Banks are stepping up their efforts to detect and deter financial elder abuse in response to a rise in such crime, and artificial intelligence software could become part of the solution.
“Wells Fargo has been focusing on this as an issue and building analytics for it, very much like we do for other things like fraud,” said Rich Baich, Wells' chief information security officer. “We’re greatly concerned, and we’re putting time and resources behind it,” including having teams of data scientists create proprietary models.
In 2018, U.S. banks reported 24,454 suspected cases of financial elder abuse, a 12% increase over 2017, according to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, which is a unit of the Treasury Department.