The scam calls have been coming for years now, to the point where I have told my mom not to pick up the phone until caller ID says it's one of us. It was always a male voice mimicking the cadence and dumb tone of a teenager who would open by saying, "Grandma, it's [insert name], don't tell mom and dad, but I'm in trouble and I need help." My mom would say, it doesn't sound like you, and the caller would come up with some excuse about having a cold or a bad connection.
My mother has enough presence of mind to call me or my brother first. Initially I thought one of my nephew's friends got ahold of their cellphone and was pranking my mother. Even I couldn't believe the outlandishness of it all. But the calls would keep coming periodically and my mom would forget the previous calls and answer them again unwittingly.
Once they called and said they were the police calling about me, her daughter, who was in jail because I had caused an accident. They instructed her to wait for my attorney to call her for instructions. She called me, frantic, only to realize I was home and not in jail. I went over to her house and received the second call to curse out the perpetrator. The guy cursed me out in response and hung up.
Now in the retelling of these stories, it is good for laughs. My mom feels silly for falling for these scams every time. But we are lucky that she hasn't been conned to the point of actually wiring money to these scammers or giving out sensitive information. In recounting these stories to numerous friends, I have found out that not everyone is so lucky. Perfectly smart, with-it elderly parents have fallen for it and given money to these scammers. It apparently can happen to the best of us.
The trick these scammers use is getting you emotionally heightened so that you are not thinking straight. That is the point of opportunity for these swindlers and they have studied human behavior for nefarious purposes.
The FBI estimates older Americans lose more than $3 billion a year to elder fraud, and that's only what gets reported, which is a fraction of what actually happens. The shame keeps the rest of us quiet. What I've come to understand, from years of managing this kind of vigilance is that by the time you know a scam has happened, half the damage is already done, and sometimes more than half. The families who fare best are the ones who were already paying attention.
It's not confusion, it's circumstance
The reason older adults are targeted has more to do with circumstance. They're more likely to be home to answer the phone, more likely to have accumulated savings over a lifetime, and more likely to have grown up in an era when a call from a government official or a family member in distress was something you took seriously rather than screened. Isolation makes all of it worse in ways that are hard to overstate. A parent who lives alone, whose circle has contracted, whose children are hours away or buried in their own lives, isn't more vulnerable because of something wrong with them, but because of these conditions that have accumulated over years.
Cognitive decline adds another layer of course. Someone in the early stages of dementia can seem fine and have full situational awareness, can carry on a perfectly coherent conversation. But in this state, they are missing the judgment that would otherwise catch the inconsistency in a caller's story, the pressure that doesn't quite make sense, the urgency that should be a red flag but lands instead as a reason to act fast. The scammer doesn't need to fool them entirely to be successful. They know that they just need to get there before the family does, before anyone has had a chance to say wait, let me call you back.
The scripts they're using on your parents right now
The grandparent scam is a common one as my mother can attest. It's so effective because it targets that instinct to protect a loved one in trouble. A caller pretends to be a grandchild, or a lawyer or police officer calling on their behalf, in urgent need of money for bail or medical bills or an accident that just happened. The ask is always immediate and always secret. Don't tell mom and dad! Urgency and secrecy are the two levers the scam depends on.
The government official scam runs on similar dynamics. The caller says they're calling from a government agency like the Social Security Administration, the IRS, or Medicare. They say there is a problem with your benefits, or there is a warrant for your arrest for some unpaid tax bill, or that there's a fee that needs to be paid immediately. Now, you might be well aware that government agencies do not call you to demand payment or request gift cards or ask you to make a wire transfer. But it's hard to remember at the moment when they catch you off guard and get you scared or alarmed. The first line of defense is to tell your loved one this, in clear and plain language, over and over again. My mom would straight up forget and get fooled again, not because she has dementia but because the scammers are so well-practiced at causing alarm. "They're so good at fooling me!" she would say. "Yes of course they are because this is their job to scam people," I would say back.
Tech support scams tend to arrive as a pop-up on a computer screen announcing a virus, with a phone number to call, and the person who answers is helpful and authoritative and will ask for remote access to fix the problem, which is of course the problem. Once they have remote access to your computer they have access to everything.
