WATCH: Kelly Addresses Fraud Against Seniors in Senate Hearing

Last week, in a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing about how scammers are targeting older adults, Arizona Senator Mark Kelly engaged with consumer advocates, law enforcement, and fraud victims to discuss strategies to protect seniors from increasingly sophisticated forms of fraud.  

During the hearing, the Aging Committee released its annual Fraud Book, highlighting how the new threats of AI-generated voice cloning, untraceable cryptocurrency transactions, and “pig butchering” schemes have expanded the reach of international criminal networks and exacerbated the dangers that seniors face.  

Referencing a pig butchering scam, Kelly said, “The person on the other side of the screen wasn’t just someone bored at home over the weekend. It was probably over in southeast Asia somewhere, and organized crime that is doing this at scale and it is very sophisticated, run by professional criminals. They are getting older adults, as you mentioned $100 billion [in reported losses], a lot of it is this confidence investment scam. So, what do we do about it? Because they are not going to stop.” 

The panel’s law enforcement expert highlighted the need to increase resources for investigators, engage industries whose products are utilized in scams, and establish a comprehensive national strategy to mitigate and prevent scams. 

Kelly has been a strong advocate for protecting seniors from fraudulent actors and supporting law enforcement capability to trace and prosecute such crimes. His Stop Senior Scams Act, which was signed into law in 2022, established the Scams Against Older Adults Advisory Group at the Federal Trade Commission to produce educational scam-related materials for the public. Kelly’s Educational and Career Opportunities for Public Safety (EdCOPS) Act of 2024, which creates a higher education assistance program for members of law enforcement, will support law enforcement retention to provide the human capital to better identify and combat these scams. Kelly also co-leads the “National Slam the Scam Day” resolution each March in an effort to raise awareness of pervasive government imposter scams.  

Click here to download a video of Kelly’s remarks. See the transcript below:    

Sen. Kelly: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you to all of our witnesses for being here today to talk about a topic that I think is sometimes uncomfortable talking about. Mr. Pirrello, I understand from your testimony that the Elder Justice Task Force you helped create in San Diego is the first of its kind, bringing together local law enforcement, FBI, adult protective services, and the U.S. Department of Justice. I’m impressed by the task force’s ability to collect real-time information and disrupt scams taking hold in your jurisdiction, especially ones that are originating overseas. I’ve gotten some scam calls myself from overseas before and I have been personally tempted to take them on by myself.
 
However, I know it is best left to professionals like you to do this, and you’re proving that here. So, Mr. Pirrello, what is the key to the success of your Elder Justice Task Force? 

Mr. Pirrello: Thank you Senator. San Diego does have a proud tradition of collaboration between local and federal authorities, and amidst all the local authorities. I think that is the largest piece as we travel around the country and talk to people who want to duplicate what we are doing. You hear things that like people can’t get other colleagues from agencies on a telephone call. So, it requires people who view this with passion and are willing to sacrifice to get a task force like this up and running.  

Sen. Kelly: First of all, how much does it cost to operate your task force?  

Mr. Pirrello: It’s interesting Senator, our task force started as a collateral responsibility for myself and every other member of law enforcement or the FBI. There really wasn’t a cost. It was kind of a side hustle, so to speak, for many of us. Where the money needs to go is funding investigators, funding analysts—we need to fill positions. The law enforcement community is so starved for resources that it is difficult to get any agency to dedicate a full body of resources to this. And sadly, as you go around the country, there probably is not one single person in law enforcement anywhere locally or federally that 100% of their job responsibility is focusing on elder scams.  

Sen. Kelly: If it wasn’t a collateral duty in your office and you were going to have dedicated people, how many people would be doing this?  

Mr. Pirrello: Well Senator, the numbers are staggering. As successful as we have been in San Diego, we are working less than one tenth of one percent of the intake to give you an idea of the tsunami of fraud that’s coming out us. We’ll take one body, we could use an army obviously. So it really takes a group of people committed to this cause to start building it in each community. We started and we felt the first step forward was identifying how big of a problem it was. It goes back to that underreporting and lack of centralized reporting mechanism, but as each jurisdiction locally and nationally come up with the actual loss amounts in their own jurisdictions, that is the number we need to go to the policymakers and decision-makers to ask for the resources that this problem merits.  

Sen. Kelly: We can understand the amount of resources. I often think about this in terms of people. So, if you were going to stand up for your office a team of people 100% dedicated to this to actually handle the demand that you see out there, the fraud that’s out there, how many people are we talking about? 

