Vulnerable adults in Michigan now have more protections in place to keep them from being taken advantage of by scammers.
Here's an example, someone calls or contacts you telling you they are a close friend of a family member. They say they need money right away to get that person out of trouble but give you no other details other than how to send the money.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said this is one of the most common ways scammers try to get those with cognitive or physical impairments as well as the elderly to give away large sums of money.
She says the Financial Exploitation Prevention Act which took effect this week will make it harder for those scams to take place.
“And that's what we're trying to protect people from, we've seen it over and over again, where, you know, seniors are the number one target for scammers or con artists, for people who want to take advantage," Nessel added.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed the act into law late last year. It requires banks and credit unions to identify unusual money transfers and initiate investigations to ensure their validity.
Nessel said the measure requires financial institutions to be better trained to recognize scams and to have a way to stop them.
“What if you all of a sudden have a person who's a senior who only does their banking in person, and then all of a sudden one day, boom, there's a $50,000 transfer, it's online. So that's going to be flagged, and they'll be able to freeze that," she said.
The Act follows work done by the state’s Elder Abuse Task Force first organized by the Attorney General’s office in 2019.
No comments:
Post a Comment