Most scam guides give you five examples and tell you to be careful. This is the working reference: nine scam families, forty-nine named patterns, each one with how it arrives, the feeling it exploits, how the money actually leaves, the tells that give it away, and what to do in the moment. We also say plainly which ones our own system catches today — and which ones are still hard.
Scams are usually cataloged by the story they tell — the fake invoice, the fake grandson, the fake prize. That is the wrong grouping for a family trying to protect someone, because the story changes weekly and the lever almost never does. These nine families are organized by what the scam is actually doing to the person reading it.
Borrows an authority the reader already trusts — Medicare, the IRS, the bank, Microsoft, the power company. The trust is real; only the sender is fake.
8 patternsBuilds a real emotional bond over weeks or months, then spends it. The slowest family, and by a wide margin the most expensive.
5 patternsManufactures a crisis involving someone loved, then adds secrecy so the story is never checked. Now routinely voice-cloned.
4 patternsNot a story at all — the payment rail itself. Gift cards, wires, Zelle, crypto ATMs. How the money leaves, once a story has done its work.
6 patternsReads public obituaries, probate filings and hospital discharges, then arrives at the single worst week to be asked a question.
4 patternsOffers money that does not exist, then charges to release it. The oldest family in the book, and still working.
5 patternsSkips the person entirely and takes the mailbox — because whoever holds the inbox holds every password reset.
6 patternsThe technical families: attachments, QR codes, redirects, fake share notices. Where the delivery trick matters more than the story.
8 patternsTargets people who were already defrauded, offering to get the money back. The cruelest family, and the most predictable.
3 patternsThe reason to group them this way: a family cannot memorize forty-nine stories, but they can learn nine reflexes. Every pattern below tells you which reflex applies.
Search it, or filter by family. Tap any card for the full entry — how it appears, the lever, the money trail, the tells, what to do, and whether we detect it. Every ID is stable, so you can cite one (EF-FAM-001) in a policy, a training deck, or a note to a caregiver.
Nothing matches that. Try a shorter word — “bank”, “prize”, “code”.
It is not a complete enumeration of every scam ever run — new pretexts appear weekly, and this is a working catalog of what is actually reaching inboxes now, revised as that changes. It is not a scoring system: the risk of any single message depends on context this page cannot see. And it is not advice for an emergency in progress — if money has already moved, go straight to what to do right now.
Forty-nine stories, six exits. This is the more useful thing to memorize, because the story is designed to be novel and the exit cannot be — every one of these has to be irreversible, or the scam does not pay.
| Rail | Why they use it | Reversible? | The reflex |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gift cards | Bought at any pharmacy, redeemed instantly and anonymously anywhere in the world. | Never | No real organization on earth is paid in gift cards. None. This one is a certainty, not a judgment call. |
| Wire transfer | Fast, final, and hard to trace once it lands abroad. | Almost never | Call the bank on the number on your card and say the words "I think I am being scammed" before sending. |
| Zelle / P2P apps | Bank-to-bank in seconds, and consumer protection is thin because you authorized it. | Rarely | Treat it as cash in an envelope. Only ever to someone you have met. |
| Cryptocurrency & crypto ATMs | Irreversible by design, and a crypto ATM converts cash with no bank in the middle. | Never | Nobody legitimate will ever ask an older adult to feed cash into a crypto machine. |
| Bank details "update" | Redirects a payment that was already going to happen, so nothing looks unusual. | Sometimes | Verify a change of bank details by voice, on the number you already had — never the one in the email. |
| Remote access to the computer | Skips payment entirely — they move the money from inside the victim's own bank session. | Sometimes | Never let anyone who called or emailed you first take control of the screen. |
Read the nine families, not the forty-nine patterns. Then agree one thing out loud: a code word, and a promise that any request for money gets a phone call to you first — no matter how urgent it sounds. That single agreement defeats most of the Family Emergency family on its own.
The Impersonation and Money Extraction families are the ones that will hit your finance volunteer. Use the IDs to build a one-page policy: which requests always require a callback, and to which number. We publish a per-inbox option if you would rather it were watched for you.
The IDs are stable across revisions and cross-referenced to the FBI IC3 and FTC categories, and to MITRE ATT&CK where a technical technique applies. Cite them freely. Corrections and additions are genuinely welcome — hello@familysentinel.org.
Elder Fraud Scam Library v1.0 · July 2026 · Compiled by Family Sentinel from FBI IC3 and FTC Consumer Sentinel reporting, published threat research, and patterns observed in our own monitoring. Revised as the landscape changes. Companion pages: everything we watch for · why ordinary spam filters miss these · test yourself.