Crimes against the elderly population are increasing at an alarming rate. Among these crimes, the financial exploitation of older adults is the most common. However, financial crimes are often very complex, involving numerous transactions in multiple accounts spread over months or years. Perpetrators of these crimes recognize that many factors—including cognitive decline and health issues, the shift from pensions to self-managed retirement accounts, and the rapid growth of the elderly population—make older adults particularly vulnerable. Recognizing the severity of the problem, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Elder Justice Initiative provided funding to the IACP to develop a tool to help investigators and prosecutors investigate financial crimes targeting older adults.

Financial investigations often require detailed examination of bank records that could contain hundreds of individual transactions from multiple checking, credit card, savings, and investment accounts. Compounding the problem is the lack of a uniform format of records provided to law enforcement by financial institutions; they are often paper records or PDFs that cannot be easily imported into a spreadsheet or other tracking tool. The IACP project team spoke with investigators from around the United States and found that the most commonly cited hurdle in the investigation of financial exploitation was the entry of data from the bank statements and other financial documents.