What is elder fraud and why is it increasing right now?
Elder fraud is financial exploitation that targets seniors, often through impersonation, emotional manipulation, or false emergencies.
There’s an $80 trillion wealth transfer underway – and scammers know it.
In this episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons exposes how criminals are increasingly targeting seniors and families using sophisticated elder fraud schemes, including fake “grandchild in trouble” calls and AI-generated voice cloning.
Drawing from a Department of Justice investigation, Darryl breaks down how international call centers impersonate loved ones, manipulate emotions, and move stolen cash through unsuspecting rideshare drivers. He also explains how scammers now need as little as three seconds of audio from social media to replicate a family member’s voice using AI.
You’ll learn:
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How grandparent scams work from start to finish.
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Why seniors are being targeted during the historic wealth transfer.
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How AI voice cloning makes scams harder to detect.
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Real warning signs to listen for during urgent phone calls.
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Practical steps families can take to protect aging parents and grandparents.
This episode isn’t just about financial loss – it’s about the emotional damage these scams cause to families, parents, and seniors.
If you or someone you love may have been exposed to fraud, contact the FBI at 1-800-CALL-FBI (1-800-225-5324).
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Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, and you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature only. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax or legal advice. Visit PAXFinancialGroup.com for more information. And we believe that good decisions, good money decisions happen in a conversation.
And so we’re having a conversation today. There’s a better way to have a conversation. If you go to PAX Financial Group there’s a connect with us button. You can connect with an advisor that way. So that’s my commercial for today. But I really want to talk about protecting you all from scammers. And I talk about this a lot.
For those that don’t know, I did a whole segment or series of ten episodes called The Dark Side of Finance, and you can find that on every other podcast platform that’s out there. So, the Dark Side of Finance is where we unpack some of the major frauds that we’re seeing today. And so, I’m going to dig into that a little bit.
And I’ve got some interesting angles that I want to cover with you all. And if you think about, there’s actually two frauds I want to talk about today. But I want to set the stage because this is important. There’s about an $80 trillion wealth transfer taking place between one generation to another. So, the baby boomers to Gen Z and Gen X, that money is beginning to get in motion.
It’s taking a while. In fact, I was having a conversation with the business owner the other day. And here’s part of the challenges, that the transition of control of a business is starting to take place a little bit more. I’m starting to see a lot more business owners hand over the keys to their sons or daughters.
They’re starting to trust them. Maybe there’s a part of them that doesn’t trust themselves anymore. I don’t know, but they’re starting to trust them with managing portions of the business. The money itself hasn’t fully transferred to the next generation. I know there’ll be some catalysts when people pass away, but it’s coming. And there’s a group of people that want to intercept that money before it gets into the hands of the next generation.
They ask Willie Sutton, you’ve heard this phrase before. Why do you rob banks? And he says, what? That’s where the money is. So, we have this huge, massive amount of wealth that the baby boomers have earned and acquired and saved over their lifetimes in real estate and cash, CDs, stocks, bonds, businesses. It’s huge, biggest wealth transfer of all time. You can certainly nerd out on the nuances of it, but it is a huge wealth transfer. And so, the con artists are looking specifically at these seniors, specifically at the baby boomers, and looking for cracks in their armor to be able to steal. And it’s utterly disgusting. And it breaks my heart to read these stories.
There’s one called pig butchering. I did again. I did a whole podcast on pig butchering. If you go to the Dark Side of Finance, I’ll talk about two today, because this one hit my inbox from the Department of Justice and the headline here. And again, I’ll put a link into the podcast. But the headline here is 13 individuals charged for operating a transnational elder fraud scheme.
Transnational international, transnational, cross borders. But this one was a call center in the Dominican Republic. And a lot of them are built like call centers. There’s a bunch of people there. Some are innocent, some are human trafficked, some aren’t. But these this was a call center operation in the Dominican Republic that specifically targeted seniors. There were 400 victims, 400.
