National Adult Protective Services Association’s (NAPSA’s) Research to Practice (R2P) series

In this webinar, Drs. Lynn Langton (RTI International) and Marti DeLiema (University of Minnesota) will describe partnering with the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) to launch a randomized controlled trial of a national mail fraud prevention campaign. The goal of the field experiment was to educate and protect older adults who recently lost money in mail scams. Langton and DeLiema will present two variations of a mailed scam prevention campaign designed to warn, educate, and empower victim households about mail scams. The USPIS tracked these households’ rates of revictimization in a naturalistic observation of the mail over a four-month period following delivery of the intervention materials. Compared to households in the control condition (no intervention), households that received the "Be a Fraud Fighter" counter-marketing materials experienced a 22% reduction in their risk of revictimization. This research offers empirical evidence that a simple, scalable, and cost-effective counter-marketing fraud prevention campaign can reduce revictimization among diverse older adults. Findings can be used by mail service organizations to launch larger scale campaigns to reduce losses from mail scams, and be modified for other delivery channels and scam types.

Presenters include:

Marti DeLiema, PhD, is a gerontologist and Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work at the University of Minnesota. She is the Associate Director of Education for the Center for Healthy Aging and Innovation (CHAI) at the University of Minnesota, and the faculty advisor for the student-led Aging Studies Interdisciplinary Group. She also holds the 2023-2024 Fesler Lampert Chair in Aging Studies. Dr. DeLiema studies financial victimization using focus groups, in-depth interviews, surveys, and panel data. She regularly collaborates with financial institutions, AARP, the FINRA Foundation, and federal protection agencies to analyze victimization risk factors and to test efforts to inoculate consumers from fraud and abuse through enhanced consumer education and advance care planning interventions. Her research is funded by the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute on Aging, the Social Security Administration, the Administration for Community Living, AARP, and the FINRA Investor Education Foundation.

Lynn Langton, PhD, is a Criminologist and Program Director for the Victimization and Response Program at RTI International, a not-for-profit research institute based in North Carolina. Dr. Langton’s research focuses broadly on the areas of victimization, victim services, financial fraud, and white-collar crime. In her prior role as Chief of the Victimization Statistics Unit at the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, Dr. Langton formulated, directed, and oversaw numerous large-scale national projects including the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the NCVS Supplemental Fraud Survey and served as a member of the Federal Interagency Identity Theft and Fraud Working Group. She has substantial experience designing studies, developing survey instruments, collecting data from and about victim populations and victim service providers, developing outcome measures, evaluating program effectiveness, analyzing data, and disseminating findings to broad audiences.