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Now or Never: Long-Term Care Strategy is a podcast for all those seeking answers and solutions in the long-term care space. Too often we don’t fully understand the necessity of care until it’s too late. This podcast is designed to create solutions, start conversations and bring awareness to the industry that will inevitably impact all Americans.
Nobody will ever ask for your personal information.
Right? If they are asking is a scam. That's just and I'm I know that sounds like a broad generalization, but it's still right. There is no call that says, hey, you need to unlock your account. Give me your ID that never happened. Companies don't behave that way. The IRS doesn't behave that way.
Medicare doesn't behave that way. The police don't behave that way. So it just so nobody calls and said, I need your information. So you don't have to memorize every scam. You don't have to stay up to date.
If you just want to be proactively, you know, have good hygiene and be defensive. You are in control of your information.
Welcome to Now or Never Long-Term Care Strategy themselves. with Kosta Yepifantsev a podcast for all those seeking answers and solutions in the long term care space. This podcast is designed to create resources, start conversations and bring awareness to the industry that will inevitably impact all Americans. Here's your host Kosta Yepifantsev.
Hey, y'all, this is Kosta. And today I'm here with my guest, Todd Rovak, CEO and co Founder at Carefull the first digital platform built for older adults and their families to protect money, credit, identity, and critical documents. Today we're talking about how to protect seniors from online scams, and fraud.
Todd, welcome to the podcast to start off which fine to share a bit more about your background, and what led to the creation of careful?
So I used to run a firm out of New York that built products for banks. We were the business was called Fahrenheit we built a product for Wells Fargo and Vanguard and chase and Citi in American Express. And the more things I built over 10 years, the more I saw everything being built for Gen Z and millennials and everything you can do all right, and was you know, let's build an interesting sexy interface and the widget and your app. And yet really nothing being built for people 55 Plus, and it was always a question well, okay, we'll get to that eventually, but they never got to it. And I started to feel like there was this gap in actually just taking care of this entire generation where we call it get a cheerful we call it G one like the the the generation that has created wealth has money. There's no money in a chime account. Right.
And so are we drawn to can these people have Anasazi these people need more built for this
statistic? If I'm not mistaken? Is 83% of the wealth in the United States is controlled by people that are over the age of 60? Absolutely, yeah, absolutely.
And yeah, you know, it's more fun, it's to invent, we think, you know, for, for young people, it's important, you know, it's important, but someone 25 plus is, his completely with it is gonna be around a long time, has the assets. And so it's just this desert of invention and innovation in some ways. There's all these myths, which we'll probably talk about that are not tech savvy, they totally are.
And so sometimes just to just to have enough to be dangerous, and so there's, we need to build, we thought we needed to build for them. So that was one and then maybe second, I will never be in pretty little and listening to my parents at the time deal with my grandparents who have no of course since passed. And, and it was such a mess. It was just such a mess dealing with someone else's money. There are 45 million people in the US who are what we call financial caregiver, I people who's dealing with someone else's money, everybody. And there are no tools and no solutions. If you have to do it, you have to basically like login and hack and like basically impersonate your parents, right? Is the only way how about with someone else's money. You have to share passwords, you have commingled funds. I remember my parents dealing with it, you know, kind of arguing with your siblings and arguing with the parents of what a mess alright, and everybody experiences this in some way. And so um, so anyway, so it's a little of like what went what led me to believe careful with my my co founder Max,
and I am very fascinated in that second part about the sibling interaction and how an ad so I want to know a lot more about that and we'll get to it on the towards the end of the show. But right now I want to talk about just the scale of this problem. Careful has been successful in protecting $2 billion of transactions from fraud and financial threats in 2022.
Alone. Can you walk us through the different types of financial scam Hands that seniors are most vulnerable to? And how careful specifically addresses these threats?
Yeah, happy to so.
And by the way, it's 3 billion now on this about how quickly it's how quickly kind of people are adopting care. Because we're just just a gap just to give in broad strokes. Fake fraud alerts are probably the number one thing that that is going around right now. And there's a lot of different flavors of this. It looks like it comes from your bank says like bank fraud alert.
