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The Justice Department released its 2025 Annual Report to Congress on elder fraud this month.

Older Americans lost almost $2 billion to fraud schemes in 2024.

Lottery scams, romance fraud, tech support pop-ups, and the grandparent jail call are doing most of the damage. Attorney General Pamela Bondi flagged transnational rings working out of multiple countries to target U.S. seniors specifically.

The patterns are predictable. The conversations with parents almost never happen until after a hit lands.

Three controls actually work, and none of them require a fancy app:

A family rule that any money decision over a set threshold gets a second set of eyes before money moves.

Account alerts turned on for every senior bank login so the family sees withdrawals in real time.

A scripted answer to any call asking for cash, gift cards, or wire transfers. Word for word, written down by the phone.

World Elder Abuse Awareness Day is June 15. If you have not had this conversation with your parents yet, this is the month to do it.

Has anyone here had a scam come close to landing on someone in your family? What stopped it?

Ryan Riggins | NC Real Estate License #361546 | eXp Realty

If your parent gets a Social Security overpayment notice dated after April 25, the Social Security Administration can now withhold 50 percent of their monthly benefit until the debt is repaid.

AARP confirmed this two weeks ago. NBC News followed up.

Here is the short version.

In early 2026 the Trump administration tried to push the clawback rate from 10 percent to 100 percent. Public outcry forced the agency to back down to 50 percent. The 50 percent rate is now active for any new overpayment notice issued after April 25, 2026.

About one million beneficiaries owed approximately $23 billion in overpayments as of fiscal year 2023, per SSA records. Most of these overpayments are not the beneficiary's fault. They come from SSA processing delays, eligibility math errors, or workload backlogs.

Here is the part most families miss.

The waiver and appeal window is 30 days from the notice date. If your parent files for a waiver or appeal in that window, the SSA cannot start the withholding until the agency decides on the request. The waiver standard is two things: it was not your fault, and you cannot afford to pay it back.

Most cases meet both tests. But you have to file the paperwork.

If you have a power of attorney for an aging parent and you are not reading their mail every week, this is the kind of letter that slips through. A 50 percent reduction on a fixed-income check can cascade into missed rent, missed Medicare premiums, and downstream Medicaid eligibility issues.

Has anyone in your family seen one of these notices yet?

Ryan Riggins | NC Real Estate License #361546 | eXp Realty

The IRS Criminal Investigation Division announced this week that an Indian national was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for his role in an international elder fraud ring.

His job in the operation: gold courier.

Over four months he made 33 in-person pickups in Florida, Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, and New York. He personally took $6.6 million in cash and gold from elderly victims. Individual household losses ranged from $50,000 to over $1.2 million. He was ordered to pay $4.36 million in restitution.

The script is the same in every case I've seen reported by the DOJ over the last two years. A scammer calls pretending to be the FBI, IRS, Medicare, or a tech support agent. They convince the senior that their accounts are about to be frozen or compromised. The "fix" is to liquidate retirement funds and convert the cash to gold bars. Then a polite young man shows up at the door, often in a suit, to "secure" or "protect" the gold for them.

What strikes me about this case is the physical scale. Thirty-three families, five states, four months. The average pickup was around $200,000. One was over $1.2 million.

The transnational structure is what makes recovery nearly impossible. Once the gold leaves the country, the money is gone. There is no clawback. The restitution order is largely symbolic.

The single highest-value conversation any of us can have this weekend is to tell our parents directly: no legitimate agency, ever, asks anyone to convert savings to physical gold and hand it to a courier. Not the IRS. Not the FBI. Not Medicare. Not a bank. The "secure your assets" pitch is a confirmed crime.

Anyone seeing this in your state? Have your parents gotten one of these calls?

DOJ announced this week that Michael Cris Traya Sordilla pleaded guilty to running a $48 million fraud scheme through fake U.S. publishing companies operating as PageTurner Press and Media.

The numbers from the DOJ filing.

Eight hundred-plus victims, the majority retired authors who had self-published a single book.

Forty-eight million dollars in confirmed restitution that Sordilla agreed to. He personally pocketed $2.7 million.

Operation ran from 2017 to 2024. Sentencing set for July 24.