Romance and friendship scams are more of a long game con and can be even more devastating. By the time money enters the picture the relationship is real, the emotional bond has been carefully built over weeks or months or years. Oftentimes, the victim doesn't experience what happened as a scam. They might even end up defending the perpetrator. Or if they do realize it was a scam, they'll experience the devastation of emotional betrayal.
Check washing is low-tech and common and easy to miss until it shows up on a bank statement. In this scenario your mail is stolen, the payee and amount on a check are chemically erased and rewritten, and the check clears as if nothing happened.
Investment scams promise high returns and low risk on an urgent timeline, and then the money is gone, and the person who lost it often doesn't report it because they made the decision themselves and can't quite believe what happened.
When it's not a stranger
Most of these examples are about crimes committed by someone your parent has never met. But some of the most devastating financial exploitation comes from someone the elder trusts completely, someone who filled a void that the family couldn't fill.
I wrote about what happened to my grandfather in detail on Substack. The short version is that his dementia, which we didn't yet recognize as dementia, pushed him away from us and toward people who exploited that distance methodically over years. By the time we could legally intervene, the damage was done.
This pattern has a name: trusted companion exploitation, and you can read the full story here. It follows a recognizable arc. The elder becomes isolated, often through conflict that the disease itself is generating. Someone new enters the picture who validates the elder's suspicions about family. Access expands gradually and financial control follows. What makes it so difficult to address is that the family often can't act without losing the one thing keeping the elder stable, because the companion is also the care, and removing one means losing the other.
The defenses you build before you need them
Your parent's phone number, address, and family relationships are almost certainly sitting in multiple people-search databases right now. Whitepages, FastPeopleSearch, Spokeo, and dozens of others aggregate public records and sell access to anyone who wants it. This is where the grandparent scam gets its details. The caller doesn't guess that your mother has a grandson named Tyler. They looked it up, the same way you can look it up right now by Googling your own parent's name and seeing what surfaces. I did this with myself and spent some hours going platform by platform, submitting removal requests through each site's privacy page. Those listings typically include your parent's information and will list you as a close associate or family member, which is precisely how a scammer learns your grandchildren's names. Google's Results About You tool can help request removal from search results directly. None of this is airtight and the databases repopulate over time, but each door you close is one fewer the scammer can walk through.
Setting up bank alerts is one of the more useful things you can do before there's any reason to. Most banks allow you to configure notifications for transactions above a certain amount, for new payees, for activity that falls outside the normal pattern, and the key word there is normal, which you can only define if you've been paying attention to what the baseline looks like. Regular expenses, typical withdrawal amounts, the payees that appear every month. If you can, have ask your parent's bank about their protocols for large cash withdrawals by older customers, and ask specifically whether your parent has ever come in with someone you don't recognize. Some banks have elder financial exploitation teams. Most families don't know to ask until it's too late to ask.
For parents on a landline who won't give up the number they've had since 1988, which is by now on every scam list that exists, there are call-blocking devices that announce unknown callers aloud and block numbers automatically. The one I found for my mother announces "Unknown caller. Unknown caller." in a robotic voice every time an unrecognized number comes through, which is not elegant but has functioned as the most reliable line of defense we've had.
Tell your elder that anyone who asks you to keep a financial request secret from your family is someone you should not send money to, regardless of who they claim to be or how urgent they say it is. The grandparent scam depends on the instinct to protect. Naming that script explicitly in advance is one of the few defenses that actually works against it. For AI voice cloning, which can now reproduce a family member's voice well enough to be convincing, choosing a family code word can help. Use it so that anyone requesting emergency money must provide the code word before any action is taken.
Protecting against mail or check fraud is simpler. Pick up your mail promptly, or switch to electronic billing. Check washing requires nothing more sophisticated than a stolen envelope and a bottle of acetone.
Move fast as every hour matters
If you think a scam is in progress or has already happened, the window for recovery narrows with every hour that passes. Wire transfers can sometimes be reversed within 24 to 48 hours, certain check transactions have similar windows, and the faster you move the more options remain technically open even if nothing is guaranteed.
