May 2023: Senior Citizens Striking Back at Scammers

Thousands of people fall for online scams every year. Anyone can be scammed, but older adults in the US are the most targeted population in the world. By far. Those over age 60 lost over $3 Billion last year—and that’s just the ones who reported it. One of the fastest growing scams aimed at seniors is romance scams, especially those involving cryptocurrency, which is largely impossible for US law enforcement to prosecute. Websites and education programs to inform seniors about scams exist, but they’re not interactive and engaging and often treat seniors like they are clueless. Our project – Deception Awareness and Resilience Training (DART) is building a fun, spy themed mobile video game for senior citizens that will be released this summer. This talk will give some background on how the latest scams work, especially ones based around cryptocurrency, and show you how we’ve assembled a multidisciplinary team, including a professional game development company, to arm seniors to defend themselves against scammers!

Speaker Bio:

Anita Nikolich is a Research Scientist and the Director of Research and Technology Innovation at the University of Illinois's School of Information Sciences and Director of Research at Inca Digital, a digital asset analytics company. She is Co-PI of the NSF-funded FABRIC Midscale Research Infrastructure, Co-PI of an NSF-funded Convergence Accelerator project, Deception Awareness and Resilience Training (DART) and PI on a DARPA funded SBIR, Mapping the Impact of Digital Financial Assets (MIDFA).