Senate hearing warns AI is industrializing fraud against older Americans - Biometric Update

Senate hearing warns AI is industrializing fraud against older Americans

Artificial intelligence is stripping old fraud schemes of their telltale flaws, giving criminals the ability to clone voices, fabricate trusted professionals, tailor approaches with stolen data, and keep multiple victims under pressure at once, witnesses told the Senate Special Committee on Aging Wednesday.

The hearing converged on the stark conclusion that AI has not changed the emotional machinery of fraud. Criminals still rely on love, fear, shame, and urgency.

What has changed is their ability to manufacture the evidence those emotions trust, and to do it faster than victims, banks, platforms, or law enforcement can respond.

The warning was given a human face by Deborah Del Mastro, a 64-year-old California woman who answered a call in May from a man claiming to have kidnapped her daughter.

The man put a crying woman on the line whose voice sounded exactly like her daughter’s, then threatened murder and sexual violence unless Del Mastro sent money to Mexico.

For 5½ hours, he controlled her movements by phone, sending her and her husband among stores around the San Francisco Bay Area to transfer cash.

Only after the caller claimed the daughter had been released at a Walmart did Del Mastro call her directly. She was safely at work. By then, Del Mastro and her husband had sent $5,400.

“It was the worst day of my life,” she told the committee.

The account illustrated the central problem before the panel. Familiar signs of authenticity – a loved one’s voice, a doctor’s face, a bank’s phone number. or a government seal – can now be generated or manipulated cheaply and at scale.

Chairman Rick Scott, a Republican from Florida, said Americans over 60 reported losing $7.7 billion to scams in 2025, a figure that captures only reported cases.

“The rise of AI has offered scammers new tools to pursue their criminal schemes and we must adapt and respond to these new threats,” Scott said, adding that, “AI has made existing scams more effective and lowered the barrier to entry for criminals. What once required real coding skill can now be done by anyone with an AI tool.”

A bipartisan committee report released the same day, Artificial Intelligence & Older Americans: Confronting New Threats, Unlocking New Opportunities, said $893 million in losses were linked to AI-enabled scams across more than 22,000 complaints.

Paul Benda, the American Bankers Association’s executive vice president for risk, fraud, and cybersecurity, said generative AI is not replacing conventional scams but is “industrializing them.”

Criminal networks can use public records, breached accounts, social media, obituaries, and commercial data brokers to identify likely victims and build scripts around family members, medical conditions, or banking relationships.

AI can translate messages, remove the grammatical mistakes that once exposed fraud, and sustain conversations with many targets at once.

Benda cautioned against portraying older people as inherently gullible. The schemes work, he said, because professional criminals exploit trust, fear, urgency, and authority, and AI makes those pressures more convincing.

Banks increasingly use analytics to flag unusual transfers, but human judgment remains critical when a customer appears frightened, secretive, or coached by someone on the phone.

Dr. David Amron, founder and medical director of the Roxbury Institute in Los Angeles, described another form of stolen trust.

He said scammers took footage from his YouTube channel and combined it with an AI-generated likeness and voice of a colleague, celebrity images, and copied media logos to create advertisements for a supposed “miracle” lipedema cream.

Some patients bought the product before learning the endorsement was fabricated.

Amron’s staff reported the ads, accounts, and websites to Meta, domain registrars, and search engines, but each removal was followed by another version.

The campaign persisted for 11 days and later resurfaced. Amron warned that patients may delay legitimate treatment, rely on unproven products, and lose confidence in physicians whose identities have been hijacked.

Matthew Ferraro, a former homeland security cybersecurity adviser now with Crowell & Moring, said deepfake-enabled fraud losses exceeded $200 million in the first quarter of 2025, citing an industry report.

Deloitte projected generative AI could help drive U.S. fraud losses to $40 billion by 2027.

Ferraro urged broader digital literacy, stronger coordination among government, and industry, and wider use of detection and media provenance systems that attach information about how content was created.

Ferraro also offered a simpler defense. Families should establish a private code word for emergencies and verify unexpected requests through a known telephone number rather than the number that initiated the contact.

Hearing a familiar voice is no longer enough, Ferraro said.

Consumer Federation of America’s director of AI and privacy, Ben Winters, argued that the technology sits inside a larger “scam stack.”

He explained that data brokers help criminals select targets and that telecom systems and advertising platforms deliver the deception, payment services move the money, and fragmented reporting channels often respond too slowly.

He warned that public education cannot substitute for accountability by companies positioned to prevent fraudulent ads and abusive voice-cloning services from reaching consumers.

Winters said the FBI’s Recovery Asset Team can freeze roughly half the money at risk when cases reach it quickly, but only 642 of more than 201,000 elder fraud complaints in 2025 entered its freeze process.

Less than half of 1 percent of the $7.7 billion reported lost was frozen, he said, showing how quickly money disappears and how rarely victims reach recovery mechanisms in time.

Scott pointed to bipartisan proposals for a single ReportScams.gov portal, expanded law enforcement training and cryptocurrency tracing, and a national anti-scam strategy.

Benda urged Congress to create a national fraud prevention office, impose stronger customer verification duties on telephone providers, and require online platforms to verify advertisers and rapidly investigate impersonation complaints.

Article Topics

AI fraud | deepfakes | financial crime | fraud prevention | generative AI | U.S. Government