A new monitoring tool aims to help seniors and their caregivers be on alert for potential fraud on their accounts, and it's now being used by a local bank.
The Cooperative Bank in Roslindale was recently recognized by the American Banker’s Association Foundation for its efforts to protect older Americans. It was also the first in the country to try out a new software that monitors senior citizen’s bank accounts to prevent fraud.
Rich Gribaudo of West Roxbury has been banking with The Cooperative Bank for 50 years, and he recently signed up for the new money monitoring software program.
“It's just that extra set of eyes looking at your account,” Gribaudo said. “That's the part I like.”
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The bank partnered with a financial monitoring platform called Carefull last year. Rich connected his accounts and now gets alerts about transactions and suspicious activity, like a purchase his wife recently made that was flagged as a potential gift card purchase, which could indicate she was the victim of a scam.
“She went to CVS the other day to pick up her prescription and the copay is $75,” Gribaudo said. “The next day I got an email and it was from Carefull and it said, you know I see a transaction went through for $75. This may or may not be a gift card. I actually think it’s great. I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
Bank President John Battaglia said with a rise in fraud and scams involving seniors, Carefull is an important tool.
“First thing I thought is bang. This is exactly what we need to help people,” said Battaglia.
Carefull is the first digital platform built to protect the daily finances of older adults, using senior-specific financial monitoring. Co-founder Todd Rovak said it's being used by banks, credit unions and wealth advisors.
“We use AI to look for basically everything banks can't find today. We're looking for behavior change, elder fraud, someone moving money out of mom or dad's account. We're looking for someone maybe not transacting in the same way that they used to. That might indicate forgetfulness,” said Rovak. “So it's a technology layer that looks at, without touching, checking and credit and savings and bills and home title and looks for things that start to look strange so that we can catch small problems before they become bigger problems.
Seniors can also give trusted caregivers access to the alerts as well, so they are in the loop.
“It allows whoever the caregiver is in, you know, in an account to look and see what's going on in the account and get warning signals either through text or email that there's something that is out of the ordinary going on in those accounts,” said Battaglia. “So it could be like, hey, you double paid your rent or you didn't pay your rent or you took out an unusual amount of money. Why did that happen?”
“Very recently actually, in our West Roxbury branch, we had a customer who was hit with fraud,” said Peter Lee, who manages TCB’s Information Technology division. “Through the Carefull service, she was alerted immediately and she came right to the branch and we took care of it...Just to see that how impactful it is to our customers, that's really what hit home for us.”
If there is a fraudulent transaction on your account, finding out about it quickly helps.
“We're catching things within hours or a day,” said Rovak. “Typically someone won't look at their statement for 30 or 60 days, right? It's more than 10 days, and so what we're trying to do is shorten that to almost as close to real times we can get.”
“This is a program I think is invaluable,” said Battaglia. “And I think it's going to allow a lot of the caregivers to sleep better at night.
Carefull hopes to have every bank and credit union in the country eventually using its software.
And every Carefull member is covered by a million dollars of Identity Theft Insurance, so if your identity is stolen, they help cover lost funds and legal fees.
