How Credit Unions Can Stay Ahead of Elder Scams and Fraud

By Todd Rovak, CEO, Carefull

Stopping elder fraud before it happens starts with educating members and using your credit union’s biggest asset: the relationship within your community.

Identity Verification Is No Longer Enough

Credit unions are facing a growing threat: imposter scams. Thieves claiming to be from financial institutions, government agencies and other known businesses are persuading account holders to hand their life savings over. Because account holders are authorizing the transactions, traditional fraud detection tools are being bypassed.

The scale keeps climbing. The FTC reports that consumers lost $2.95 billion to imposter scams in 2024 – second only to investment scams across all fraud categories. And those numbers dramatically understate the real impact: the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) saw reported losses from adults 60 and older jump 59% in a single year, reaching more than $7.7 billion in 2025.

The tactics are evolving even faster than the losses. The FBI says AI-driven fraud, much of it using voice cloning to impersonate a panicked grandchild or family member, drove nearly $900 million in reported losses to IC3 in 2025, with older adults accounting for more than $350 million of that total. A few seconds of audio scraped from social media is enough to make a scam call sound unmistakably like a loved one.

Older adults remain particularly at risk of losing money to imposter scams. Scammers target them for their wealth, retirement savings and a steady stream of income from Social Security and pensions. Isolation, declines in physical and mental health, and a trusting nature can make older adults even more susceptible.

Behavioral Analysis Is the Key to Stopping Impersonation Scams

Since the victim is willingly participating in the crime, proactive analysis on the part of the institution is crucial to prevention. Impersonation scams all follow similar patterns. These scams are usually initiated through random outreach using email or text, but the outreach can be through any form of digital communication. The victim then engages in a series of behaviors that are generally different from the usual way he or she engages with their accounts. Some of the most prevalent behaviors include the sudden trading of cryptocurrency or use of a P2P payment app, or, most simply, the sending of a random wire transfer. No matter the method, there is a novel behavior that’s indicative of being a victim. Initially, the amounts are small, but over time they can lead to financial ruin.

This isn’t a niche concern. Investment fraud, much of it “pig butchering” schemes that push victims into funding cryptocurrency trading accounts, was the single biggest driver of IC3 losses in 2025, at more than $8.6 billion.

Identifying these behavioral indicators can go one step further. There are a series of early behaviors that can be signs a person is being scammed. The most obvious is the romance scam. For this specific scam, victims often purchase a membership to a dating app for the first time. In the instance of an impersonation around crypto, it’s the signup and funding of a trading account. The challenge, though, is that each instance of fraud identification requires a credit union to track back through a member's purchases and transaction, and only then can the credit union expose the anatomy of the scam. Executing this level of analysis on a case-by-case basis is just not sustainable and requires technology to analyze members’ behavior at scale.

What You Can Do Today

Some good news: programs that perform this type of behavioral analysis exist and can be easily distributed to your members. But until you roll that out, there are three key steps to take that can lower the threat for your elder members.

Step 1: Educate Members

Making your elder members aware of a scam before it reaches them is one of the most powerful protections you have. Research shared by the FINRA Investor Education Foundation finds that people who’ve heard of a specific scam type before being targeted are 80% less likely to lose money to it. Something as simple as sending members an article alerting them to ignore any message they receive about Medicare coverage can change outcomes. The FBI maintains a regularly updated list of common frauds and scams at fbi.gov, and the IC3 at ic3.gov tracks emerging threats. Member awareness is made more powerful by also keeping your frontline employees aware of the scams.

Step 2: Educate Employees

Employee awareness is a powerful tool. In the best case, the employee, him or herself, might be able to identify a victim and trigger the necessary action to keep that potential victim protected. At the very least, however, your employees will be on the lookout and engaging with your membership reinforcing that loop of education. The payoff is real: AARP reports that its BankSafe program, which trains bank and credit union employees to spot and stop financial exploitation, helped prevent a record $137 million in member/customer losses in 2024 alone, a 53% jump over the prior year.

Step 3: Leverage Your Relationships

The final action, and the one where credit unions stand out, is to build trusting relationships with your members. Credit union and member relationships are some of the most personal and powerful in all financial services. These ties can be the element that breaks the grip of the scam. The greater the trust, the greater the chance of protection.

Last, but certainly not least, is a credit union’s intention and focus on serving their members. The purity and power of people protecting people will help credit unions lead the charge to keep their elder members safe from fraud and scams.

Connect with Carefull to learn more.