When Janine Williamson's uncle Larry Cook, a retired Navy commander living in Herndon, Virginia, died, she was appointed administrator to his estate and began receiving his mail. Williamson, a financial planner, saw some unusual activity in his monthly statements from Navy Federal Credit Union.
She asked the credit union for 12 months' worth of statements and soon realized that 74 wire transfers of exactly $49,500 each had been sent to individuals in Thailand over the course of six months. (As it turns out, that is just shy of the amount that triggers a government transaction reporting requirement in Thailand.) She subpoenaed Navy Federal for the cover sheets for the wires and saw they all went to different addresses.
"One of the addresses was '165 alley behind the old Phraya Karai Temple Wat,'" Williamson said in an interview. A bank employee had dutifully written in that address and allowed the wire to be sent, as with the 71 others, she said. All told, Cook's estate was drained of $3.6 million.
Cook had had a stroke two years before his death at 72, and Adult Protective Services had told the credit union he had diminished mental capacity and was in need of a conservatorship, according to Williamson.
She sued Navy Federal and the case was dismissed. She is appealing the decision.
"I have no recourse," Williamson said. "Nobody does. Because you fell victim, it's on you. They're not accountable. It's frightening for anyone who has parents or family members that have had a concussion or are going through chemo or do have diminished capacity from dementia or stroke."
Williamson has helped push a bill through Virginia's General Assembly, dubbed Larry's Law, that requires financial institutions to train their employees to identify and report potential financial exploitation of senior citizens. The law also requires banks to notify a senior's trusted contacts of any such exploitation.
This is one of several pressures on banks to better monitor the accounts of older customers (and customers of all ages) for signs of fraud. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is investigating Bank of America and
Meanwhile, fraud cases keep piling up and getting more sophisticated. The Federal Trade Commission estimates older Americans lost somewhere between $7.1 billion and $61.5 billion in 2023 (it's hard to get a firm number because much elder fraud goes unreported).
The case of the missing $18.5 million
Los Angeles residents Lawrence Liu, 84, and his wife, Ling-Ling Liu, 76, were victims of an elaborate scheme through which $29.5 million was moved from their Charles Schwab accounts to Bank of America and then to the cryptocurrency exchange Unchained, and $18.5 million of it was stolen. The scammers convinced the Lius that they were victims of a data breach and that their money had to be moved for safekeeping.
According to the complaint, the Lius had never withdrawn large amounts from their Schwab (formerly TD Ameritrade) accounts before and they had not sent a wire transfer from their Bank of America account for several years.
"The massive influx of tens of millions of dollars' worth of funds that commenced in July 2024 were highly anomalous and required a heightened level of scrutiny and inquiry that BofA did not provide," the complaint said.
The size of this swindle is unusual, according to Liz Loewy, co-founder and chief operating officer of EverSafe, who was chief of the elder abuse unit at the New York County District Attorney's Office for more than 20 years.
"We had plenty of cases involving millions, the Astor case being one of many," said Loewy, referring to wealthy philanthropist and New York City socialite Brooke Astor, whose son, Anthony Marshall, was found guilty of stealing millions from her and illegally tampering with her estate while his mother suffered from Alzheimer's.
"This was a lot stolen with a lot of activity that really should have been identified," Loewy said of the Liu case.
Bank of America declined a request for a response.
Early Warning, which operates the payment network, says the rate of reported fraud is less than a tenth of one percent. Yet stories of consumers who have fallen victim to scams and lost money as a result abound.
"We sympathize with the Liu family, and we hope the criminals who stole their money are brought to justice," a Schwab spokeswoman said. "But the allegations in the complaint cross the line from advocacy to outright falsity. No one from Schwab was involved in any of the alleged actions. The Liu family authorized every wire that left Schwab, and each wire went to an account that the Liu family controlled."
What banks could be doing
Banks and brokerage firms have a fiduciary responsibility to look out for their customers, Loewy said.
"You can't just say, no, it wasn't a Schwab employee and they weren't involved in any breach, and this could have been malware," she said. "They stopped short of saying this was consistent with the customer's banking activity for the last few years. When are banks and brokerage firms going to start doing more and when are they going to start accepting some responsibility for identifying erratic activity?"
This kind of inactivity was why Loewy left the DA's office, she said. She knew banks could be better monitoring customer activity, either on their own or with fintech partners.
Another element to cases like this, Loewy said, is that although generally speaking banks are not authorized to share suspicious activity reports, under the Patriot Act they can share these reports in cases of suspected money laundering or terrorist financing. "So why didn't that happen here?" she mused.
Williamson would like to see banks put a hold on suspicious transactions, such as the $49,500 wire transfers out of her uncle's account.
Because of FINRA rules, brokerages "have the ability to stop it, review the situation, and make the call to close the account and prevent future criminal behavior," she said.
She also believes technology is part of the answer.
"It's highly recommended to have software that will alert the teller or other employee that this is unusual behavior," Williamson said.
EverSafe and Carefull are among the fintechs that offer such software.
"Get some software, know your clientele, trust your common sense," Williamson advises banks.
Jilenne Gunther, national director of AARP's BankSafe Initiative, agrees monitoring and analytics are critical.
"One of the positive parts of working with the older population is they tend to have the same accounts they've always had — I think the average is over 20 years," she said in an American Banker podcast that will air Nov. 19. "So you have a lot of data analytics that look at their past behavior, and banks can use analytics to detect these out-of-pattern transactions. They can determine what device is being used, whether malware is on it, whether the bank's website is being accessed in the bank service area footprint or it's in another country."
A sudden change of address is one of the biggest red flags, Gunther said.