It's supposed to create anxiety, it's supposed to make you panic a little bit. So usually right now it's coming by text. We're used to it coming by phone, but right now, it's coming by text.
Did you approve a transaction for $1,000? And then you reply, yes or no, I'll get into what happens next. But that's a big category of kind of false alerts. But they're also coming from from non financial institutions. They're coming from Amazon from Netflix from paid out, by the way, they're not actually coming from there.
They stay they seem to come from Amazon Netflix,
and they like impersonate the vendor
gear and they have to asking you to click on a link to unlock your account. prevent, prevent your membership from being canceled, right? There's something you'd have to fix.
Usually, that's usually the theme, depending on how they they sort of phrase it that's what they're asking for. Just tick off a few more. And we can go a little deeper on any of these. Medicare enrollment is is a bad one right now. You'll get a fake call saying, Hey, we can help you with new options for a see will help you but this is completely made up the will will help you navigate and save some money and it's time for Medicare reenrollment. It sounds official, it's just confusing.
And that confusion, right leads to what all of this is really looking for, which is just going to have personal information, right? Can I just say enough to get get your Social Security a password, I can use something like that. Everything else is just smoke, right smoke and mirrors. Few more just to keep keep keep a list going. Gift Card scams have been around a long time. Gift cards are lovely for your grandkid, they are also a money laundering technique.
It's a way for scammers to get you to it's very hard to trace.
And so gift card scams have lots of different shapes. But you'll get a call and for some reason, they'll say oh, and we need to be paid in gift cards here.
Please go to gonna buy at Target. Walmart, it sounds like all of these, by the way, we like laugh about because they sound ridiculous. And yet, you know, we we that is not kind of one off, it's it's the way that they present these things.
Usually we know it's the IRS, you owe a certain amount of money, the easiest way to do that is it's the way they do it.
It's just confusing, right? And so no, everybody doesn't vote for it. But a lot of people do and well, and they're not gonna they're not.
If I can, if I can just interject one point, I think a lot of it also comes down to the fact that we're just so busy. And even people that are over the age of 55 may still be working. Or this is something that I see all the time, because some of our clients that we care for, they fall victim to these scams on occasion as well. And usually what happens is they find, you know, through a Google search a potential relative or a or a number of names that are associated with that individual, and they say like, you know, Johnny's in jail and needs $300 to get bailed out. And here's the car, you know, here's the information, please provide your card number, and we'll let him go. And I know that that also sounds rather ridiculous. But you know, if you're at times, maybe even isolated, because you can't leave your home because of a disability, and you're elderly and you can park with $300 because 83% of the wealth is controlled by everybody over the age of 60. It's pretty easy, and there are professional organized crime rings, whether it's in Jamaica, or in Nigeria that have been documented to do this for a living. It's your
job. It's a job and and you're you're talking about a flavor of what we call the grandchild's cam. grandkid in trouble needs a little needs help to XYZ, right, they have just enough information they know the name and then and what you're saying there's and this is a tip probably a really important thread. Time and urgency, right? It's like the big right of you know that call.
You get that at noon when you're relaxed. And you kind of question it you get that call at 1130 when you're by yourself and 30 PM. You get their call at 1am kids right it's time and and they know that they don't trust what they're doing.
How do you How does the higher fool interject into this to help stop some of these things?
Yeah, so so careful is you know a A financial protection service that you sign up for, or it's given to you by a bank or a wealth advisor. And it's for adults over 55. But it's also for the kids who are involved in the daily money matters of an aging parent, its job, basically, it's a big AI engine, its job, it monitors, or whatever you want to connect tricky accounts, credit cards, savings accounts, brokerage accounts, your home title. And it basically is a second set of think of it as a big smart, second set of eyes does nothing in the background, looking to defend your identity, your credit, your savings, and so it's looking for those scams, right? That type of money movement, those transactions that look really suspicious, we can see what you're buying, while you're buying three gift cards, no way. Okay, we can see when that way, when you're doing that, right, we can see something we'll talk about like peer to peer payments, right?
