If you’ve been hacked or your identity stolen, you know how vulnerable it can feel and how scary. Trying to make sense of it all and get your account straightened out can months or longer depending on how bad it is.

Even if you haven’t had the misfortune of experiencing identity theft, it can still be scary knowing your information could be out there on the dark web or in the hands of a hacker and you might not even know it.

This article was originally posted by NAIFA partner Carefull. Carefull is the first service built to organize and protect older adults' finances. It is available for individuals, families and financial advisors who need smart financial monitoring, identity theft protection, and bill oversight for older adults' daily money matters.

Scammers love to target older adults. Sure, they’ll go after people of all ages, but con artists often prey on older adults because they assume that seniors are more trusting, more vulnerable, and less likely to report being scammed.   

On top of that, scammers see older adults as prime targets because they think they’re sitting on a pile of retirement cash – cash that they hope to steal. According to a report by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, older adults reported $1.7 billion in losses to financial exploitation in 2017 alone, with an average loss among victims of $34,200. And that's only the reported losses — outside researchers estimate that actual annual losses to older adults range from $2.9 billion to $36.6 billion.

Unfortunately, there’s a chance your parents could become a part of those statistics – if they haven’t already. No matter what you do, you can’t protect your parents 100% from becoming victims. However, you can reduce their risk by taking the following steps.

(The following tips from Morgan Stanley will help ensure your donation is going where you want it to go.)

In July alone, there were 2.3 billion records[1] breached globally. That’s about 74 million a day, an astounding number of people to be subject to a cyber attack. Domestically, there’s an attack every 39 seconds, affecting one in three Americans a year.[2] The same study explains how hackers are able to levy so many attacks a day. They program software to strike large numbers of computers simultaneously and write code that controls which usernames and passwords to try – those that the hacker believes are most likely to be used.