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Home / Resource / Blogs / Elder Fraud Today - How to Start Fighting Back
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Elder Fraud Today - How to Start Fighting Back
 | Authors: Scott Pirrello, Deputy District Attorney, Head of Elder Abuse Prosecutions San Diego District Attorney’s Office |
Elder Scams have become ubiquitous in society. For too many seniors, it is not a matter of IF they have fallen victim but rather WHEN they will fall victim and how much money they will lose. Data on REPORTED cases and losses tell us that hundreds of thousands of victims report these crimes each year to countless agencies, hotlines, or databases. Sadly, policy makers are making uninformed decisions on resource allocation to combat elder fraud. Available data ignores the unreported cases, there is no effort to consolidate and integrate data captured by the varied and siloed reporting databases, and success in combatting healthcare fraud is often conflated with near non-existent efforts to fight against elder scams by transnational criminal organizations. The reality is that millions of victims in the United States are losing well over a hundred billion dollars a year.
In 2021, San Diego launched a first of its kind Elder Justice Task Force (EJTF) to combat elder fraud. The task force includes the San Diego District Attorney’s Office, the FBI, Adult Protective Services (APS), the U.S. Attorney’s Office, all local law enforcement agencies, as well as our local fusion center to work together in an unprecedented fashion to connect the dots and turn small, local fraud investigations into large scale federal investigations and prosecutions. In addition to investigating and disrupting scam networks, another primary role of the task force is to collect and report data on the amount of fraud impacting our county by consolidating every report of elder fraud made to local law enforcement, FBI’s IC3.gov database, and then adding Adult Protective Services data, which often comes from mandated reports by financial institutions. There are efforts to bring in additional sources of reporting this year.
We are often asked from other professionals around the country how they can duplicate our efforts and start their own EJTF and we have determined that the best thing any jurisdiction can do to get started, is to form an interagency collaborative effort to get an accurate accounting of how much elder fraud you have in your own jurisdiction. Only with these numbers in hand can you demand the appropriate resources. In San Diego we were shocked to see the number of reported losses in our county rising to over $98 Million in 2023. With this jaw dropping number in hand, we then went agency by agency asking for dedicated investigators, detectives, analysts, social workers, and prosecutors.
The San Diego EJTF model of working cases and counting the data can translate to solving the chronic problem of underreporting and overcome the lack of any centralized reporting in this country. Each of us can work within our own local jurisdictions to first come up with the data we need to illustrate the true scope of this problem. As additional jurisdictions come online with loss amounts and victim data, we can work together to integrate and connect the dots in order to shut down these networks and protect older adults from losing their life savings everywhere.
Last Modified: 11/29/2024