Venmo and Zelle scam that are going around right now, prints pretty brutal, we can see that stuff. So basically, it's a monitoring engine that's looking for your strange usage of basically things that that disproportionately affect older adults. And so you there's a new caregiver in your life as a new person, you're moving money to banks not gonna find it. It's not a huge amount of money, but we see that as a behavior change. So that's really the heart of what careful does you sign up for it, it works in the background, and then gets ahead of this stuff and says, we saw this looks like you're making duplicate payments. By the way, if it's not fraud, it's a sign of cognitive decline, Alzheimer's, but um, that that's pretty closely related to vulnerability. And so we see patterns and look like forgetfulness that look like poor judgment filled look like you're donating way too much to charity relative and you usually do we we're going to split that the things that we'll be having this morning, Brian, I think that knows what to look for older adults.
I think people need to understand just how big this problem is. A few years back, I did a study on financial exploitation. And this statistic kind of blew my mind. So 62% of people that are over the age of 5565, that is or financially exploited in some way. Five out of six times, it happens by a family member.
Absolutely. I was obeying you asked here we have a we, we we often find we have to explain that second part to PA right. It's really insightful you're making because people think about elder Fraud and Elder abuse as something that comes from Nigeria, right, like like you mentioned, and that's kind of the what's in what's in the mind of most people, of course, from the outside. But so much comes from within the trusted circle and only one out of 44 instances of that cause report, because adult report your cousin, you don't send your than your the kid probably in terms of the police, you freak out, and you panic and you have your family goes to war with each other. But you don't report it should but you don't. And so you're absolutely right.
And we mentioned that, you know, people that are over the age of 65 Seniors, they're pretty tech savvy. But I think we have to also consider and identify the fact that it does take some time for people to become proficient with various online financial platforms. So what steps do you recommend seniors take to build their digital literacy and safely navigate online banking and transactions? I looked at
a couple of things one, getting comfortable with online banking in general there's a chunk of a good a good segment I should say of people that seal the checks are safer.
And and we also often see some pushback from really thorough here through our banking partners that people don't want McKenzie protected with it because they're not using online banking. And the first thing I would say is there are just as many scams going around that are affecting checks, check washing is a famous one what's that check is fish so check washing is the oldest literally the oldest trick in the book. And it's back. So basically I check is a check is fished out of your mailbox you write you use checks you decide you're still going to use checks to pay your bills they will you know without with a hanger with them with a gum on the end they will get envelopes out of your mailbox they take the check they open the envelope they wash the check the amount of the rewrite the amount to as a larger amount faster rewrite the to to to themselves, and it is brutal, right um, check washing is spiked over the last last couple hours. It's manual, right it's a manual thing and so the idea that I do everything myself by hand I don't trust let's see digital is a problem more than it's actually a solution to anything and so I think a place a place we start having things you going through your bank online tool A platform is safer, it typically will trigger particularly if you're using a certain account types, it triggers some fraud and recourse and brand protections and things like that. So we like we encourage people to use to use online banking, we also encourage auto recurring payments. So it is a simple right and as your you know, in your to good point, or you're used to doing it, but don't but but let it auto payment, right, but like, take out the middleman, right, like the hardware, you're always involved in something the less hands in things that better Yeah, and so um, set up a recurring payment view check on it now and then login long. But But don't you don't have to do everything manually, it feels sometimes feels good, because old habit, I know where I am, I'm gonna go through my things, I'm gonna pay it every month myself, that's how I keep control of things.
Control being the big theme that a lot of seniors were looking for. However, every time you you, you're entering in data, they get through every time you're doing something like that you're you're you're giving someone else a chance to get data from you. And so it's just set it and forget it and put things on, on on. Okay, it's also safer
for you, based off your experience, and I don't know how much like hands on work that you have with the senior community. But I would almost think that after you get to a certain point in life, you have the experience, and you've done life for you know, 3040 50 years as an adult, you think that you would probably have a pretty good grasp on your financial situation, you may even check your bank account every single day just to make sure that you know, the same amount of money is there in the transactions, because what possibly could you be spending your money on? After you're 65 versus you know, when you've got, you know, tons of kids running around and all that stuff?
