Debbie Deem joins Dr. Sandie Morgan to discuss how transnational fraud predators are stealing billions from older adults and the intersection between financial crimes and human trafficking.

Debbie Deem

Debbie Deem is a retired FBI victim specialist with over 40 years of experience serving crime victims. She’s currently an elder justice victim advocate, specializing in transnational fraud crimes and she serves as co-facilitator for the National Adult Protective Services Association Fraud Forum. She helped start the Victim Assistance Programs at the US Attorney’s Office in both San Francisco and Los Angeles, where in the early to mid-1990s she discovered what we now call human trafficking victims and was assisting those victims while also working with financial crime victims. After moving to the FBI in 2003, she began focusing on older victims of lottery, sweepstakes, and romance frauds, gravitating toward the most underserved victims throughout her career.

Key Points

• Financial fraud against older adults is now the most common crime happening around the world, with $4.9 billion reported stolen from Americans 60 and older in 2024 alone, representing a 33% increase from the previous year.


• The Federal Trade Commission estimates that close to $160 billion per year is stolen from all Americans due to fraud crimes, making this a massive underreported crisis.


• Language matters when discussing fraud victims – using terms like “defrauded” instead of “scammed” helps maintain victim dignity and reduces blame, similar to how language evolved in human trafficking advocacy.


• Common fraud types include romance frauds using stolen military or celebrity images, crypto investment frauds starting with innocent text messages, lottery/sweepstakes frauds, tech support impersonations, and phantom hacking where criminals impersonate bank security.


• Victims experience trauma bonds and love bombing similar to human trafficking victims, making it extremely difficult to recognize they’re being manipulated even when red flags are present.


• The neuroscience behind financial fraud shows that brain chemistry and excitement responses make these relationships feel authentic to victims, requiring neuropsychologists and medical professionals to help explain what’s happening.


• System failures are widespread – in one case study, a victim lost $380,000 but police didn’t respond, banks didn’t file required Adult Protective Services reports, and victim services provided no meaningful support.


• Crypto ATMs have become “fraud machines” found in gas stations and small stores, though California now limits transactions to $1,000 per day, causing criminals to evolve to using couriers and other methods.


• Prevention strategies include not answering unknown phone calls, getting scam warning apps, sharing personal fraud experiences with family members rather than lecturing, and establishing trusted contacts on all financial accounts.


• Revictimization occurs through recovery scams where criminals impersonate law enforcement agencies claiming they can help recover stolen funds, and through tax obligations on money withdrawn from retirement accounts even when it was stolen.


• The crime creates long-term devastation including bankruptcy, homelessness, suicide ideation, and forcing elderly victims back into the workforce after losing life savings.


• This field is where human trafficking advocacy was 20 years ago – needing widespread recognition, proper terminology, victim services, and systemic responses to address the crisis effectively.

Resources

• Debbie deem


• Neuroscience Behind Financial Scams: A DOJ elder initiative


• Internet Crime Complaint Center – ic3.gov


• National Elder Fraud Hotline

Transcript

[00:00:00 ] Welcome to the Ending Human Trafficking Podcast here at Vanguard University’s Global Center for Women and Justice in Orange County, California. I’m Dr. Sandy Morgan, and this is the show where we empower you to study the issues, be a voice, and make a difference in ending human trafficking. Today’s guest represents a powerful intersection of federal law enforcement expertise and passionate victim advocacy.

[00:00:30 ] Debbie Deem is a retired FBI victim specialist with over 40 years of experience serving crime victims. She’s currently an elder justice victim advocate, specializing. Transnational fraud crimes and she serves as co-facilitator for the National Adult Protective Services Association Fraud Forum.

[00:01:01 ] Today we will discover how financial fraud predators are, stealing billions from older adults, 4.9 billion in 2024 alone. And why these crimes mirror the early days of human trafficking recognition. Debbie shares real case studies, including a devastating story of a $380,000 theft, and she reveals practical strategies that families can use to protect their loved ones from becoming targets.

[00:01:37 ] And now here’s our interview.

[00:01:39 ] Sandie Morgan: Welcome to the ending Human Trafficking Podcast, Debbie Deem.

[00:01:45 ] Debbie Deem: Thank you very much. Looking forward to it.

[00:01:48 ] Sandie Morgan: I just love that we are having this conversation. I’ve known you for a couple decades and you’ve been deeply involved in combating human trafficking from the victim side, and today our conversation is going to talk about how transnational scam predators victimize. Our family members and what we can do about that. So I’m excited to have you on our show today, so Debbie, let’s first talk about how your career in the FBI impacted your understanding of victimization.

[00:02:37 ] Debbie Deem: Sandy, thank you again for having me. And I have to say that actually it was my first work, I was a victim specialist for the FBI, and I’ve been retired. I call myself unleashed for about the last six years, but even before that position, I helped start, The Victim Assistance Programs at the US Attorney’s Office, both in San Francisco and in Los Angeles.

[00:02:58 ] And it was actually there in their, actually their early to mid 1990s that I discovered both what we now call human trafficking victims, both in sex trafficking, With a domestic as well as an international trafficking, situation and was assisting those. But I also was required under the victim rights law to start notifying victims of all crimes.

[00:03:20 ] And that included financial crimes and identity theft, when we had cases that were going forward. So when I first became aware, it was actually both groups of victims that had been. Very underserved. Again, not even names for those crimes at that time. But I was obligated to find services that didn’t exist.

[00:03:39 ] I was obligated to inform them about their rights in the criminal justice system. Um, in some cases, with the traffic victims, they didn’t even speak english. So again, the variety of things, that I found in both situations actually started in the early to mid 1990s. And then when I moved to the FBI, in 2003, I was asked by agents to start visiting victims who, older victims who had been often contacted by phone and just the beginning days of the internet, because they had been defrauded.

[00:04:11 ] I, I try to use the word defrauded versus scammed. Because it just seems like it, it focuses more on the seriousness of the crime rather than putting any kind of blame on the victim, which oftentimes the word scam does. So what happened is that I was visiting, older victims of lottery or sweepstakes frauds, or the early romance frauds, and I’m seeing so many of these.

[00:04:33 ] Yet there was no one I could call or contact for help unless identity theft was involved because we did have the Identity Theft Resource Center at that time, and there was just nothing out there for these folks. And in my career, I’ve always gravitated towards the most underserved victims, whoever that was and kind of put my focus on that.

[00:04:51 ] then once people start addressing it, I move on to something else. And I was able to do that with human trafficking.

[00:04:58 ] Have a whole bunch of folks came and recognized that crime and great changes happened. So I moved on kind of to these financial fraud victims, especially older adults.

[00:05:08 ] And I’m still waiting kind of for the army to show up, but, that’s changing and they are showing up now, which is wonderful to be a part of that pioneering effort, that, you know, happened with human trafficking and I’m hopeful will happen with fraud victims.

[00:05:21 ] Sandie Morgan: Wow. And I really relate to this idea that you saw victims of crimes we didn’t even have names for.

[00:05:31 ] I often talk to people about my first victim of child sexual exploitation was a 14-year-old boy. I admitted at 2:00 AM before we had names for that crime. And as you grew into this, your focus on serving the victims really drove how you addressed it. And we will have links in the show notes, but you’ve written extensively on this, there is a lot of resource, to help us understand. And one of the works that you published is the neuroscience behind financial scams. A DOJ elder initiative, and this is really helpful for us to understand the science. Can you talk about what that means?

[00:06:36 ] Debbie Deem: I think you’re talking more about, it was a, a work that I did with Dr. Landy who was a neuropsychologist and he actually<