In a span of just three weeks in the summer of 2022, Alice Lin was swindled out of her life savings in an internet scam that began on a Chinese-language chat app. She lost more than $720,000 and sank so low that the 80-year-old two-time widow and mother of four considered taking her own life.
In the same year, Artemis Yaffe was targeted by a scammer posing as an IRS agent, losing her $1.8-million nest egg and — eventually — her home. It took less than two months for her life to be upended, sending the 77-year-old widow into a tailspin from which she has yet to emerge.
The scary thing is that as huge as these losses are, they’re not all that rare in the midst of an epidemic of ripoffs in which older adults, in particular, are targeted. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center fielded 3.26 million consumer complaints in the five years ending in 2022 and reports that $10.3 billion was lost in that last year alone.