Yeah, you know, I think it's what drives, first of all, what I've learned, because we are really hands on with our customers and our families, you can never really guess, you know, you think some people would be on autopilot and really experienced. But what they really are, is into a routine that they that they trust and a routine that makes them feel in control and sane. And that is really the bedrock that more than an adult, an adult, let's just get to like anxiety and fear, which I think is part of a lot of this, what people fear more than being scammed is losing control of their finances, like losing. And if someone's going to take control at some point, I'm gonna divide on Friday night and all that me and my kids. So when you get a little older, you get to 65 or 75, when when you start to worry about either in the back of your mind when he talks about it is somebody stepping in and you kind of being your hands been taken off the wheel. And so and so part of the rituals and the behaviors that we see a lot are not really based on how much money I have, or the spending, spend to manage. It's just based on a feeling of control. And I want to set the precedent that that's typically a typically where we see monitoring, though, and just the basic hygiene that's expected today, right?
Careful exists because everybody should have credit monitor everybody should have identity theft insurance. This is a this is kind of table stakes hygiene now because we just live in a digitally dangerous world. So control where not everybody should be backed up in some way.
And we think that's good. Is
that the best way to manage their finances and to minimize the risk of falling victims to scams and fraud.
So it actually is you know, I mean, so there's, there's well there's I think about it as proactive and defensive things and then there's how do I make sure I catch it right? There's there's good behavior, which if I could give like one desert one piece of advice it is no matter what wrapper a text message comes in or a phone call comes in the urgency that time of day the relative like whatever package you are communicated with. And I will say this kind of slowly because it's I think it's probably the most important part nobody will ever ask for your personal information as right if they are asking is a scam that's just um, I know that sounds like a broad generalization but it's still right. There is no call that says hey, you need to unlock your account Give me your ID Beth never happens. Companies don't behave that way. The IRS doesn't behave that way Medicare doesn't behave that way. The police don't behave that way so just so nobody calls and said I need your information so at so if you don't have to memorize every scam, you don't have to stay up to date like we will careful monitoring services will do that for you. So we'll get to but the if you just want to be proactively, you know, have good hygiene and be defensive. You are in control of your information. You only need to give someone that information when you want to go do something Anytime someone sends you an email or call, here's ups, so I need to deliver a package. All I need is your xyz your address, for instance. So just have that trigger, right? If you could just, if you could just build that reaction to like, nope. The downside of not giving it right.
Is is so little compared to the downside of giving. If you're not sure that makes absolutely.
So what happens when someone is in fact, scammed? Or is a victim of fraud? How does careful come in and pick up on the warning signs or even on the actual transaction itself to alert people to say, hey, there's a 90% likelihood that this is a
scam. The first thing is you have to know what to look for. And that means knowing what looks normal to a bank or to anybody but actually is probably uniquely dangerous for older adults. ultimates ease was a fun one, right? Um, charitable political donations, right? Doesn't these are not scams, okay? They are eye candy, plenty of charity, fake charity scams, but they're often just a little bit of no us a bad judgment. What we find a lot is our financial caregivers are meaning our 45 year olds are are noticing, wow, my parents just don't need a lot to this day.
And this is this happens all the time. It's not a scam necessarily, but what you have to know to look for charitable donation. Let's see, even within that, let's take political donation. Okay. Both political parties, doesn't matter where you live, who you vote for, both political parties have convinced older adults that the world has ended. And they have to donate to a candidate and write down all right. And what they're also usually agreeing to is a monthly deduction. And so don't get by the way, donate to charity.
Charity is not a bad thing.
Political Donations, go nuts, right? However, the amount and the regularity of it we have people that we've programmed, careful to look for recurring donor or recurring deductions.
Sometimes after a year, we find a year after the election or the election has been lost or won.
And we see these deductions going because they didn't unchecked wild. Yeah, it's it's, it's crazy. But there's a lot of that right. And we have. So we're looking for patterns. So your bank doesn't care, right?
If you make a political donation, because it's not fraud. But what is it right?
