank.
Yeah, over my years here, we've stayed focused on financial exploitation of older Americans. Today, let's return to one of the voices in that Brains and Losses project to get us up to date on an innovative approach at the state level to freeze out scammers in mid-swindle. We're joined from Florida by elder law attorney Shannon Miller with another representative case. Shannon, good to hear your voice.
Hi, David. Thank you for having me back.
Great to reconnect. You had a client and she lost two million dollars over several years. Her relatives are trying to stop it. You were trying to stop it. And then there was the chance that she was going to lose another half million. But that was complicated trying to stop that. What happened?
So what happened was these two cashier's checks were ready to be issued from the bank and they had been paused by the bank. The sons were notified and the sons immediately opened an emergency guardianship here in Florida to try and shut these monies down. We got the guardianship open. The court orders went over to the bank to stop those monies from being funded through these cashier checks. But it was a day too late.
But now there is a new new law in Florida that would help with this.
What Florida created a couple of years ago was this new process related to scams, where if we don't know who that person is because they're not real, what we're able to do is we go into court, and instead of the police officer knocking on their door to serve them with notice of the hearing, we are allowed to use the same communication technique that they have been using to communicate with our victim. So in that first case, it would be using the millionaire match text to text them the final order that says, hey, you need to show up for this hearing to explain why you should be able to keep these assets. And, of course, they don't show up because they're a scammer. And, you know, they also don't show up normally to assert that the bank account that has now been frozen is actually their money or legitimate money.
You know, as I found in my reporting, sometimes it's a call in the night from you don't even know what time zone. You have no idea who they are or the address. The vulnerability under Florida law before was you couldn't freeze documents. the account. But now under the law, you don't need to know who the scammer is specifically?
That's right.
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