When 80-year-old Richard Thomas got a call from his grandson from jail asking for $5,000, he told his son, Ernest Thomas. Thomas immediately began the drive to Gainesville from his home in Miami to grab his son.
There was only one problem: the grandson, 21-year-old UF student Nathan Thomas, wasn’t in jail. He was studying in his room and never called his grandfather.
“My grandfather got a call from somebody who sounded like me,” he said.. “It wasn't me…my grandpa told him to ask my dad for money.,” he said.
Richard Thomas narrowly avoided falling for a scam call, one of many fraud techniques seemingly growing in the digital age. In 2023, over 40,000 people reported online scams in Florida. From online investment to malware, Floridians lost millions last year, according to an FBI internet crime report.
The FBI ranked Florida third in internet crimes reported and subsequent monetary losses amassed in the nation. The state suffered $874 million in losses from cybercrime, almost $30 million more than the previous year, according to the 2022 and 2023 FBI internet crime reports.
Gainesville also ranked 50th in fraud rates, including online scams, for metropolitan areas out of the 374 total in the U.S., and submitted over 4,000 reports of fraud last year, according to the 2023 Federal Trade Commission databook.
UF psychology professor Natalie Ebner said people 65 and older are more susceptible to certain scams due to a lack of internet savviness, making Florida’s large older adult population a contributor to its high rank in related crimes.
Older adults made up 21% of Florida’s population in 2021, which was the second-highest concentration of residents 65 and older in the country, according to the Population Reference Bureau.
Adults 60 and older lost over $290 million last year, the highest quantity out of every other age demographic, according to a 2023 internet crime state report. The U.S. Department of Justice found that only 15% of these offenses are reported annually.
“There is a lot of shame with being scammed, particularly among older adults who already feel like they are cognitively declining and people have low opinions about their abilities,” Ebner said.
The lack of reporting due to personal embarrassment leaves law enforcement agencies unaware of the high threat level, she said.
“They’re holding back information about being victimized,” Ebner said. “It’s really hard for agencies to basically come in and take down the scam if they are not even aware this is happening.”
Nick Ferrara, a Gainesville Police Department financial crimes unit detective sergeant, said when people are scammed online, local law enforcement like GPD struggles with a lack of resources.
“There's so much anonymity to see where that money goes,” he said. “You have to use these tools that cost a lot of money to use that the police department doesn't have money for.”
A lot of cybercrime happens overseas, which Ferrara said is a limiting factor for local agencies that can’t afford to send personnel out of the country, therefore leading them to seek federal organizations like the FBI.
Even when cybercrime is reported, he said federal investigations don’t take place unless a large sum of money is lost.
“It’s usually in the several hundreds of thousands if not into the millions,” Ferrara said.
The most common scams in Gainesville include those involving threats of legal action for fabricated offenses including missing jury duty, unpaid traffic tickets and found DNA, he said.
Scammers reside in different parts of the internet, which he said can range from dating websites to career-oriented platforms like LinkedIn.
Marilyn Horta, a UF social cognition and aging research scientist, works with Ebner to analyze decision-making among older people. She found scammers commonly play on the loneliness of people, particularly in older individuals.
“They’re relying on their initial impressions more,” Horta said. “That has the potential to increase their susceptibility to deception and specific scams that are trying to tap into their connections with other people.”
Horta said her and Ebner’s work focuses on older adults, and they aim to translate deception risk into policy development and other effective methods to mitigate the rising scam threat.
For Nathan and Richard Thomas, the scam call was close but unsuccessful.
“It's insidious that these people target the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to this, that we really should be making sure that those people have access to better resources to improve their media literacy,” Nathan Thomas said.
Contact Lee Ann Anderson at landerson@alligator.org. Follow her on X @LeeAnnJOU.
Lee Ann Anderson is a sophomore journalism major and The Alligator’s Summer 2023 criminal justice reporter. In her free time you can catch her reading articles, talking to her cat or losing her mind.