It's that gray area of like, Oh, I really didn't mean to donate every now and $2,000. And so, so we, you know, to answer your question we're looking for, for individuals, so when you sign up for careful, instantly, within an hour, we've looked back two years, and we know what normal looks like for each individual person. And then when we start seeing things that look like behavior change, for instance, I stopped spending at CVS or Walgreens by let's say, two thirds, well, that means you may not be taking care of yourself buying medicine as a dozen, you're over a certain age. I'm using cash now. We can even spot patterns, like there's a caregiver that usually buys things for your economy aging parent, and now they're buying things for themselves, right? We call it it's a form of caregiver by gas sales every time on the way home, not going to call the police. But we can see that stranger mounts, we're looking for patterns in the transactions in the data, you can see all candidates that
AI powered or do you have like a group of people in some room that's just like literally going through every single bank account.
Yeah, it's a power.
It's a power. It's so impressive. We have a group of data scientists that are building that engine, but it's our power. So we have what do you have to do is build the engine that knows what to look for. And then you let them and his job is to it can see that so it's a reason we've seen you know, over 3 billion transactions a turn on careful and instantly we know
what normal looks like for you was so we touched on this at the very beginning. We talked about family members obviously financial exploitation is a big deal with amongst family members with aging parents. But the other aspect of that is the kind of the issues that arise when you have multiple siblings that are trying to all have input as to what's best for their mom or their dad or both. Right? Yeah.
So how does careful implement the sort of the foundation so that families can remain families? Yeah, and they're not all financial planners and playing the good guy and the bad guy?
This is a really good question. And and the family thought we call it fewer, like faster fixes fewer fights really is kind of where we get what we want to get to. It was sitting here so the reason I gotta love his question is because families think that their family is crazy and their families the work straight into it. Oh, my bone brother who lives in LA is not doing anything for moms. I'm doing all the work. So everybody feels that their, that their family is the worst. It's not, it's because it's hard to do this.
And every family gets here. So that's the first thing, what we would careful has put into this space is a trusted contacts we call kind of a trusted contacts, infrastructure, which is shorthand for, we have a permissioning system where different members of the family can view or access different things. So we, the kids can see alerts. But again, it's read only they're not getting access to mom's account. But all the kids can see the same thing.
Let's say it was a duplicate payment or a strange donation or what looks like fraud. All the kids see the same thing already.
Now we're having the same conversation. We're not saying Mom is losing it. What do you mean, we're using objective data, right? So we share it there, we share alerts, if we want to, with, with the family, we identify who the Trusted Contacts are. And so what the relationship is, and then that can be used to say, okay, family member X calm should have leave a password manager probably should have mentioned should have access to the password manager, deadly member, Wally should have access to the document vault, family member z should have access to nothing, because we know that guys spending money bombs money on his band practice, right. So we want to permission people to get visibility into the right things. And then that creates a much, much healthier dynamic and everybody not kind of piling on,
you just nailed it right there. I think it provides the transparency among siblings so that everybody understands their role. And and I see this somewhat mirrored whenever people sign up for power of attorneys. And they have to go through like the conversation with their siblings about like, Okay, listen, you know, I have a nursing degree, so I'm going to be the medical power of attorney and the other person is, you know, I've got a accounting degree, so I'll be the financial power of attorney, and then the brother with bad practice is not a power of attorney at all. You know, I love that you that you took that process, though, and you you've digitized
it. And hopefully made it easier. We have a full time writers who just help people talk to their parents about this stuff and their sibling, nice. We write it, we have about 150 articles on how to talk to your mom about donations or Bill Pay how to talk to your siblings, and because people like they don't just like the infrastructure and the technology, they left the link, right? Do you know, and that's what causes all the fights of you have two thirds of the time it's all his daughter who's in there, like doing this.
And and then you have everyone sending chest, you know, without without going down the rabbit hole there. It's, it's people need more structure through which to do what is a very natural financial life stage.
We'll treat it like a car crash because it feels that way. Like it's it it was unexpected. And now everyone has to panic and fight with each other. This is a normal life stage. And it's not even a quick one to 20 year life stage. We call financial caregiving from, you know, independent older adult, to where the kids aren't involved when that relationship all the way in versus to when the kids are really in charge. Right. And that's a 20 year. Phase. So yeah, digital tools help.
Absolutely.
What role do financial institutions and government agencies play in combating financial scams targeted at seniors? And are there any collaborative efforts or initiatives that our listeners should be aware of?
