The world is a beautiful place, filled with kind and caring people. The reverse is also true, with no shortage of ugliness, selfishness, and deceit. Look no further than the glut of fraudsters and scam artists who choose to target the lonely and vulnerable.
 

“The scope of the problem continues to be pretty broad,” says Matt Mizenko, a Garden State native who studied at Rutgers University. “The bad guys know that their most lucrative audience tends to be seniors, and there’s no end to their creativity.” 
 

He would know. Originally from Willingboro, New Jersey, Mizenko now lives in Tucson, Arizona, where he works as the general manager of Nomorobo. The company specializes in stopping robocalls and texts, thereby sparing customers from potential “scammers, spammers, and swindlers.” That said, its efforts go much further. A proprietary Honeypot monitoring system tracks more than 300,000 phone lines daily to detect new threats, and the company then shares its knowledge of the “latest and greatest scams.” It has also filed lawsuits against debt collectors alleged to have violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. 
 

“In the old days, scammers would use a carpet-bombing [approach], dropping lots of ‘bombs’ over a wide area, hoping to get a few [victims],” he says. “What we see now are really targeted scams, where the scammers take information off the dark web, loosely speaking, and look for really strong targets. 
 

“They gather up information on where someone works, maybe they have the last four digits of their social security number, and they package that as a profile before making a phone call or putting it in a text message with the intent to scam,” he continues. “They might say, ‘I’m your banker or broker, and here’s the information to prove I’m legit.’ From there it becomes an old-fashioned confidence game.”
 

The stakes are sky high. From 2020 to 2024, the number of reports from older adults who lost $10,000 or more to these scams increased more than fourfold, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The trend was even more striking among older adults who reported losing more than $100,000; during the same period, the number of reports increased nearly sevenfold, and the combined reported losses went up eightfold.
 

Mizenko has some advice for seniors and their families.