And the average age of the victim, 84. They stole about $5 million, which in the big scheme of things isn’t a lot, but every family counts. So, if somebody gave these fraudsters their last $5,000, that could be devastating. Most of these were in the Massachusetts area. But if you don’t live in Massachusetts, don’t let your guard down.
This is happening everywhere. So, here’s and I’m actually reading a print copy of the script. So, it’s kind of hard to see, but, again, I’ll send you the link so you can see, but they actually, in the Department of Justice made copies of their scripts. So, the call centers, people are using these scripts to scam the elderly.
And what they do is they pretend that they’re the grandkids. And so it’ll be something like this. Hey, mama, or Tia, or I shouldn’t say Tia, but grandma. Hey, grandma, it’s Julie, and your granddaughter. I’m in Florida. I came over because a friend passed away, and I came to pay my respects to the family.
So, after the funeral, we went to restaurant and had dinner. And we did this farewell toast for my friend, and I had two glasses of wine. But when leaving the restaurant, this lady out of nowhere ran a red light. And I ran into her. And when the police came, they gave me a breathalyzer test and said that I was over the limit.
And I was granted a five minute call. And I called you because I know you can help me, but please don’t tell my parents. Or please keep this between you until I get out. I am so ashamed about this. Okay. And so, then it goes on. So that’s the script that they use, and they must have refined it over and over again.
That script is used by someone in their scheme called the opener. And so, this person would pretend to be the grandchild, then the closer would be somebody who would follow up on that call, who would be the grandchild’s attorney asking for money to pay for the child, the grandchild fees due to the accident. And so, they had this as a system.
Now, you still have part two of this where. Okay, you may have convinced Grandma or Grandpa. But how do you get the money to these con artists? Well, they do it in multiple different ways, but believe it or not, they will actually hire a Uber driver and tell the Uber driver and the rideshare driver can be completely clueless.
Hey, I need you to pick up a package from this address. If you can pick it up and then drop it off, mail it here. The rideshare people will do those kind of things. I didn’t know that. So, the rideshare drivers who were innocently picking up packages of money, boxes of money from these grandmothers and then shipping it to the Dominican Republic unsuspecting, like clueless rideshare drivers.
I’m going to go to this neighborhood, pick up a box, I’m going to put it in the mail. That’s what they get paid to do. And, you know, it’s usually just a shoe box of cash or whatever you don’t want to be. It doesn’t. They obviously don’t want traceable. So, no wires or no ACH or credit cards.
It’s cash. This particular one, I didn’t hear about cryptocurrency, but oftentimes cryptocurrencies are used. And then if they’re not greedy enough, they often will call back and say we didn’t get the money. And something happened. There was a mix up. You’re going to have to send it again. And then they have this board, this running board of the names of the victims and the roles.
The different people are playing along with the amount of money that they collected. I mean, it is a very, very sophisticated system. These people did get busted. If you feel like I think it’s worth mentioning, if you feel like you are a part of some fraud or have been exposed to it, please call 1-800 Call FBI, call FBI. That’s 1-800-225-5324. Really a horrible experience for everyone here. A lot of people lost money. But you’ve one question you’ve got to ask is like, how did the grandparents, like, discern whether or not it’s their grandkid or not? First of all, you know, some of these, if their average age is 84, there’s some hearing issues likely.
And who knows. But here’s where the second scam I want to make sure that you’re aware of. That’s happening in real time right now all the time. And this is just recording of your family members voices. And so, what these con artists are doing now is they’re finding video clips that you might have produced online on Facebook, Instagram of your kids, and they only need three seconds of audio, only three seconds of audio to feed that into the ChatGPT machine or whatever AI machine.
And then they create their own voice recognition that duplicates people that you love. It replicates it and, then you’ll get a phone call and that phone calls. Here’s where they get really tricky. The phone call will come from a local area code, so you’ll pick it up. Okay. Maybe. I mean, I don’t pick up my phone very often anymore, but you pick it up because it’s local and it’ll be your granddaughter, grandson, somebody you love.
