A Senate Judiciary hearing led by Chairman Grassley and Ranking Member Durbin examined what witnesses and senators called an expanding, transnational fraud crisis that is disproportionately harming older Americans and using new tools such as cryptocurrency ATMs and artificial intelligence.

Witnesses and senators framed the issue as both a consumer-protection and law-enforcement problem: federal and industry witnesses cited national statistics on monetary losses, described how scam operations cross telecom, social-media and financial networks, and urged a coordinated federal response and new industry guardrails to stop scams before victims lose their savings.

Chairman Grassley opened the hearing by warning about the scale and organization of modern scammers and their use of technology. “The scam threat is real,” he said. He and other senators cited Federal Trade Commission and FBI figures offered in testimony: the FTC estimate that scammers stole $158,000,000,000 from Americans in 2023, with about $62,000,000,000 taken from senior citizens, and FBI figures presented that people age 60 and older reported $4,900,000,000 stolen last year with an average loss of $83,000.

The hearing included first-person testimony from a victim advocate and several industry and law-enforcement witnesses. April Helms, introduced as a founding board member of Advocating Against Romance Scammers, recounted her mother’s loss and the human toll of scams: “My mother, Sherry Tyson, lost $350,000 to a romance scam,” she said, describing isolation during cancer treatment and escalating losses that she tied directly to her mother’s later death. Helms urged Congress to act to prevent similar cases.

Jolene Gunther, national director of AARP’s Bank Safe Initiative, described industry prevention work and urged legal changes to allow financial institutions to act more readily to stop suspicious transactions. “The financial industry can be the last line of defense, but only if we give them the authority to act,” Gunther said, citing AARP training that she said has prevented hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Josh Berkew, executive director of the Industry Traceback Group and senior vice president at USTelecom, outlined telecom-sector tools such as call blocking, SHAKEN/STIR authentication and tracebacks that identify illegal call sources. He recommended three congressional priorities: “establish a national anti scam strategy with a designated federal lead or task force,” create legal safe harbors to enable information-sharing and fraud-prevention partnerships, and “support and scale what works.”

Brady Finta, founder and CEO of the National Elder Fraud Coordination Center and a former FBI supervisor, urged creation of regional elder-justice task forces paired with a national coordination center to aggregate complaints, link cases across jurisdictions and develop higher-value investigative packages that federal and state prosecutors can pursue.

A recurring focus was cryptocurrency ATMs. Senator Durbin described how crypto ATMs are used to convert victims’ cash into cryptocurrency that is then difficult to trace or recover. Durbin said he introduced the Crypto ATM Fraud Prevention Act with Senators Blumenthal, Reed and Welch; he called for operator registration, customer warnings, transaction limits and refund protections for new customers. Durbin said, in part, that “crypto ATM scams led to nearly $247,000,000 in losses in 2024.” He also cited a corporate filing from Bitcoin Depot acknowledging that its products “may be exploited to facilitate illegal activity,” and an investigation from the Iowa attorney general finding that over 98% of reported Bitcoin Depot transactions in Iowa were part of scam activity.

Committee members and witnesses discussed the emerging role of artificial intelligence in scams, including voice cloning. Several speakers described how a few words of a person’s voice can be used to synthesize calls that appear to come from family members. “They are so convincing,” April Helms said of AI-enabled imposters, and senators asked for “rules of the road” on AI to protect individuals from deepfakes used in fraud.

Senators raised several policy responses discussed by witnesses during questioning: (1) a national, government-led anti-scam strategy and a federal coordinator or task force; (2) legal safe harbors and clarified liability to enable real-time information-sharing and to let banks hold or slow suspicious transactions; (3) federally supported regional elder-justice task forces tied to a National Elder Fraud Coordination Center to aggregate leads; (4) registration, transaction limits and consumer protections for crypto ATMs; and (5) expanded tracebacks, cross-sector partnerships and targeted enforcement to disrupt overseas call centers and criminal enterprises.

Witnesses and senators repeatedly stressed coordination across agencies and the private sector, pointing to Australia’s recent national anti-scam approach as a promising model that combined telecom, tech platforms and financial institutions and that, according to testimony, produced a large reduction in scam losses after implementation. Multiple senators and witnesses asked for legislation and federal leadership to create and fund a coordinated approach.

The hearing produced recommendations and a record of bipartisan concern but no formal committee votes. Senators set a one-week deadline for written questions for the record and asked witnesses to return answers within two weeks.

Looking ahead, senators said they expect follow-up work on bills (including the Crypto ATM Fraud Prevention Act) and potential legislative proposals to clarify industry authority, create a national strategy, and enhance enforcement tools and information-sharing to better target transnational criminal networks.