Cybersecurity and Your Wealth: Why High-Net-Worth Families Are the Fastest-Growing Target for Financial Fraud

Key Points:

• The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center recorded a new record for reported losses in 2024, totaling $16.6 billion — a 33% increase over the prior year.
• Affluent families and individuals over 60 are disproportionately targeted, and the threat has expanded well beyond simple phishing emails.
• Real estate closing fraud, AI-generated deepfake scams, account takeover schemes, and advisor impersonation are the four fastest-growing attack vectors against high-net-worth households.
• Once funds are wired to a fraudulent account, recovery is not guaranteed — even with swift law enforcement intervention.
• Establishing verbal verification protocols, multi-factor authentication, and a trusted “pause and confirm” habit before any large transaction are among the most effective defenses available today.
• Working with advisors and institutions that maintain documented cybersecurity practices adds a meaningful layer of protection.

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You’ve spent decades building financial security. Your wealth is managed carefully, your accounts are with reputable institutions, and your advisors are people you trust.

Fraudsters know all of that. And they’re counting on it.

High-net-worth families have become the most coveted targets in financial cybercrime — not because they’re careless, but because the payoff of targeting them is dramatically higher than targeting the general population. A single successful attack can yield hundreds of thousands of dollars. The tools available to criminals have advanced rapidly. And the scams being deployed today are sophisticated enough to fool experienced professionals, not just unsuspecting retirees.

Cyber-enabled fraud accounted for 83% of all losses reported to the FBI in 2024, totaling $13.7 billion. The era when “just don’t click suspicious links” was sufficient protection is over.

Here’s what the current threat landscape actually looks like — and what families with significant wealth should be doing about it.

What Makes High-Net-Worth Families Especially Vulnerable?

It seems counterintuitive. Shouldn’t more resources mean better protection?

In some ways, yes. But wealth also creates specific vulnerabilities that criminals deliberately exploit.

Affluent families routinely execute large wire transfers — for real estate purchases, investment moves, business transactions, and charitable giving. Those transactions create opportunities for interception that simply don’t exist for families who never wire more than a few thousand dollars at a time. High-net-worth individuals are also more likely to be publicly identifiable through property records, business filings, social media, and news coverage, giving fraudsters detailed intelligence before they ever make contact.

Americans aged 60 and older filed 147,127 complaints and suffered $4.8 billion in losses in 2024 — the highest figures of any age group. That demographic represents a significant overlap with the wealth-building generation that accumulated substantial assets over four-plus decades of work and investing. Older Americans with real estate equity, retirement accounts, and investment portfolios are precisely who the most sophisticated fraud networks are organized to target.

The threat isn’t abstract. It’s targeted, it’s growing, and four specific attack types deserve serious attention from every affluent family.

Wire Fraud Targeting Real Estate Transactions

Real estate closings involve large, time-sensitive wire transfers executed by multiple parties — buyers, sellers, title companies, lenders, attorneys — communicating almost entirely by email. That is exactly the kind of environment financial criminals are designed to exploit.

The typical attack begins with Business Email Compromise (BEC): a fraudster monitors or spoofs the email of a party in the transaction — often a title company, real estate agent, or closing attorney — and waits for the right moment. Days before closing, when a buyer is expecting wire instructions, the criminal sends a fraudulent email with routing information directing funds to an account they control. The email looks authentic. It references the property address, uses the correct names, and arrives at precisely the moment the buyer expects it.

In 2024, there were 9,359 real estate and rental fraud complaints reported to the FBI, resulting in losses exceeding $173.6 million. Victims of real estate wire fraud suffered a median financial loss exceeding $70,000, making it one of the most financially devastating forms of fraud.

The FBI’s Recovery Asset Team can sometimes freeze fraudulent transfers if alerted within hours — the FBI’s Recovery Asset Team reported a 66% success rate in freezing or recovering stolen funds in 2024 using its Financial Fraud Kill Chain. But that requires the victim to recognize the fraud and report it almost immediately after wiring funds. In many cases, buyers don’t realize anything is wrong until days later, when the actual closing agent calls asking where the funds are.