This is the third major DOJ elder-fraud guilty plea or sentence announced in the past two weeks. A Canadian was sentenced to 188 months for a grandparent scam ring on May 5. A Burbank man was sentenced to 10 years on May 5 for embezzling $1.8M from an elderly estate. The DOJ Elder Justice Initiative is producing the steadiest enforcement output the federal government has had on this issue in years.

The pattern across all three cases is the same. International or shell-based operators monetizing the discretionary income of retired Americans through pitches that feel less like scams and more like recognition or family help.

Few useful filters if you or someone in your family is being pitched a deal.

A real literary or film agent works on commission, never upfront fees. SAG-AFTRA and the Authors Guild verify real reps in minutes.

A real grandchild in jail does not need cash sent to a courier within the hour.

A real attorney handling an elder estate does not move money through a single shell LLC.

Anyone in your state seeing this rate of enforcement actually translate to fewer cases on the ground?

This is for folks over 60 because the scammers are getting more sophisticated and your kids may not have told you yet.

The FBI's 2025 internet crime report came out April 7. Adults 60 and older lost 4.9 billion dollars in one year. Up 43 percent.

The new piece you should know about: AI voice cloning. With about three seconds of audio, scammers can make a recording of any voice say anything they want. They pull the audio from Facebook videos, voicemail greetings, even old podcast clips.

The phone rings. It's "your grandson." The voice is right. He's in jail in another state, needs bail money wired right now, please don't tell his parents because he's embarrassed.

It is not your grandson.

What works:

Pick a family word. Not a security question. Just a word that any real family member would know to say in an emergency. Pick something somebody in a foreign call center would never guess.

If a call like this comes in, hang up. Call your grandson, or his parent, on the regular number you have for them. The real grandson will pick up, or you'll find out within five minutes nobody is in jail.

Wire transfers, gift cards, and cryptocurrency don't come back. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Pass this along to your friends. Print a card with the family code word and stick it next to the phone if you don't want to memorize it.

Anyone else seeing this in your area?

FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center released its 2025 report April 7. Americans lost 20.8 billion dollars to internet crime in 2025. That's up 26 percent in one year.

Adults 60 and older took 4.9 billion of that hit. Up 43 percent.

The biggest single category was investment fraud, most of it pig butchering. That's where a scammer befriends a target online, builds rapport over weeks or months, then walks them into a fake crypto trading platform with fake account screens and fake gains. By the time the target tries to withdraw, the platform vanishes.

Pig butchering alone hit 7.2 billion in losses across 61,559 complaints in 2025.

The IC3 report specifically calls out AI scaling these scams. Voice cloning needs about three seconds of audio. Profile photos can be generated in seconds. The deepfake "grandma I'm in jail" call has been documented in multiple states this year.

For anyone over 50 with parents alive, or anyone over 60 yourself, three things the data keeps pointing at:

If a stranger from the internet is teaching anyone you know about cryptocurrency, that is the scam.

If "your grandkid" calls in an emergency and asks for money sent fast, hang up and call back on a known number before anything moves.

If anyone in your life has gotten more isolated from family in the last six months and is suddenly making big financial decisions, look closely at who they're talking to.

Anyone seeing this in your state? Has it hit your family yet?

For families dealing with elderly parents, the FBI's new IC3 report (released April 7) put real numbers behind something a lot of us have been seeing.

Adults 60 and older lost 4.9 billion dollars to internet crime in 2025. That's up 43 percent in one year. The Journal of Accountancy's April issue ran a piece on AI voice cloning specifically. Scammers need about three seconds of audio to clone a familiar voice. They pull it from a Facebook video, a podcast clip, even a voicemail greeting.

We just hit the point in our extended family where Dad's brother got a call that sounded exactly like his nephew claiming to be in jail in another state. Money was almost wired before someone called his daughter to verify.

What's working for us:

One. Family code word. Not a security question, just a word a real family member would say if they actually called in an emergency. We picked something nobody in another country would guess.

Two. A shared place where the whole family can see what's happening with Dad week to week. Visitors, mail, doctor appointments, anything unusual. We are using SeniorSafe for it but a shared family note works too. The point is the visibility, not the tool.

Three. Slow money rules. Anything over a threshold needs two of us on a call before it moves.

The technical fixes don't scale. You can't expect a 78-year-old to authenticate voiceprints under stress. The fix is family communication patterns that get ahead of the call before the call happens.

