Florida's elderly lost nearly $300 million to fraud last year, report says, as crimes become more insidious and devastating

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Perhaps they just lost a spouse, or went through a traumatic health scare. Perhaps, as they’ve grown older, they’ve simply become lonely. Then someone calls bearing good news.

Over 50 elderly Americans answered the phone to such news a couple years ago, told by callers based in Broward County that they had won a lottery prize of millions of dollars. To collect their money they just had to cover the cost of shipping, taxes, insurance and customs processing. So they withdrew the money from their bank accounts and paid.

Florida, with its high population of elderly people, has ranked second in the country for elder fraud for at least the fourth year in a row, a newly released FBI report shows, with residents over 60 losing a cumulative total of nearly $300 million in 2023 alone. Even accounting for its larger elderly population, the state ranks in the top 10 for the crimes, according to a recent report by the company VPNPRo that analyzed federal data.

Across the U.S., the crimes are growing, with a total of $3.4 billion lost this year, more than the year before. They’re also becoming increasingly effective and sinister. Romance scams and lottery scams are two of the most popular in recent years, experts say, driving people to financial ruin and even suicide. Yet the crimes are rarely reported. Oftentimes, elderly people are embarrassed about what happened to them or afraid that if they report it, their families will think they are mentally unfit to take care of themselves.

“With older adults, people quickly jump to conclusion they must be slightly mentally declining,” said Karen Murillo, AARP Florida’s associate state director of advocacy, “so it’s time to take control over Mom’s bank accounts, or get guardianship in place, or she can’t live alone anymore.”

Officials estimate that only a fifth of scams are actually reported. Even the FBI’s numbers are lower than what they should be because the agency has the ages of the victims only in about half of the complaints they received.

The numbers “do not fully capture the frauds and scams targeting this vulnerable cross-section of our population,” Michael D. Nordwall, assistant director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Division, wrote in the report released Tuesday.

Between 2020 and 2021, the 51 lottery scam victims ended up losing, cumulatively, over $6.6 million, some of which went to purchase a Mercedes Benz in Jamaica, according to South Florida investigators, which included the Broward Sheriff’s Office and Homeland Security’s Fort Lauderdale office. This past February, a federal grand jury in Miami indicted a man and woman originally from Jamaica with the fraud.

Investment fraud, romance and confidence scams, and tech-support scams are responsible for the biggest financial losses among the elderly, according to new data from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, though tech-support scams have by far the greatest number of victims.

Sometimes when the phone call comes, the news is urgent and bad.

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