Call the bank immediately and ask them to freeze the account, reverse any transactions still in process, and flag the account for monitoring going forward. File a report with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov, which creates a paper trail and feeds data that helps investigators identify patterns across cases. Call the National Elder Fraud Hotline at 833-FRAUD-11 (833-372-8311), which exists specifically for this and can connect you to resources and guidance that a general fraud report won't surface. Contact Adult Protective Services in your state, which investigates elder financial exploitation and has tools available that families acting alone don't have access to.
If significant assets have been transferred, an elder law attorney can tell you whether recovery is possible and whether emergency guardianship or conservatorship is appropriate to prevent further loss. One resource that most families never think to use is their congressional representative's constituent services office, which exists to help residents navigate federal agencies including Social Security and Medicare. If your parent has been targeted by a government impersonation scam, a call there can sometimes move an investigation in ways that a standard fraud report cannot.
The infrastructure doesn't exist
The sad and bad news is that you're mostly on your own to prevent your parent from being victim to scams. There is no universal caller screening, no consistent bank protocol for flagging large withdrawals by vulnerable adults, no infrastructure that catches this before it happens rather than after. The advice that gets handed to families, educate your parents, stay vigilant, places the entire weight of a systemic failure onto individuals who are already managing more than they can reasonably hold.
You can do everything right and still end up a victim. I guess the only thing you can do is reduce the chances and stay vigilant.
It's not too late to act
If it's already happened, the most important thing is to not let shame stop you from moving forward. Scammers rely on your shame to keep quiet. Instead report it, get legal help, and know that you are not the first family this has happened to and that acting quickly, even after the fact, is still acting.
Trusted resources
- National Elder Fraud Hotline: 833-FRAUD-11 (833-372-8311)
- FTC fraud reporting: ReportFraud.ftc.gov
- National Institute on Aging: nia.nih.gov — Beware scams targeting older adults
- Adult Protective Services: search "[your state] Adult Protective Services"
- National Council on Aging: ncoa.org — avoiding scams
- donotcall.gov: National Do Not Call Registry
- Google Results About You: remove your parent's contact information from search results
Frequently asked questions
My parent sent gift cards to a scammer. Can we get the money back? Almost certainly not, because gift cards are designed to be untraceable, which is precisely why scammers prefer them over every other payment method. Report it to the FTC anyway, both because it creates a record and because some gift card companies have fraud teams that can occasionally act if contacted within a very short window after the transaction.
How do I talk to my parent about scams without making them feel like I think they're losing it? Lead with the scam rather than with your parent's vulnerability, and frame it as something that happens to people who are sharp and capable, because it does, because these operations are sophisticated and well-resourced and designed specifically to get past the defenses of people who think they'd never fall for it. "These scammers got someone I know" is a more useful opening than anything that centers your parent's age or cognition.
My parent is embarrassed and doesn't want to report it. What do I do? Scammers count on exactly this, which is worth saying to your parent directly. The embarrassment is part of the design, not a reasonable response to something your parent did wrong. Reporting doesn't require public disclosure, and framing it as something that protects the next family rather than something that exposes this one can sometimes make it easier to agree to.
What's the difference between Adult Protective Services and the police? APS investigates abuse, neglect, and exploitation of vulnerable adults and can connect families to services, resources, and legal intervention that a standard police report doesn't trigger. Police handle the criminal complaint. In cases of financial exploitation you often need both running in parallel, APS for the protective and civil side and police for the criminal record that may eventually support recovery or prosecution.
Should I take over my parent's finances entirely? That depends on what your parent's capacity actually is and what they want, and those two things are not always the same. A financial power of attorney gives you legal authority to act on their behalf while leaving their autonomy intact. Guardianship or conservatorship removes that autonomy entirely and requires a court order. An elder law attorney can tell you which is appropriate for where your parent actually is, which is a more useful starting point than a general answer.
How do I protect against AI cloning my voice? Technology will take us to places in the future that we can't even imagine today, both good and bad. Trying to stay ahead is futile. But for starters, deciding on a family code word is a good thing to do. Make that word something agreed upon in advance and known to every family member, that anyone requesting emergency money over the phone must provide before any action is taken. If the caller can't produce it, hang up and call the person directly on a number you already have stored. The code word should be memorable enough that family members will actually remember it and unusual enough that it can't be guessed from context.
Note: This article provides general information, not legal advice. If you believe your parent has been the victim of financial exploitation, consult an elder law attorney in your state.