The rule that eliminates most of this risk: Never wire funds based solely on email instructions. Always call the title company or closing attorney directly — using a phone number you looked up independently, not one that appears in the email — to verbally confirm routing information before initiating any transfer. This one step, consistently applied, defeats the majority of real estate closing fraud attempts.

AI-Generated Deepfake Scams

If real estate wire fraud relies on compromised email, the emerging threat of AI deepfakes is something fundamentally different — and significantly more difficult to defend against through standard vigilance alone.

Voice cloning technology can now replicate a person’s voice with as little as three seconds of source audio, which is often freely available from voicemail greetings, social media posts, corporate webinars, or YouTube videos. Video deepfakes can render a convincing real-time likeness of a known individual — a family member, a business partner, a financial advisor — during a live video call. These are no longer theoretical capabilities. They are actively being deployed against affluent individuals and their advisors.

The most documented high-stakes deepfake attack occurred in February 2024, when a finance worker at global engineering firm Arup was tricked into wiring $25 million to fraudster-controlled accounts after participating in what appeared to be a legitimate video conference with the company’s CFO and other senior executives — every person on the call was a deepfake.

That incident targeted a corporation. But the same technology is being aimed at high-net-worth households. Fraudsters impersonate adult children claiming an emergency. They clone the voice of a trusted advisor to instruct a wire transfer. They fabricate video calls with fake legal or financial professionals to manufacture urgency around a supposed investment opportunity or legal settlement.

Fraud losses facilitated by generative AI are projected to rise from approximately $12.3 billion in 2023 to $40 billion by 2027, according to the Deloitte Center for Financial Services — a compound annual growth rate of 32%.

The defense here is not better technology on the consumer side. It is establishing predetermined “out-of-band” verification protocols with the people you trust most. If your son calls claiming an emergency and needs funds wired immediately, the protocol is to hang up and call him back on the number you have saved. If your advisor contacts you requesting an account change or urgent transfer, call the main office number to confirm before acting. The authenticity of the voice or face on the other end is no longer a reliable signal.

Account Takeover and Credential Theft

Account takeover — gaining unauthorized access to investment, banking, or email accounts — is the mechanism that enables many other fraud categories. A criminal who controls your email account can intercept two-factor authentication codes, redirect password reset emails, monitor your financial communications, and manufacture convincing correspondence with your financial institutions.

Business Email Compromise, which relies heavily on compromised accounts, resulted in $2.77 billion in losses across 21,442 reported incidents in 2024 alone. The attack method doesn’t require sophisticated hacking. It typically begins with a phishing email convincing enough to capture login credentials, a data breach at a third-party service where a password was reused, or a SIM-swapping attack that redirects text message verification codes to a criminal’s device.

High-net-worth individuals are at elevated risk because the value of compromising their accounts is so much higher than compromising a typical consumer. Criminals invest more sophisticated resources when the potential reward is a seven-figure investment account or the ability to redirect a large wire transfer.

Effective defenses include using unique, complex passwords for every financial account (a password manager makes this practical), enabling authenticator app-based multi-factor authentication rather than SMS-based codes wherever possible, placing a credit freeze with all three major credit bureaus to prevent new accounts being opened in your name, and regularly reviewing account activity and alerting settings.

Impersonation of Advisors and Financial Institutions

Fraudsters don’t only impersonate family members. They impersonate registered investment advisors, brokerage firm representatives, IRS agents, and bank fraud departments — all with the goal of manufacturing urgency and bypassing the skepticism a cold contact from an unknown number would naturally trigger.

A common pattern: a caller identifies themselves as a representative from your brokerage’s fraud department, tells you your account has been compromised, and instructs you to move your assets immediately to a “secure” account they provide — which is, of course, an account they control. The call displays your brokerage’s phone number thanks to caller ID spoofing. The caller knows your account balance and recent transaction history, likely from data available on the dark web following a prior breach. Everything about the interaction feels legitimate.

