Scams are evolving — and so are the tools to fight them

There’s scientific evidence that as we age, our brains may physically change in a way that makes some, but not all of us, more vulnerable to financial exploitation. In 2019, “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio did a deep dive into the subject called “Brains and Losses.”

As part of that 18-month investigation, he spent time with a school nurse, still working in her late 70s, who’d lost $200,000 to fraudsters who kept calling her home phone.

In the years that have followed, AI has opened up a new world for those trying to get rich quick by draining unsuspecting bank accounts. From audio deepfakes to websites that could fool even the most savvy users, scamming hasn’t slowed down.

But neither have enforcement tools.

To look back on his coverage, Brancaccio returned to one of the voices in the “Brains and Losses” project — Shannon Miller, an attorney with the Elder Miller law firm in Gainesville — to get up to date on an innovative approach at the state level to freeze out scammers. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

David Brancaccio: Florida is among a few states that put in a law there that lets concerned parties temporarily, what Shannon? Freeze a person's bank account if they suspect there's fraud aimed at a vulnerable person?

Shannon Miller: That's correct. And sometimes, if we can see in the evidence that the property has moved to another account, the court here in Florida can actually also freeze the account where the monies have been placed. So, not only can we freeze, you know, the victim's money from more money going out, but we can actually reach into the account of the scammer or the exploiter and freeze their assets as well.

Brancaccio: You had a client, and she lost $2 million over several years. Her relatives were trying to stop it, you were trying to stop it, and then there was the chance that she was going to lose another half million. But that was complicated, trying to stop that. What happened?

Miller: So, what happened was these two cashiers, checks were ready to be issued from the bank, and they had been paused by the bank. The sons were notified, and the sons immediately opened a guardianship, an emergency guardianship, here in Florida to try and shut these monies down. We got the guardianship open, the court orders went over to the bank to stop those monies from being funded through these cashier checks, but it was a day too late.

Brancaccio: But now there is a new, new law in Florida that would help with this?

Miller: What Florida created a couple of years ago was this new process related to scams, where if we don't know who that person is, because they're not real, what we're able to do through the court process is we go into court and instead of the police officer knocking on their door to serve them with notice of the hearing, we’re allowed to use the same communication technique that they have been using to communicate with our victim. So, in that first case, it would be using the MillionaireMatch text to text them the final order that says, “hey, you need to show up for this hearing to explain why you should be able to keep these assets.” And of course, they don't show up because they're a scammer, and, you know, they also don't show up normally to assert that the bank account that has now been frozen is actually their money or legitimate money.

Brancaccio: You know, as I found in my reporting, sometimes it's a call in the night from you don't even know what time zone. You have no idea who they are or the address. The vulnerability under Florida law before was you couldn't freeze the account. But now, under the law that was enacted in 2025, last year, you don't need to know who the scammer is specifically?

Miller: That's right, that's right. And let me just add another layer. The latest tool that we've been using in Florida relates to a crypto scam that exceeds $10,000. So, if someone has given cryptocurrency to someone and that scammer places the funds in a wallet, we have been able to use a tool through the Attorney General's office in Florida to find that wallet and freeze the wallet using federal seizure laws. And so what is happening is we are actually recovering more than the value of the victim's claim, because the monies that are also in that wallet, let's say there's a million dollars that then become resources after a certain time period passes, where the Attorney General's Office can then turn that into tools that we can use to find scammers and also to educate the public about some of these issues that exist.

Brancaccio: Shannon, the crypto example applies to anybody scammed or, again, focused on vulnerable older adults?

Miller: So actually, it's anybody. It's like a seizure case. In a criminal matter, you can seize assets that are the product of unlawful action. So, if someone commits a crime, and they that they steal money from somebody, and that money is available, then the court can seize those funds, and it's an asset seizure. So that person can come in and say, like, oh, no, this was legitimate, like, it really was for this business deal or whatever. So, you don't have to be vulnerable to take advantage of the Attorney General's process. The Attorney General's process is very quick, so if you lost your money on Friday, you can contact the attorney general's office, and you can also reach out to a local law enforcement office in Florida, and they will reach out to the Attorney General's office to start that process of searching for the wallet, freezing the wallet, and then there is a delayed process for processing the seizure. But it takes like four or five months.

Brancaccio: And what happens in Florida does not stay in Florida necessarily. You must have been delighted to see other part of the country. Minnesota just enacted at least a piece of this, that Florida-style mechanism for freezing assets pending review.

Miller: Yes, and you know, we've done so much work in Florida. And David, when we introduced the injunction statute, the exploitation injunction statute, the foundation of that statute is the criminal statute. We expanded the exploitation injunction statute in 2020, so that at that point you could actually use a power of attorney to proceed with one of these cases. You could also we criminalized undue influence. So if someone had a long-standing estate plan and all of a sudden, you know, their neighbor swoops in and says, “yeah, let's change your will to make me the beneficiary,” that's actually criminal in Florida now. So like we did a whole bunch of things to help make these laws so much better in so many ways, to help people protect against exploitation and scams in Florida. For many of us, we know when something sounds fishy, but if you have that thinning of the cortical insula in your brain, you don't you don't get that intuitive, like “Spidey sense,” that this doesn't sound right. So, you might just go ahead with that idea of, like, paying somebody a bunch of cash to cut the tree down in your front yard. Whereas most of us would be like, this is a bad idea.

Brancaccio: It's evidence that for some people, not all, as they age, their scam radar, their radar for scams is somehow diminished.

Miller: Yeah, I think it was Nathan Sprang who talked about, you know, we might be looking down a street and it's dark, some of the lights are out. There's nefarious-looking people there, and we are not going to walk down we're going to turn around and go in the other direction. But the person with the exploitable brain doesn't notice those issues. They walk straight into danger, and that is what we see again and again in these scenarios, people who pick up the phone and start to engage with a stranger, and meanwhile, they're giving them all their personal information. They go to the bank, they're getting gift cards and Western Union, and they're doing all these things because they can no longer assess risk or understand the difference between the truth and a lie. And they've attached to whatever it is that has been fed to them, whether it's a romantic relationship, if it's an idea about making a million dollars. They find your currency. That's what I always say. The person on the end of the phone is trying to figure out what is your currency. Where is that little void in your heart that I can fill and then ask for money to continue to fill it.