This article discusses data about mail fraud discerned from perpetrators’ own records and concludes that older victims suffer more incidents of mail fraud.
This study funded by the Department of Justice (DOJ) National Institute of Justice (NIJ) examines scammers’ own data and concludes that, compared to younger victims, older victims suffered more incidents of mail fraud and lost higher amounts of money. To this point, there had been inconsistent evidence about whether financial fraud has an outsize impact on one particularly vulnerable group: older adults. Most research into financial fraud relies on victims to recall and report their own experiences, but it is difficult to know whether self-reporting offers a reliable account of these crimes. For a different perspective on the harms caused by fraud, the NIJ funded researchers at RTI International to analyze data from the other side of scams — the scammers’ own digital records about their victims. Seized by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the four scammer databases studied by RTI include information on more than 1.3 million victims across nearly two decades, enabling “the largest analysis of repeat mass marketing fraud victimization to date.”