Witness Warns Senate Aging Committee AI Is Industrializing Elder Fraud

At a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing on the new frontier of senior fraud, an industry witness warned that generative artificial intelligence is making financial scams against older Americans more convincing, personalized, and scalable.

In his testimony, Paul Benda, Executive Vice President for Risk, Fraud and Cybersecurity at the American Bankers Association, told the committee that AI is not creating new categories of fraud but accelerating existing ones. He noted that criminals can now produce convincing synthetic voices, videos, photographs, text messages, and online personas with little technical skill and at low cost.

Mr. Benda said banks are countering these threats by deploying AI and advanced analytics, along with employee training and information sharing, to detect anomalies and flag suspicious activity. He argued that the policy goal should not be to restrict these defensive uses of AI but to strengthen safeguards and reduce criminals' ability to exploit communications and identity systems. Regulators have increasingly warned financial institutions about the use of deepfake media to bypass identity verification processes (see prior coverage).

Mr. Benda outlined several legislative and regulatory recommendations for Congress, including establishing a National Office for Scam and Fraud Prevention, strengthening telecommunications safeguards, improving fraud-related information sharing and funds recovery, modernizing identity and authentication systems, and enacting the SCAM Act. He said accountability should extend to every sector involved in the scam lifecycle, not banks alone.