Single Platform Reporting of Financial Exploitation

The Office for Victims of Crime is committed to enhancing the nation’s capacity to assist crime victims and provide leadership in changing attitudes, policies, and practices to promote justice and healing for all victims of crime. Through the FY 2018 Field-Generated Innovations in Addressing Elder Financial Exploitation solicitation, OVC seeks to support projects which focus on elder financial exploitation through innovative collaborations between the financial industry and others to better detect and respond to victims. These efforts should build the capacity of victim service providers and financial industry representatives to enhance fraud detection and provide trauma-informed, age-appropriate services and resources for victims.

With this award, the Research Foundation CUNY on behalf of Hunter College will pilot the first-ever Financial Exploitation (FE)-focused unified reporting platform. As a result, web-based reports will be entered by financial institutions and automatically routed to appropriate investigating agencies (e.g., APS, financial regulators). The platform would allow all involved agencies to share basic case information. The goal of this project is to increase reporting of FE, and the speed and quality of victim response, by streamlining reporting and information sharing between financial and investigating agencies. The project will directly assist FE victims by allowing cases to be more efficiently identified and investigated. The project objectives are to: 1) develop the new unified web-based platform, 2) pilot the platform in two states, 3) evaluate the platform’s feasibility and acceptability in practice, and 4) evaluate the platform’s efficacy in increasing FE reports, substantiation, referral, and prosecution rates.

CA/NCF