What frontline practitioners say actually prevents fraud against older adults

GASA’s Research Working Group convened around Prof. Mark Button’s study on what actually works to prevent fraud against older adults — a population that gets targeted like everyone else but absorbs far heavier financial and emotional damage when a scam lands. The research draws on frontline practitioner perspectives rather than survey self-report, which is the more useful lens for anyone deciding where intervention money should go.

The top finding speaks straight to the calling-trust stack: practitioners rank technology that blocks or disrupts scammers before they reach a victim — spam detectors, call-blocking apps, real-time interception — as consistently among the most valuable tools. That’s a direct vote for the upstream stack (caller analytics, call blocking, the authentication layer that feeds them) over downstream education. Education still matters, but the second theme is that broad awareness campaigns underperform targeted, practical, one-to-one support; generic “watch out for scams” messaging mostly doesn’t move the needle.

The rest reads as a coordination problem. Trained bank staff and care professionals can catch warning signs — unusual transactions, rushed transfers, distress — and stronger partnerships across police, NGOs, banks and technology vendors are needed, but practitioners often don’t know which initiatives exist or how to plug in. None of this is surprising, but it’s a clean, sourced articulation of something the industry tends to assert without evidence: stopping the contact at the network edge is worth more than teaching everyone to be suspicious. A point worth holding onto for the next KYUP or call-blocking debate where someone argues consumer education should carry the load.