Elder fraud across all scam types rose to $4.9 billion in reported losses in 2024 — a 43% increase year-over-year. Many of these losses stem directly from institution impersonation schemes targeting individuals with substantial assets.

The critical rule: no legitimate financial institution, brokerage, or government agency will ever call you unsolicited and instruct you to move money to protect it. If you receive such a call, hang up and call your advisor or institution directly using a number from a statement, the back of your card, or the firm’s official website. Do not call back using any number the caller provides.

Seven Steps High-Net-Worth Families Should Take Now

Cybersecurity for affluent families is not primarily a technology problem. It is a habits and protocols problem. The steps that provide the most protection are behavioral — and most of them cost nothing.

1. Establish a verbal verification protocol for all wire transfers. Any wire transfer instruction received by email — regardless of source — should be confirmed by a direct phone call to a known, independently sourced number before funds are sent. This applies to real estate transactions, investment moves, and any other large transfer. No exceptions.

2. Implement a “family safe word.” Choose a word or phrase that only immediate family members know and agree to use it to verify the authenticity of any emergency request for funds. If a caller — regardless of how convincingly they sound — cannot provide the safe word, the call is not legitimate.

3. Enable authenticator app-based multi-factor authentication on all financial accounts. SMS-based verification codes can be intercepted through SIM-swapping attacks. Authenticator apps like Google Authenticator or Authy generate codes locally and are significantly more secure.

4. Place credit freezes at all three major bureaus. A credit freeze at Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion prevents new credit from being opened in your name without your explicit action to lift the freeze. It costs nothing and can be done online in minutes.

5. Use unique passwords for every financial account. Password reuse is one of the most common vectors for account takeover. A password manager (such as 1Password or Bitwarden) makes managing unique credentials practical.

6. Conduct a digital footprint review. Search your name and family members’ names online. Review what personal and financial information is publicly available through property records, business filings, and social media. Fraudsters research their targets before making contact — understanding your own exposure helps you anticipate the approach they might use.

7. Ask your advisor about their firm’s cybersecurity practices. Your financial security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain of parties who hold your information. Reputable firms maintain documented security protocols, client identity verification procedures, and staff training programs. You are entitled to ask — and a strong firm will be glad to explain what they do to protect you.

What 50 Years of Client Protection Has Taught Us

At Carter Financial Management, our team has guided Dallas-area families through every major shift in financial markets and financial security since our founding in 1976. The nature of the threats has changed dramatically over those decades. The underlying principle has not: protecting what families have built requires the same deliberate attention that building it did.

The families who fare best against financial fraud are not necessarily the most technically sophisticated. They are the ones who have established clear protocols, communicate openly with their advisors, and apply a consistent habit of verification before any significant financial action — regardless of how urgent or familiar the contact appears to be.

If you have questions about your family’s exposure to any of the threats described here, or if you’d like to review the verification protocols we recommend for clients who execute frequent wire transfers or large real estate transactions, we invite you to contact our team. Protecting wealth is inseparable from managing it — and that conversation is always worth having.

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This content was created with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). While efforts have been made to ensure the quality and reliability of the content, it is important to note that AI-generated content may not always reflect the most current developments or nuanced human perspectives.

The information has been obtained from sources considered to be reliable, but we do not guarantee that the foregoing material is accurate or complete. Any opinions are those of Aaron Hays, CFP® and not necessarily those of Raymond James. Expressions of opinion are as of this date and are subject to change without notice. There is no guarantee that these statements, opinions or forecasts provided herein will prove to be correct. Raymond James and its advisors do not offer tax or legal advice. You should discuss any tax or legal matters with the appropriate professional.

Cybersecurity recommendations provided are general in nature and for informational purposes only. Individual circumstances vary; consult with appropriate security and technology professionals for guidance specific to your situation. Raymond James is not responsible for the content or security of any third-party websites or services mentioned herein.