Revealing the prevalence and impact of financial fraud victimization of older US adults

According to authors Morgan and Tapp, there is a shortage of good quality research on financial fraud victimization of older adults in the US. And much research on this population focuses more on financial abuse (perpetrated by those in a position of trust) and less on financial fraud (perpetrated by strangers). Morgan and Tapp mined data from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS): Supplemental Fraud Survey (SFS), [United States], 2017 (ICPSR 37825) to provide a better picture of how older Americans experience financial fraud. The NCVS is a yearly, nationally representative survey that is the country’s primary source of information on crime victimization. In 2017, the NCVS also included the SFS (the most recent one yet fielded), which collected information on seven different types of financial fraud (not including identity theft, which is covered in a different NCVS supplement). The SFS complements FBI data that is based on police-reported crime, since SFS statistics include information from victims who do not report to the police. Indeed, Morgan and Tapp found that in 2017, about 1.33 percent of adults aged 60 and over (nearly one million people) experienced at least one incident of fraud, but fewer than 20 percent reported it to police. Older adult victims lost a total of nearly 1.2 billion dollars that year, averaging $1,270 each. Well over 50 percent of older fraud victims experienced moderate or severe emotional distress, and nearly 80 percent of older fraud victims were non-Hispanic white persons.