What's worked for your family? Especially if you're dealing with a parent who insists they would never fall for a scam, because that's the parent who is most at risk.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-KS) and Rep. Max Miller (R-OH) introduced the ACCESS Act this week.

If it passes, Medicaid would cover assisted living for seniors who already qualify for nursing-home-level care. Effective date if it gets through Congress: January 1, 2027.

Right now Medicaid will pay for a nursing home but not for assisted living. So when a family runs out of money and Medicaid is the only option left, the parent often ends up in a higher-acuity setting than they actually need.

The bill would cap the new benefit at what Medicaid would have spent on a nursing home anyway. Cost-neutral on paper. Marshall's framing: Medicaid spending is unsustainable, and seniors are being pushed into higher-cost care they do not actually need.

Industry response is split. Argentum and the National Center for Assisted Living support the goal but are pushing back on a federal mandate layered on top of 50 different state regulatory frameworks. Their concern is real. The delivery of long-term care varies sharply across states. A federal mandate without funding could squeeze smaller communities out.

A few things worth knowing if you are running a transition right now.

January 2027 is 7 months away. Even if this passes, families in the middle of a decision today still face the existing patchwork. Per CareScout 2025, assisted living averages $74,400 a year nationally, mostly out of pocket.

State Medicaid waiver programs already cover some assisted living services in many states. The names vary. North Carolina has Special Assistance In-Home and Adult Care Home variants. California has Assisted Living Waiver. Florida has the Statewide Medicaid Managed Care Long-Term Care program. The benefits are limited and waitlists can be long, but they exist now.

If your parent is years away from needing care, this bill is a real planning variable. If they are months away, it is news but not actionable yet.

For anyone in the middle of this: what state are you in, and have you run into the Medicaid-pays-nursing-but-not-assisted-living gap personally?

CMS just put new prior authorization rules into effect for Medicare Advantage plans for the 2026 contract year.

The short version, for anyone managing a parent's care:

If your parent's MA plan denies a procedure, treatment, or admission, the plan now has to respond to an urgent appeal within 72 hours and a standard appeal within 7 days.

They also have to publicly report their approval and denial rates every year.

And if they already approved an admission, they cannot retroactively deny it unless they can prove fraud or obvious error.

This matters because MA prior auth denials jumped about 56 percent in recent CMS oversight reporting. Most families never appealed because nobody told them they could, or because the timeline felt impossible.

The new rule is a real shift. The leverage moved a little.

What I would do as the adult child managing a parent's care if a denial shows up:

Same day, write a letter or use the plan's portal.

Cite the date of the denial and ask the plan to provide the specific criteria they used.

Reference the new CMS Contract Year 2026 rules.

File the appeal in writing and keep a copy.

Most denials I have seen overturned came from families who actually put the appeal in within the first week.

Source for this is the CMS Final Rule for Contract Year 2026 (CMS-4208-F).

Has anyone else been through a Medicare Advantage prior auth fight for an aging parent? What worked? What did not?

If anyone wants the full free checklist for senior transitions, I keep it at rigginsstrategicsolutions.com/freeguide.

Two scam categories now dominate.

Government impersonation. Tech support fraud.

Both follow the same three-step structure. Invent urgency that did not exist before the phone rang. Name an authority that cannot be questioned. Demand payment in something irreversible.

The payment instrument is always the giveaway. Gift cards. Cryptocurrency. Wire transfer. Cash courier picked up at the door. Real federal agencies do not ask for any of these. Real tech companies do not call you out of the blue and ask for remote access to your computer.

The advisory's two prevention rules track almost word-for-word with what I tell every family I sit down with.

One. No legitimate federal agency will call your parent and demand same-day payment.

Two. No legitimate tech company will call unsolicited and ask for remote access.

Print those two on a fridge magnet if that's what it takes.

What I keep learning is that the conversation almost never happens until after a parent has lost money. By that point the playbook has already worked. The credit card has been read. The wire transfer has cleared. The crypto wallet is gone.

I am putting this out here because subreddit conversation is more useful than another generic article. So:

Has anyone in your family actually fielded one of these calls in the last 30 days? What did they say. What worked to break the spell. Did you involve anyone besides the family.

I'm trying to learn from real cases, not statistics.