And it’ll be their voice. It’ll be their voice. That was AI duplicated. And these are often, you know, hard to figure out. They will ask for untraceable money. Like I mentioned before, cash, gift cards. You know, those are popular. There’s also scams where they’ll replicate an executive’s voice to try to get somebody to wire money, an assistant.
But oftentimes they’re really going after family members, and you just have to really start to begin developing instincts. And I think that’s the challenge right now. We haven’t been hit enough in our neighborhoods, in our communities yet. So, we still have this naivety. And they’re, these con artists are gearing up for the next wave of very effective scams against families and seniors.
And it’s incumbent upon all of us as a community to train each other and be aware of what might be happening specifically for our grandparents. We have to start taking, you know, a little bit more precaution if you really want to get ahead of this. You know, you may want to take down some of the audio that’s on social media.
I’m all over the place, so it’s hard for me to do that. But if you’ve been concerned about that, you know, that’s a good step. A secret family passphrase would be helpful that only you guys know. Because be careful of saying, okay, if somebody calls, and says, my pet Lily. And you’re like, oh, well, you know, a scam artist wouldn’t know my pet Lily.
No, they can screen, they will go through your whole social media. They’ll know your pet’s names, what high school you went to, the mascot, everything they had. All of us have trails of breadcrumbs that these con artists will pick up to make the case that it’s a legit call. So, a secret passphrase is helpful.
And you can also ask the caller, you know, a specific detail that only you know, your relatives might know. But do let law enforcement know if you do come across this very important. It’s also helpful if you want to if you’re having a conversation with somebody like this, maybe if you have another phone to record it, that’s an idea or you know, take a picture of the, you know, I guess you have the caller ID, but, the recording of another phone of that conversation would be helpful because there might be, your amygdala might be hijacked.
Which leads me to the last story I want to mention. Jennifer. And she is out of Arizona and she’s a mom. Two girls, one she was taking to, like, a gym class, I think it was gymnastics. And the other one was skiing with her dad, and she got a phone call from her daughter that was supposedly skiing, and her daughter was crying, saying, mom, I’m sorry I messed up.
I’m so sorry. And she heard her crying in the background. And then a guy grabbed the phone and said, if you don’t give me $1 million, and if you call the police, if you don’t give me $1 million. And if you make an attempt to call the police, I will shove your daughter full of drugs and abuse her and drop her off in Mexico, and you’ll never see her again.
And if you’re hearing this now, keep in mind your mom and you’re hearing your daughter in the background. You know, it’s her voice. This happened to a lady in Arizona. And obviously she freaked out, scared to death, was able to connect with her daughter. Something fishy. I don’t remember the whole story. But something fishy happened where she caught on, and, in fact, actually, you can look up this story yourself because it’s everywhere, but it’s, she realized that it was a scam and was relieved to know that her daughter was okay.
She didn’t give the money out or anything, but I saw some follow up videos. You can look her up on YouTube. And she’s still shocked. I mean, this is still, there’s PTSD there because a mom had a moment where she thought her daughter was going to die. So, there’s this financial element that exists, but I don’t think we recognize the emotional pain that this causes to all of us.
I mean, we’re talking about moms thinking that their children are dying. We’re talking about lonely old men that get in a romantic relationship with a con artist overseas. We’re talking about a grandma that’s scared about a grandson that’s in jail. There’s not only a financial piece, but an emotional piece involved with all of these scans.
And I just want you to be aware of this. I want you to be on point, and I want to make sure that you keep your head on a swivel as we continue to navigate this new iteration of con artists and, like Willie Sutton, they’re going where the money is. So, I hope that was helpful. I hope it doesn’t disturb you too much.
I hope it gives you enough awareness to start training you and your family to get in front of this. And as always, thanks for tuning in to Retire in Texas. And I want to remind you, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
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