Aging and Financial Exploitation Risk

Financial exploitation among older adults is an increasing public health concern. Whether in-person or online, financial risks are becoming omnipresent in our increasingly connected and wired world. Understanding why some older adults are more vulnerable to financial exploitation than others, and the specific contexts in which this vulnerability is most likely to emerge, is necessary to design more targeted surveillance and intervention tools. In this review, we identify the cognitive, socioemotional, and brain changes in aging that increase financial exploitation risks in later life. Next, we build on this review to propose a new social cognitive neuroscience model of financial exploitation risk. In the final section, we review emerging work to develop profiles for older adults, toward novel intervention techniques to reduce the burden of financial exploitation in later life.