Yeah, so a couple of thoughts here. The first one's kind of frustrating, which for for people, whenever we say it's, meaning, you know, the Consumer Financial Protection Board is out there giving guidelines, people don't listen, but it's out and and they have feed, we want to see what they're recommending, like, should I open a joint account bank account with my parents?
There's inheritance issues, where if you have that same question about whether you should get your kids involved, there are recommendations from the CFPB about let's call it conveniens account most people don't know to ask. And there are decent guidelines and direction coming from some some government organizations. AARP fraud watched run by a great leader named Cathy Stokes and she tries to stay on top of her organization does I should say stay on top of the latest scams and you can always call them and check to see if something is is a scam. But most of the action right now is happening at the at the oh I shouldn't say by the way there's also report fraud.ftc.gov to people don't like that answer because it sounds like giving it you know, giving doesn't sound like any help. It sounds like putting something out into space. It's useful I should say it's it's there's some resources there.
But most of the action right now is happening. At the state level, and there are 25 states that have and more coming that have issued guidance to banks and financial institutions that they have to do more impressive to give you an example, right, there's a new law in Michigan.
That's that's probably the latest one, but a new law in Michigan, that just went into effect in the fourth quarter of last year, that says banks have to do more to spot elder fraud, to spot elder abuse to freeze accounts, if they suspect something. It's we're we're past the time when a financial institution or a wealth advisor can just kind of like see accounts being drained and mistakes being made and fraud, say I'm just the bank. Right?
You know, what job it is, you know, actually, and particularly when everything happening is happening digitally. And so we are now allowed to new laws that are driving the financial institutions to do more. And so I guess I would say, you should ask you know, it is worth ask your bank, ask your credit union, ask your wealth advisor, ask your parents will bank critique, what do you provide?
Chances are they do or planning to? I haven't, frankly, I know this because we have banks offer careful, right banks and Wealth Advisors provide careful to their clients, credit unions as well, if he's not careful, they should provide something at least credit monitoring at least identity theft insurance.
So correct me if I'm wrong, but careful combines the component of credit monitoring, and bank monitoring.
So essentially, just so that listeners understand, you take a platform like truebill, which when you take a platform like Equifax, like for Experian, whatever it might be, and you put it together, and you have careful, but there's components of careful that separated from both of those platforms. And yeah, the actual separation comes in the fact that you are creating essentially a dashboard for families to manage the financial well being of their parents.
Yes, there's an actual client customer experience here. Nice, right?
It's not something to sign up for and wait to get terrifying emails, from your credit money right here that email it's does more harm than good. It's nice to get it. But you're like, Whoa, why don't we do now? And our job right is to combine what you said but combined a password manager, right? Combine identity theft insurance, combined dark web monitoring combined. Add a week, you think of it as like full stack financial safety?
Yeah. At home Title monitoring, right? Um, does anyone messing with your title, anything you can think of? Should be in one simple place, and then there should be an experience where the family can make sure everything's okay. Like, yeah, is there enough to pay the bills next month is, is there a identity breach? What do I do about it that needs to have a place and of inexperience?
That's where we're different.
How
big is this problem?
Well, so there, you know, depends on what number you will choose. The number one thing that we pick his cheek is right in the middle of you know, you have about 50 billion of elder fraud. At this point, every weekend, at least half of that's coming from within the trust circle, it's probably a lot more it's just hard to it's hard to get that there's about$34,000 On average, for those that are victimized, it's a lot of money for people who are hit by Elder Abuse and elder fraud.
And it's getting you know that the aging population is growing not shrink. Right, exactly. Our demographics in the in the US are such that we have more and more people retiring 84 trillion of wealth transfer underway right now, to Gen X. And all kinds of shenanigans happening as people stepping up in front of insurance beneficiary and annuity stream. People messing with long term care policies like you name it, you know, people have well come up with it right and so there's a lot of vulnerability. The other the other issue which unfortunately I don't have a number for, but I speak spiking cognitive decline in Alzheimer's and vulnerability and non cognitive decline, as you would imagine, are pretty related. I
didn't so it increases exponentially. So when you look at the future of careful care, are you trying to create kind of a one stop shop to lock down all these liabilities in one platform and say, okay, you know, this is the company that you use to ensure that bad things don't happen with my mom and dad's money.
