Aging and Mass Marketing Fraud: Evidence on Repeat Victimization Using Perpetrator Data

Background and Purpose: As the US population continues to age and many older adults face declines in financial decision making capacity, social workers will be challenged to educate and protect older adults from financial scams. There is significant debate about which age groups are most susceptible to scams. Consumer complaint data indicates that adults in their 70s and 80s experience significantly greater losses than middle aged and young adults, however older adults are less likely to self-report victimization overall. One explanation for older adults’ relatively higher financial losses may be that they experience a greater incidence of repeat and chronic victimization. The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between age and repeat mass marketing fraud using a novel dataset of nearly one million US mail fraud victims. The mail scams in the sample include psychic scams, where the victim is convinced that they have received a letter from a psychic who will tell them their future for a small payment, and fake lottery/sweepstakes scams where the victim is told that they won money or a prize, but first must pay a fee.

Method: Data come from four criminal mail scam enterprises that were investigated by the US Postal Inspection Service. These criminal enterprises ran overlapping schemes between 2000 and 2018. The perpetrators collected information on paying victims (first name, last name, address, age) and how often they paid money in response to solicitations. Datasets were merged and machine learning was used to clean and deduplicate repeat addresses and victims. We used a Prentice-Williams-Peterson adaptation of a Cox proportional hazards model to estimate the effect of age on the likelihood of experiencing a subsequent victimization, controlling for the number of prior victimizations. We use logistic regression to assess the relationship between age and polyvictimization, defined as responding to multiple types of mail scams (i.e., psychic scam and lottery/sweepstakes scam) over the nearly 20-year period.

Results: Compared to victims in their 50s, victims aged 70 to 79 and 80 to 89 had a 9% greater risk of experiencing another victimization, whereas victims in their 20s had a 24% lower risk of experiencing another victimization. Logistic regression analyses indicate that adults in their 70s and 80s are significantly more likely than those younger than 50 to experience victimization by multiple types of mail scams. Contrary to expectations, the timing between sequential victimization incidents is not shorter for older adults compared to those in their 50s.

Conclusions and Implications: This is the first study to use administrative data collected by fraud perpetrators, rather than relying on victim self-report, to explore the relationship between fraud victimization and age. Findings advance the literature by helping to address the debate about who is most susceptible to scams. We show that although people of all ages respond to mass marketing fraud, social workers need to focus education and protection efforts on older adults who face a significantly greater risk of repeat victimization and polyvictimization.