Older adults shared harrowing stories of AI-enabled scams they experienced and the difficulties they encountered to resolve them during a Senate Special Committee on Aging hearing Wednesday about deepfakes, chatbots and senior fraud. The bipartisan committee is seeking ways to safeguard older Americans from AI-enabled fraud that is projected to reach $40 billion in the United States next year.
“Whether it’s a phone call from someone posing as a grandchild in trouble, a suspicious investment scheme delivered through the mail or an email from a government imposter threatening jail time, these criminals are targeting seniors with increasing sophistication,” Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., the committee’s chair, said at the hearing.
“The rise of artificial intelligence has offered scammers new tools to pursue their criminal schemes, and we must adapt and respond to these new threats,” he said.
During the hearing, 64-year-old mother Deborah Del Mastro recounted an incident from May in which she answered what she thought was a domestic phone call but was instead a man who identified himself as working for a Mexican drug cartel, who claimed to have kidnapped her daughter.
“’Is your daughter prone to panic attacks?’” the man asked, according to Del Mastro.
“I’m sitting in my pajamas at the breakfast table, and I said, ‘My daughter, yes,'” Del Mastro testified. “And then he put on her voice. Now, I know her voice. (The voice was) saying, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Mom. I’m so scared. I’m so sorry,’ and crying, sobbing.”
Del Mastro spent the next 5½ hours driving around the San Francisco Bay Area to different retailers to instantly transfer money to Mexico so her daughter would be returned, only to discover her daughter was alive and well and that only her daughter’s voice had been stolen and cloned with AI.
“Thank God it was a scam, but I had no idea that this was a possibility, that AI could clone the voice,” said Del Mastro, who reported the incident to local police who said the perpetrator was probably a foreigner and would most likely never be caught.
Dermatological surgeon Dr. David Amron, of the Roxbury Institute in Beverly Hills, California, told the panel his likeness had been stolen in the summer of 2025 and used in AI-generated videos that appeared to show him endorsing a miracle cream to treat a fat disorder known as lipedema. Amron neither created the videos nor endorsed the cream.
“The video was disturbingly realistic,” Amron said. “Scammers used actual footage from my YouTube channel and combined it with fully integrated AI-generated likenesses of my voice and my colleague … as well as AI-generated celebrity images and stolen media logos to create a polished advertisement that appears entirely legitimate.”
As soon as he became aware of the deepfake advertisement, Amron reported it to Meta, the accounts that had published the fake ad, the domain registrar that hosted the website and the major search engines that were directing consumers to the scam.
“Yet each time one version was removed, another quickly appeared,” said Amron, who decided to take his story to the national media to raise awareness about the issue.
Generative AI is not replacing traditional scams but “industrializing them,” Paul Benda, the American Bankers Association’s executive vice president for risk, fraud and cybersecurity, testified at Wednesday’s hearing.
“Generative AI is making impersonation dramatically easier and more convincing,” he said. “What once required significant time, skill and resources can now be done quickly, cheaply and at scale.”
The crimes do not succeed because older Americans are unsophisticated but because professional criminals are good at exploiting trust, fear, urgency and authority, he said.
Benda underscored the importance of education to help older adults identify AI-enabled scams and of bankers to change how they react to unexpected requests for money, especially if an older person appears frightened, secretive or coached by someone on the phone.
“In these moments, human judgment and the relationship between banker and customer can be just as important as any algorithm,” Benda said.
Matthew F. Ferraro, who once worked as a senior counselor for cybersecurity and emerging technology for the U.S. homeland security secretary, said during the hearing that cyber frauds targeting older adults in the first quarter of 2025 alone resulted in $200 million in financial losses. He cited a projection from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services that found generative AI could enable $40 billion in fraud losses in the United States by 2027, with older adults bearing a disproportionate share.
Like Benda, Ferraro advocates for increased education about AI scams. He also suggests greater coordination between federal and state agencies and industry to improve threat mitigation and to bolster enforcement.
On Wednesday, Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., sent a letter to some of the country’s leading artificial intelligence companies asking for details about the steps they are taking to protect older Americans from AI-enabled fraud.
Meta did not provide Spectrum News with a comment. OpenAI and Anthropic have not responded to emails from Spectrum News.
Click Here For The Original Source.