It is it is that you know, we believe there is a need in the market for what we call financial safe, right? Right.
This big broad idea of financial safety is my identity my driver's license, passport, my my bank accounts house. The way my family interacts the caregivers that are involved in my money, my wealth advisor, financial safety should be one simple place one simple account See, that is the hygiene, right?
That is the hygiene, join and then frankly don't think about now I don't want to adult, we don't want to create a an army of people who go out into the world worried of everyday about everything, we're, frankly, it should be the opposite, they should feel covered. And they should feel that they know what to do that something is looking out for them. And that if something bad happens, they have recourse, someone that will give them back to good.
Unfortunately, we just got a generation of people who are winging it right now in a danger integers world. And this chaos among keys. Okay, family. So, one stop financial safety is really where we think the world will be among
the Baby Boomers, Gen X, they're in this really weird spot, you know, because like, for example, I'm a millennial. And, you know, Life Alert and credit monitoring was on my radar when I was still in high school, right. And so you know, when you look at people who grew up in the, in the 40s 50s 60s 70s, they're just that that stuff didn't really come onto the radar until they were well into their very, very busy lives. And so digesting and absorbing that information became a lot harder. And so now it's kind of like, okay, when bad things happen, then I'll start thinking about it. Whereas you could be more proactive. So I think, over time, this is going to be a platform, and a process that's going to be much more adopted in the next 10 to 15 years or so I think it's great.
However, I appreciate that, you know, we're seeing so much our biggest growth area, surprisingly, is wealth, insurance and banks giving it to their customers, just giving it like, and it's nice, because it first of all, do the right thing for your, for your customers. And, and second, you know, it's it's particularly, you know, for, for who you just described, that sort of person that may feel like this is something that's new, or they have to let into their lives, to get it from their financial institution, or their insurance agent or someone they trust is much easier, right? It feels like this person is already handling has a view into my financial life had ever given me something to in the that can reduce this kind of underlying financial anxiety.
It's it's quite powerful. Right?
And so I'm totally agree with
so few more questions, then we're going to wrap up. Let's say that somebody over the age of 65 is scammed.
Or they discover some type of fraudulent activity. What intermediate steps so like steps one, two, and three should they take to report the issue and minimize the financial damage?
Yeah, okay, so two answers, one self serving and one one that's actually helpful.
So the, the self serving ones, we have a go to sheet go to get kerrville.com and click on something called Hack repair.
And it will take you through the steps, right, it's a free thing that we'll just walk you through. We built it to just give away for just this moment, we found people it's so hard when it's so hard to calm down when you've been scammed you don't know where to start. And we wanted to create a starting point, right? And so there's something a big button called called Hack repair, which which which is kind of a online wizard to walk you through. But but but to unpack that, and actually what's in it. So when they can give some give some answers to those who don't. First of all, it depends. If someone's has access to your device or not, right, I'm taking if someone has access to your advice, let's say they have used a computer takeover scam, they have pretended to be eye your eye, they pretended to be it they have access to your computer or you feel they've been they have something on your phone, take it off Wi Fi right away. So disconnect. That's the first thing. We don't want somebody else I'm uploading transacting doing something from from from that machine. So the ticket off lines is the first thing we always say. We do want to notify your financial institutions.
This you know, it's our gamebreaking stuff, but we want to change passwords quickly. And we have an order in which we want to do that we want to change financial services, we want to change your bank password set of two factor authentication. And then the thing people often forget is go right to Amazon and go right tend to go right to the places where you shop. So can that's right where the thieves will go.
So they'll do that they'll go to Target will go to Amazon.
They'll go to Etsy look on a Walmart a few places because you've got your credit card in there already. I've got your they've gotten your data, your information, and they're going to buy as many things as they can before you shut it down. So people often forget that step.
So we often say to go to go to your bank and then go to where you shop. And make sure you've at least you hear if you've changed those passwords or disconnected the account in some way. It sounds like work by the way. It's because it is where you got to go. You could do it.