Mr. Pirrello: You could get a task force started with one local prosecutor like myself, one investigator from the DA’s office or from a local police or sheriff jurisdiction, and then cooperation from the local FBI office. You could hit the ground running, with the caveat, that you need the local U.S. Attorney’s office to devote the resources. The number one obstacle we faced starting our task force was the dirty word called thresholds within the criminal justice system. To get federal agencies like the FBI or U.S. Attorney’s office to open up the case, typically you needed million-dollar cases. Most of the cases like, unfortunately, Ms. Whittaker’s family start by losing $25,000. Even $300,000, you can’t get the FBI or U.S. Attorney’s office to open that case. Our task force was devoted to working locally to connect the dots to show our federal partners that these were million-dollar cases once you connected the dots. But also, for our local task force, the chains of command that the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s office eliminated thresholds, which is huge, which was the only thing that got us really off the ground so we could all work collaboratively on these cases.  

Sen. Kelly: Another question on the communications platforms, Mr. Pirrello. We had a hearing on this topic last November where we talked about how artificial intelligence plays a growing role in scams, both preventing them, but also enabling them. We talked about a constituent of mine who had received a phone call from somebody she thought was her daughter and the daughter was screaming and crying and a man came in on the phone to say he was going to do harm to her daughter if the woman didn’t pay $50,000. It turned out that her daughter was safe at home and this was just an AI created scam call using voice cloning technology. We learned in that hearing how difficult it is to trace and prosecute a scam if no money has been exchanged, which was the case here.  

Mr. Pirrello, from the law enforcement perspective, why is that so challenging to trace and prosecute a scam if the scam was not completed?  

Mr. Pirrello: Senator, we believe that you have to devote your limited, scarce resources to where you can have the greatest impact. When we talk to a victim and learned that they almost fell for the scam, there is great relief. As I mentioned before, the intake is coming at us faster than we can process. We have victims losing tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and our focus in the first days after someone has been scammed is not necessarily putting a bad guy in jail, it is doing everything we can to try to pull this money back for them. On the artificial intelligence piece, that is great evidence that there is urgency here. We can’t sit on the sideline any longer. With AI coming, the scammers are going to be doing better than they are doing now and they are doing really well without the use of AI. When we look at the numbers, the estimates of actual losses beyond what is reported is over $100 billion a year. If that is how much the scammers are getting from us without artificial intelligence, this is the time. The time is now. We are reaching a tipping point and we couldn’t be more grateful for this committee to take up this issue.  

Sen. Kelly: I read this article on CNN about a man in Virginia who was a victim of a pig butchering scam and met somebody online, convinced him to invest in crypto, he did it, never met her in person. He lost his entire life savings and then he took his own life. The person on the other side of the screen wasn’t just someone bored at home over the weekend, it was probably over in southeast Asia somewhere, and organized crime outfit that is doing this at scale and it is very sophisticated, run by professional criminals. They are getting older adults, as you mentioned $100 billion, a lot of it is this confidence investment scam. So, what do we do about it? They are not going to stop. What kind of negative incentives can we put to the countries involved? I know this isn’t your area of expertise, but beyond just informing the public about this, I imagine for you it is hard to prosecute somebody you don’t know that is in a foreign country, where we may or may not even have an extradition treaty. It is hard to identify who these people are. But from a foreign policy standpoint, do you have any ideas about what the federal government could be doing at the highest level to put pressure on the countries that are harboring these organized criminal groups?  

Mr. Pirrello: Thank you, Senator. I’m proud there is leadership coming from California, from San Diego with our Elder Justice Task Force. The Santa Clara district attorney’s office is a national leader in combating pig butchering scams. A deputy DA colleague testified in Congress yesterday on this issue. I don’t have an answer, a magic pill to solve that problem, but what I can say is when we are dealing with countries that are outside of the reach of United States law enforcement, I think the effort and there are concrete steps we could take upstream of the scam to eliminate the ability for the scammers in southeast Asia to contact our victims. That is where resources should be spent and pressure on the technology industry. Every one of our victims is being contacted on a spoofed telephone number or a foreign IP address over the devices and technology we depend on every day. There are countries like the U.K. and Australia that have implemented programs specifically designed to eliminate that and their trends are skewing downwards in the last two years. There is an addendum to my testimony that was submitted from the stop scams alliance, who is led by a former CIA analyst.
 
There are some real, concrete, specific things that the technology communications companies can do. If we eliminate the ability for these call centers to reach our victims, then we don’t have to worry about the expense of chasing them to Myanmar or wherever else they are.  

Sen. Kelly: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.