Belinda* is a retired emergency room nurse and health care manager who has lived in my Upper East Side district for over fifty years. In her seventies, she is among 60,000 constituents over 65, the largest concentration in Manhattan.
Earlier this spring, Belinda responded to a spoofing email—an online fraud technique where the sender alters their email branding and address to mimic a trusted source, in this case a well-known tech support firm with whom she has an account – and over the next 48 hours was scammed out of almost $30,000, her entire retirement savings.
The theft was a crushing blow, vaporizing a nest egg accumulated from a lifetime of serving New Yorkers—first as an ER trauma team member treating the severely injured in a city hospital and subsequently as a managed care specialist coordinating physician services.
She is among thousands of city and state residents victimized each year by fraudsters who target elder residents.
Heartrending stories like Belinda’s are why I introduced legislation to enact stronger fraud protection mechanisms to protect aging New Yorkers from targeted scams and to establish an elder financial exploitation public awareness campaign.
According to an FBI report released last year, New Yorkers age 60 and older lost hundreds of millions, totaling $203, 437,635 in 2023, the fourth highest of any state in the nation.
The average loss per victim in 2023 was $47,000. In 2022, losses to scams victimizing New Yorkers 60-plus totaled more than $212 million, up from $188 million the previous year.
Belinda’s narrative unspools much of what we know about elder fraud: the scammers’ methodology, the financial and emotional devastation they leave in their wake, and how a set of more robust safeguards may have repelled them.
Her ordeal began with a morning email in April.
It was a $200 payment demand, ostensibly from the computer repair company she’d used in the past few years. Struggling at times to keep pace with fast-moving hardware and online technology, Belinda had come to rely upon the house calls from their personable and skilled techs. She’d eagerly signed up as a subscriber and kept current with her fees and service balances.
The email, a visual clone of an authentic message, threatened an additional $900 late fee if she failed to respond within 24 hours. Heart racing, she dialed the 800 number. A pleasant-voiced woman answered, impersonating a billing agent. She confirmed Belinda’s name, age, and that she lived alone. She was transferred to a man who took an aggressive tone, insisting that the swiftest way to resolve her balance was to deposit the money directly into the company’s bank account. All she had to do was accept the “Share Screens” request on her computer screen.
What appeared to be the firm’s legitimate bank account popped up on her computer. She typed “$200” into the Payee amount box. The
scammer then manipulated the interface to turn the $200 into $20,000 into her account. He accused her of fraud and said the only way to avoid prosecution was to “return” the funds via cash deposited into bitcoin ATMs, for a speedy resolution and to protect her account.
Over the next 48 hours, Belinda made two ATM withdrawals of $10,000 each, handing one installment to a courier and depositing the other into a bitcoin ATM in New Jersey, per the fraudster’s instructions. When she logged onto her checking account shortly after, the initial $20,000 in question had been transferred out of her account, along with another $9,000. In total, Belinda had been robbed of $29,000.
Belinda reported the scam and is working with our local precinct’s elder fraud detective. Her bank has said that her money is mostly irretrievable because the bulk of the transactions were in cash.
Belinda is sharing her plight as a cautionary tale for other elder New Yorkers. A graduate degree holder, she is embarrassed at how others may deem her naïve and unsophisticated. But her experience is all too typical, and hardly a reflection of intellect or judgement. Scammers, who are deploying increasingly advanced methods to access banking accounts, target elders because they are more likely to have a retirement cash reserve, as well as a generational challenge with online technology.
The Elder Fraud bill would mandate stronger protections within financial institutions, so that an anomalous activity, such as atypically large cash withdrawals by an elder client, over two consecutive days, would trigger a freeze on the banking activity. My public awareness bill would spread the word about elder financial exploitation to older New Yorkers where they live. We have also co-sponsored shredding events, a reliable method to help protect against identity theft, with the
Sanitation Department, AARP-NY, Upper Green Side and other non-profits.
Aging New Yorkers like Belinda enrich their communities economically, socially, and culturally. And yet, by any metric, our services have failed to keep pace. So many face housing, food and healthcare insecurity. This week, AARP-NY and the Center for an Urban Future released a report on the financial security crisis engulfing older New Yorkers. The study revealed that over a quarter million older adults in NYC are living in poverty, a forty percent surge in the last decade, and that close to sixty percent of those 70+ do not have a stable source of retirement income.
It is unconscionable that they are further left vulnerable to devastating financial fraud. I will continue to marshal every resource to protect aging New Yorkers, their hard-earned finances, and ensure that they have the affordable city and state, and quality of life, that they deserve, that they have earned.
*Name has been changed to protect privacy
***
Assembly Member Rebecca A. Seawright represents the Upper East Side, Yorkville and Roosevelt Island. The first woman to serve her district, she was the Assembly lead sponsor of the ERA to the New York Constitution, which voters enacted in 2024. She is Chair of the Aging Committee, which oversees agencies and legislation affecting New York’s nearly 5 million older adults’ quality of life and independence.
The post A Heavy Toll: The Calamity of Elder Fraud and the Ways We Can Better Protect Older New Yorkers appeared first on EMPIRE REPORT NEW YORK 2025® NEW YORK’S 24/7 NEWS SITE.