It can be done in about an hour but we want to give you the steps to go through all this stuff. We also say freeze your credit. You can do that on with Any, for free with any of the credit bureaus, but we want, we don't want somebody opening accounts and cards on with your personal information that it takes a long time to find out that happened. And so you want to put a credit freeze. So MA and your accounts as well. And and of course there's there's there's other things to do, but those are the big ones right of like, we consider that like, get your arms around it right? And then you can take a deep breath of like, that is not fun when I just had, right. That's what I just described, there are people I say that to people and like their eyes roll back and like, oh, changing one password sounds like, worse. But so does the soap was losing all your correct. So I would I would really suggest you sit down, you say it's gonna take an hour, you disconnect one machine, you get on a new machine and you go through it right. And so that's the stuff, will things
get better? In terms of the technology? Will it will it become at some point where we don't have to do those things? And we have, I don't know, biometric everything or just ways of optimizing these processes, yes or
no? And so the yes is there's there's new password and authentication technology coming out, you may have read Apple and Google working on these things, it's kind of take the password out of out of the equation, right? That will the back of that will be great.
Things like Apple Pay. And those payment technologies are wonderful because they have dumb two factor built in, they know what's up just looking at your face. So I would say things are actually getting better and on a good path to get better.
Unfortunately, this is an industry. And so unlike any industry, when things get better, there will be new scandals, right. So there have been there have been guys on a wagon selling snake oil for hundreds of years. And they've and they've evolved with they've evolved as the world. And so I guess I guess the you know, the some scans, hopefully that I haven't talked about will go away or change. But they're you know, having a second set of eyes, its job is to keep up with it is always going to be the best Hanser versus kind of hope technology eliminate scammers, because I don't I'd actually don't don't see that happening.
What I worry more about, which is an evergreen thing is if aging and cognitive decline and judgment is is normal. It's everybody. Right? And so let's acknowledge that this is a financial life stage where it's better instead of saying dad's losing it, and then go fight with his family. You know, it's it's a, this is a life stage. So advisors, banks, family, let's have a blessed antagonist antagonistic, more transparent, more collaboration, collaboration among families and acknowledged this is not the end of the work. Is it normal life stage? That's fine. But it's he bought a he bought a thing twice, you know, so let's, let's let's get into things. And so it's a long winded answer to your question. But I do feel like some of it, it's different.
Its defense, another step is stepping into the reality of aging in finance, and what we call financial caregiving is a natural thing that people are going to have
to do. And I'm optimistic that people like yourself are building it that have identified the problem and are building platforms that are going to provide a systemic, and a very structured solution. And Amin, its online banking was a game changer. And this is just the evolution of online banking for a population of people who are aging. So
look, you have a security system in your house, he should have a pair of so we think of it as a security system keeps things from the outside, you should have a smoke detector to make sure you don't screw up on the inside, right? That's a simple way of thinking about safety. Same thing with your financial life, right? So yeah, so So we
always like to end the show with a call to action. Can you provide our listeners with some practical tips for verifying the authenticity of communication from financial institutions or government agencies to avoid falling for phishing scams or impersonators?
It's not your job to verify their authenticity, because they're gonna lie to you. So if you're not sure, forwarded it to someone you trust, you can forward it de RP fraud watch, they will tell you, you can forward it to careful we have something called scam Assist, which you can Forward a text or an email and say is this real long before you click on it? But the simplest things to do and this is and I think this is maybe the primary takeaway here is don't click on anything.
And nobody will ever asked for your personal information that hasn't been like it ever. And so use that as the lens through which you interact with anything. If you're not sure about its authenticity, you're right or wrong, but you don't have to. You don't have to give your information. That's the one thing that it will always be true. That will always be true.
There is no email and no text that can that should extract her ask you for information whether it's a package the IRS, Medicare, your doctor, whoever it doesn't work like for the world doesn't work that way. So just go into the world thinking with that in mind, and you'll never have to be the person that figures out is that really paid though?
Thank you for joining us on this episode of Now or Never Long-Term Care Strategy with Kosta Yepifantsev.
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Today’s episode was written and produced by Morgan Franklin.
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