In April 2025, AARP, Amazon, Google and Walmart announced “the launch of the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center (NEFCC), a nonprofit that will bring together law enforcement, industry, government, and academia to strengthen efforts against fraud targeting older adults.”
In an interview with Brady Finta, Founder and CEO of NEFCC, Mr. Finta said the initial primary purpose of NEFCC is to work with law enforcement and the private sector to aggregate individual but related elder scam cases to create several large cases for law enforcement to work and to prosecute the criminals. Mr. Brady outlined several components to this strategy:
- NEFCC will collect elder scam cases from various sources.
- NEFCC will identify key selectors or signals from each case. This could include phone numbers (e.g. the ‘tech support’ pop-up number to call for help), email addresses, wire transfers, digital currency accounts, text message phone number or email address and IP addresses. These selectors will help tie smaller cases into one large case, which then supports the prosecution of these large cases.
- NEFCC will share these signals with private sector entities, such as Walmart, Amazon, Google and others to get links to other crimes. This will help in the prosecution effort.
- NEFCC will work with Department of Justice attorneys dedicated to elder scams and with local District Attorney offices to prosecute the criminals.
Mr. Finta said he is patterning the NEFCC after the successful San Diego (California) Elder Justice Task Force (SD EJTF). From testimony at the March California Senate hearing, The Golden Age of Scams: How Technology and Transnational Fraud Rings Threaten California Consumers, Mr. Scott Pirrello, Deputy District Attorney in San Diego County, described the EJTF as a network of “dedicated investigators, prosecutors, detectives, special agents, analysts, and social workers from San Diego’s DA’s Office, FBI, Adult Protective Services (APS), U.S. Attorney’s Office, local law enforcement, and our local Fusion Center the Law Enforcement Coordination Center/LECC - all working together to get the best outcomes we can for older victims.” The EJFT successfully prosecutes scammers who attack the elderly in San Diego County. This has included arresting and prosecuting couriers who go to victim’s homes to pick up gold and cash for alleged ‘safekeeping’.
Mr. Finta says he wants to take this elder fraud “public private partnership to a new level where it becomes systematic and sustainable.” Mr. Finta said, “Everybody (private sector entities) wants to protect their clients.” He added, “Systematically, they are not really working together.”
He then used the analogy “to cast a lot of shade, you can’t do it with 1000 tiny saplings, you have to do it with some big trees.” His point is there are thousands of individual elder scam cases, and thousands of cases at Amazon, Google, and Walmart. But each case is only a small piece of the puzzle. It is not feasible to prosecute these individual cases; there are too many of them.
But working together in a whole-of-ecosystem, NEFCC wants to help aggregate these ‘little saplings’, using selectors or signals shared among all of these sources, to help create large cases involving hundreds of individual cases, but now linked together. He said this is what happened in San Diego County, where victims were located in Coronado, El Cajon, Carlsbad, Santee and the city of San Diego. “Essentially all from the same criminal enterprise, but neither one of those cities knew it because nobody was talking to each other and each of those cases would probably be too small to put resources to them.” he said. This is where the EJTF came in.
Mr. Finta also said: “The best intelligence comes from investigations. You will grow your experience and your options for enforcement.” He referred to his time at the FBI Academy (Mr. Finta is a former FBI Supervisory Special Agent) where he was taught the enterprise theory of investigation. “Essentially, if you are going to do the big case on the big criminal enterprise, you have to figure a lot of ways in and attack it from different angles all at the same time.” This explains the approach that NEFCC is taking.
Mr. Finta went on to say the focus on the elderly is so important. They are more vulnerable and they tend to lose so much more on scams. In fact, the FBI IC3 Internet Crime Report for 2024 just reported that the average loss for the elderly (60+) in 2024 was $83,000 per reported incident. Mr. Finta continued: “They (the elderly) are often in a situation where they cannot recoup those funds. They are retired, on Social Security, and they just lost their retirement that they cannot replace.”
The goals of NEFCC: Present and future
Next, I interviewed Kathy Stokes, Director of Fraud Prevention Programs with the AARP Fraud Watch Network and a board member at NEFCC. I asked Ms. Stokes to talk about why NEFCC was formed. She said that AARP has been mainly fighting fraud and scams though consumer education. “But that is not working.” She said “NEFCC is a sort of nationalized version of the SD EJTF. And the way they (EJTF) are succeeding in going after elder fraud cases (and getting convictions).” She said that EJTF did the first elder fraud Rico case.
Ms. Stokes said she was impressed that Google, Amazon and Walmart also saw the benefit “of bringing the pieces of the puzzle together between law enforcement and the private sector and believed it in enough to put some seed funding behind NEFCC.” Ms. Stokes confirmed that one of the key goals for NEFCC is “to collect enough information in an aggregated way to make law enforcement more effective when (elder) cases are created and law enforcement is going after somebody.”
She went on to say that NEFCC will be cohabitated with the National Cyber Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) in Pittsburgh. This is an excellent move as NCFTA is already well connected with the private sector and national law enforcement.
Ms. Stokes mentioned that after the NEFCC announcement at the recent NCFTA conference in April, “Brady already had 55 corporate inquiries from the NEFCC website.”
Ms. Stokes also highlighted the second goal for NEFCC. “Being able to catch things before they even become cases in real time. Being able to share information with the corporate members to stop a scam before it really takes off.”
She then said there is a future third goal: “We're also looking at maybe three years out, NEFCC would become a hub for sharing best practices across businesses for fraud controls and we're thinking it could potentially be an incubator for solutions that are focused on protecting consumers.”
Final thoughts
Both Mr. Finta and Ms. Stokes share a common pain point. They see the damage to the lives of the elderly when they become victims of financial scams. And there needs to be more than just education. And several large corporations see this pain point-- and they have agreed to fund a new approach to help mitigate it. Hence the birth of the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center. But the good news is Mr. Finta is using the proven San Diego EJTF model as the basis for building out the NEFCC.
When it comes to stopping consumer scams in the US, I have not found much going on. I see a sharp focus in the UK, Australia and this month in New Zealand and Thailand. But not the US—no national strategy, only some individual banks addressing this problem and a few states adding some good laws to help the elderly. But now I see another national organization taking shape to help in this battle.
We already have the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) where scam victims of all ages call get personal help in scam reporting and identity theft. AARP provides consumer education on scams and consumer advocacy. There are other national advocacy groups like Ken Westbrook’s Stop Scam Alliance. But NEFCC has an action-oriented charter to attack the criminals. This is lacking at the national level. So, I welcome the NEFCC aboard in the fight against consumer scams, with a clear focus on the elderly.
