The Bank Hired a Behavioral Scientist.

By Philip C. Marshall and Charles E. Wallace Jr.

Karen Battista has worked behind the teller counter at a Chase branch in Scarsdale, New York for years. She knows which customers just returned from vacation, whose children were recently married, who lost a beloved dog. When an 81-year-old widow tried to transfer $9,000 into an account she had never heard of, Ms. Battista knew something was wrong — not because an algorithm flagged the transaction, but because she knew her customer. She stopped the transfer. She told the customer to hang up the phone. She saved $9,000.

The New York Times reported her story this week alongside a broader account of how JPMorgan Chase has hired a behavioral scientist and begun asking a different question than the one fraud detection systems have always asked. Not: is this transaction suspicious? But: has this person’s pattern of life changed?

That distinction is the most important sentence in elder financial exploitation today.

Fraud detection asks whether the transaction is suspicious. Exploitation detection asks whether the pattern of life has changed. The pattern of life is not in the transaction record. It is in the relationship — in forty-seven combined years behind the same counter, noticing when something has shifted. No algorithm captures that. It lives in the person who was already there, already trusted, already watching. In financial exploitation, that person is sometimes a teller. More often, it is the family member who noticed the unfamiliar names on the bank statement or the adult child who asked twice whether everything was all right. 

The banking system’s blind spot is structural: two credit cards on the same client, siloed in different systems, so no one sees the full picture. A statement that shows transactions but not the shape of a financial life. The system correctly identifies the customer. The question is whether it recognizes that the customer’s financial behavior no longer looks like the customer. Financial institutions are already required to file Suspicious Activity Reports with FinCEN when they detect potential elder financial exploitation — a checkbox added in 2013. On the investment side, FINRA Rule 4512 requires broker-dealers to obtain a trusted contact for non-institutional accounts. Retail banking has no equivalent nationwide requirement. More than 1,500 financial institutions have adopted AARP's BankSafe training, which teaches employees to recognize the behavioral signs of exploitation before the transaction completes.

The SAR tells the government what happened. The trusted contact is the person who might have stopped it. The gap between those two instruments is where the exploitation lives. These are meaningful steps — attempts to institutionalize what Karen Battista already does naturally: ask the relationship question before the transaction completes. But Karen Battista is one person in one branch in Scarsdale. The system needs to ask her question for every branch, every client, every day.

The banking system’s blind spot has a twin in the legal system — larger, older, and harder to fix. When elder financial exploitation reaches the courts, the person who noticed the pattern of life changing has no formal standing. They are structurally excluded from the system they activated. The family member who called twenty-five times receives a courtesy call to say the case is closed. No findings. No records. No pathway back in.

One of us learned this after spending three years investigating a case no bank or agency would take — not because the evidence wasn’t there, but because a family member had no standing to act on it.

The bank hired a behavioral scientist. The legal system hired no one. The family member is still waiting outside.

The solution is the same in both systems: build a formal place for the person who already knows. Extend the trusted contact requirement to every institution where exploitation flows. Recognize family members and close associates in statute — in adult protective services protocols, in guardianship proceedings, in the right to know what the investigation found. The invisibility of the relationship to the systems built around the transaction is not two problems. It is one.

The bank had Karen Battista. The family had no one.

Prevention requires rights. Not just awareness.

Philip C. Marshall is the founder of BeyondBrooke.org. He is the grandson of Brooke Astor, whose abuse by his father led to a landmark 2006 guardianship case.

Charles E. Wallace Jr. is the author of The Caregiver's Game. A former banking executive, he spent three years investigating the theft of more than a million dollars from his mother — a dementia patient — by the caregiver entrusted with her care.

Sources

Siegel Bernard, Tara. "Customers Are Giving Billions to Scammers. Tellers Are Intervening." New York Times, June 7, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/07/your-money/chase-bank-tellers-scams.html. 

FinCEN, SAR Activity Review, Issue 23, May 2013, p. 66. https://www.fincen.gov/system/files/shared/sar_tti_23.pdf. 

FinCEN Advisory FIN-2011-A003, "Advisory to Financial Institutions on Filing Suspicious Activity Reports Regarding Elder Financial Exploitation," February 2011. https://www.fincen.gov/resources/advisories/fincen-advisory-fin-2011-a003. [Background: the 2011 advisory preceded and prompted the 2013 checkbox.]

FINRA Rule 4512, Customer Account Information. https://www.finra.org/rules-guidance/rulebooks/finra-rules/4512.  

AARP BankSafe Initiative. https://www.aarp.org/lp/banksafe/. The 1,500 financial institutions figure: Sourced from the NYT article above.