HOW TO KEEP SENIORS SAFE ONLINE

Cameron Huddleston is Director of Education and Content at Carefull, the first service built to protect aging adults’ daily finances and support coordination with their family caregivers. She also is an author, award-winning personal finance journalist and former caregiver for her mother, who had Alzheimer’s disease.

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Cameron Huddleston | cameronhuddleston.com

Adults 60 and older lose an estimated $28.3 billion annually to elder financial exploitation, according to AARP. Often, these losses stem from scams and fraud that originate online.

Bad actors target older adults through social media, tech support pop-ups, dating websites, phishing emails and the list goes on. Those who aren’t aware of scammers tactics can easily fall prey and lose hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars, which is why it’s so important for financial professionals to help protect this vulnerable segment of the population.

?It’s imperative for the well-being of your clients, their assets, and your firm that you take a comprehensive approach to keeping seniors safe online. Following this checklist can help.

●????? Raise awareness of scams and fraud

●????? Ensure protections are in place

●????? Leverage trusted contacts

Raise awareness of scams and fraud

Research by FINRA shows that if you know about a particular type of scam or fraud, you will be less likely to engage with it. That’s why keeping clients informed about the latest schemes and common tactics used by scammers can protect them from exploitation.

Education can be in the form of articles, webinars, email newsletters and conversations at meetings. In fact, increasing engagement with clients through more frequent meetings can help better establish you as a trusted resource they can turn to if they have suspicious interactions online. According to FINRA, people are less likely to be victimized if they have someone with whom they can discuss suspicious offers.

Ensure protections are in place

Ask your clients these questions to ensure they have protections in place and are staying safe online.

●????? Have you set up online access to all of your financial accounts with strong, unique passwords for each account? Online access to accounts lets clients check them frequently rather than waiting for account statements to make sure everything is OK. Passwords need to be a combination of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. And multi-factor authentication needs to be enabled for all accounts.

●????? Are you using account, credit and identity monitoring to protect your finances and personal information? Services are available to provide 24/7 monitoring for unusual transactions, signs of fraud and misuse of personal information.

●????? Have you placed a security freeze on your credit reports? This can prevent fraudulent accounts from being opened in clients’ names if thieves get their personal information. To be effective, a freeze must be placed on reports at each of the three credit bureaus—Experian, Equifax and TransUnion.

Leverage trusted contacts

Asking clients to name trusted contacts is an opportunity to help them identify the people who will be their first line of defense against exploitation and to establish a system of checks and balances. It’s also an opportunity for advisors to ask clients to invite their trusted contacts to a meeting to establish a relationship with them and provide them with guidance on protecting their loved ones from fraud and exploitation.

Clients also should consider providing view-only access to accounts to that trusted person to have a second set of eyes on their finances. A survey by Cornerstone Advisors found that 87% of seniors manually check their accounts for suspicious activity without additional oversight by adult children or other trusted individuals. “This confidence—or possibly overconfidence—is what fraudsters want to see,” according to Cornerstone Advisors’ Aging and Banking report. “When an intended target thinks they have all their financial bases covered, a fraudster can capitalize on this confidence given there are no additional ‘eyes’ monitoring what is happening.”

A simple solution to protect aging clients

Advisors looking to protect aging clients from exploitation can get a comprehensive solution with Carefull. Carefull provides 24/7 monitoring of bank, credit card and investment accounts for signs of fraud as well as credit, identity and home title monitoring—all backed by $1 million in identity theft insurance.

Carefull’s Trusted Contacts feature allows your clients to get a second set of eyes on their finances as they age without giving trusted family members direct access to their accounts. It keeps those trusted contacts informed through account activity alerts so they can step in and help if suspicious activity is flagged. Plus, Carefull makes it easy to educate clients with its extensive content library of articles, guides, Scam Alerts, and webinars.

Carefull becomes an integrated presence in clients’ lives without advisors needing to do the work themselves to provide constant account monitoring. And it gives advisors countless opportunities to be a hero to clients and families when Carefull catches issues before they become big problems.

Carefull’s Is It a Scam? guide can help your older clients identify the red flags of scams. To learn more about how Carefull can help financial advisors protect older clients against fraud, get in touch with our team.

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