House bill seeks better tech to combat financial fraud scams against elderly – CyberScoop
A bipartisan trio of House lawmakers is pushing a bill that would give law enforcement more resources to tackle financial fraud, pig butchering and other scams that specifically target older Americans.
The Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception (GUARD) Act from Reps. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Scott Fitzgerald, R-Wis., would give state, local and tribal enforcement agencies the green light to use federal grant funds toward investigations into financial crimes.
The legislation would also give federal agencies the ability to aid state, local and tribal entities with tracing tools for blockchain and related technologies as part of their probes.
“We need twenty-first-century tools to crack down on fraudsters who use every trick in the book — social media, emails, texts, and phone calls — to swindle Americans out of billions of dollars every year,” Gottheimer said in a statement. “Our law enforcement is the best in the world, and I’ll never stop fighting to give them the tools necessary to help keep our streets, homes, and families safe.”
The introduction of the bill comes at a time when elderly Americans are being increasingly targeted in financial schemes. The FBI’s annual Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) report found that people over 60 filed 147,127 financial fraud complaints in 2024, a 46% jump from the previous year. Total losses exceeded $4.8 billion, the bureau found.
Technology is being leveraged at a higher clip to perpetrate these schemes. One especially pervasive scam that emerged this year is a social engineering attack that attempts to trick people into paying supposed unpaid toll road violations. The countrywide smishing — or phishing via SMS or text messages — campaign has caught the attention of the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission.
Pig butchering, meanwhile, has been an especially fruitful scam for bad actors targeting the elderly. The practice of “fattening” victims up with fake investment promises and then “butchering” them by stealing their contributions reportedly totaled more than $1 billion in losses in 2022.
The rise of blockchain technology has helped federal law enforcement and national security agencies thwart some pig butchering schemes. According to the lawmakers’ press release, the Department of Justice in 2023 used blockchain to freeze roughly $225 million connected to a Southeast Asian crime syndicate that trafficked in pig butchering scams.
Beyond the use of blockchain to aid financial fraud investigations, the House bill calls on law enforcement to leverage other software and technical tools to conduct their probes, in addition to encouraging improved data collection and reporting. Training sessions and tabletop exercises with federal and state, local and tribal law enforcement would also be facilitated under the legislation.
“As technology continues to evolve, so do the tactics used by bad actors to defraud Americans,” Fitzgerald said in a statement. “By harnessing innovative technologies like blockchain, we can better protect Wisconsin seniors and families from increasingly sophisticated scams.”
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