The Fleecing of Pakistan’s Elderly, and the Silence of the Law

On 18th April 2024, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”), the financial intelligence unit of the United States, published a financial trend analysis of the category which American law names “Elder Financial Exploitation”, and its findings deserve to be read slowly in Pakistan: in the single year from 15th June 2022 to 15th June 2023, American financial institutions filed 155,415 suspicious activity reports under that one heading, involving more than twenty-seven billion US Dollars, and banks alone filed seventy-two per cent of them.

The analysis divides the wrong into two halves. An “Elder Scam” is the work of a stranger, the romance fraud, the technical support impostor, the caller who claims to be a government department, and each of them persuades an older person to move his savings towards a benefit which never arrives; such scams accounted for roughly eighty per cent of the reported activity, and the commonest single method was the takeover of the victim’s own account. An “Elder Theft” is the work of a trusted person, the caregiver, the attorney, the relative; and FinCEN records, in a finding which should be read twice in a society which congratulates itself upon the joint family, that adult children were the most frequent perpetrators.

FinCEN had already, by an advisory of 15th June 2022 (FIN-2022-A002), given every financial institution the red flags of the offence, among them sudden changes in transaction patterns, a new authorised signatory upon a long-settled account and uncharacteristic attempts at wire transfers, and had required the reports to carry the advisory’s reference so that the phenomenon could be counted. The counting is the point; an American regulator can now state, to the filing and to the dollar, how much of its elderly citizens’ money is being taken, by whom, and through which channels.

Pakistan can state no such figure, because no Pakistani law, federal or provincial, names “Elder Financial Exploitation” at all.

The elderly are here, and so is the conduct. HelpAge International counts almost fifteen million Pakistanis aged sixty years or above, some seven per cent of the population, and projects forty million by 2050; and the channels through which their money moves have been rebuilt within a decade, since the State Bank of Pakistan’s Annual Payment Systems Review for FY25, published in November 2025, records 9.1 billion retail payment transactions worth 612 trillion Rupees in one year, eighty-eight per cent of them digital, with mobile banking applications alone carrying 6.2 billion transactions. Every one of those channels terminates, at its far end, in a customer who may be seventy-five years old and holding his first smartphone.

The “Elder Scam” has arrived in local dress. On 14th January 2024 the Benazir Income Support Programme (“BISP”) publicly warned that fraudulent messages and calls, issued in its name, were announcing approved stipends and promising enrolment while seeking the recipient’s particulars for the transfer of the promised amount, and clarified that its genuine messages issue from the short code 8171 alone; the government-impostor scam of FinCEN’s taxonomy operates here in the dress of the state’s own cash transfer programme, whose recipients are by definition the poorest households in the country. The National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (“NCCIA”) received 142,272 cybercrime complaints during 2025, converted 26,036 of them into inquiries and registered 1,955 cases; fewer than two complaints in every hundred became a case. And the Financial Monitoring Unit (“FMU”), in its Quarterly Report for October to December 2022, describes M/s WAL Traders, a Ponzi scheme which gathered roughly four billion Rupees from ordinary savers, most of them middle and low income individuals, through ordinary bank accounts and mobile transfers; the retired government servant holding his gratuity and monthly pension is precisely the saver whom such schemes consume.

“Elder Theft” needs no smartphone. Its instrument of choice is the general power of attorney under the Powers-of-Attorney Act, 1882 (Act VII of 1882), executed by an ageing parent in favour of the son who manages his affairs; the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan held as long ago as Fida Muhammad v Pir Muhammad Khan (PLD 1985 SC 341) that such instruments are construed strictly and that an attorney who deals with the principal’s property for his own benefit must show the principal’s real consent, but that is civil doctrine; it is vindicated, if at all, in litigation which outlasts the victim, and it restores property to an estate rather than protection to a living pensioner.

What does the criminal law offer on the legal front? Section 14 of the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016 (Act XL of 2016) punishes “electronic fraud” with imprisonment which may extend to two years or fine which may extend to ten million Rupees; the age of the victim is neither an ingredient of the offence nor a ground of aggravation, and the position under the cheating provisions of the Pakistan Penal Code, 1860 (Act XLV of 1860) is the same. The machinery behind Section 14 has meanwhile been dismantled and rebuilt twice: the NCCIA was created on 3rd May 2024 by rules framed under Section 51 of the Act to replace the Cybercrime Wing of the Federal Investigation Agency; those rules were repealed with effect from 17th October 2024 and the work was returned to the FIA (Dawn, 12th December 2024); and the Prevention of Electronic Crimes (Amendment) Act, 2025, passed by the National Assembly on 23rd January 2025, established the NCCIA a second time, now upon the statute itself. An investigating agency created, abolished and recreated within nine months, for the reasons best known to the federal government, is no protection for a seventy-year-old complainant whose savings crossed three mobile wallets in an afternoon.

The provincial statutes written for the old are welfare statutes, and their silence on money is complete. The Sindh Senior Citizens Welfare Act, 2014 (Sindh Act No. XXI of 2016), assented to on 28th June 2016, defines a “Senior Citizen” as a person of sixty years or above, promises a card, old age homes, medical concessions and free funerals, and creates two offences only: contravention of the Act, framed around refusal to honour the card, and abandonment of a “Senior Citizen”, the latter punishable with three months’ imprisonment. Its solitary property provision, Section 11, voids a gift where the transferee fails to provide the promised amenities to the transferor. The Punjab Senior Citizens Welfare Act 2026, published on 12th March 2026, confines itself to citizens of seventy years and above and builds a welfare council and a fund. Very unfortunately, neither statute reaches the bank account, the mobile wallet, the pension or the power of attorney, and neither imposes any duty upon any bank; the legislation in field hence needs serious reconsideration.

The anti-money laundering architecture is no better sighted, despite the fact that Pakistan rebuilt it, at real cost, during the “Grey List” years between June 2018 and 21st October 2022. The FMU received 24,107 “Suspicious Transaction Reports” during 2022 under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010 (Act VII of 2010), and its table of predicate offences for the fourth quarter of that year records fraud and Ponzi schemes at twenty-four items.

Elder abuse appears nowhere in that table, because no reporting category for it exists.

Since no Pakistani bank is asked to mark a “Suspicious Transaction Report” with the age or vulnerability of the customer therefore no institution of the state can say whether the elderly of this country lost one billion Rupees or one hundred billion Rupees last year; and the omission is not clerical, keeping in view that the Honourable Supreme Court of Pakistan held in Shahid Chaudhry v The State (Criminal Petition No.174 of 2026, decided 27th February 2026) that a charge of money laundering is derivative of a determined predicate offence, so that the mule accounts through which scam proceeds travel cannot be pursued under the Anti-Money Laundering Act, 2010 unless the underlying fraud is first investigated and determined; and a wrong which is never recorded is rarely investigated and almost never determined.

In the light of the above, it is urgently required that, first, the State Bank of Pakistan issue to banks, microfinance banks and electronic money institutions a circular on the FinCEN pattern, prescribing the red flags of “Elder Financial Exploitation”, among them sudden changes in transaction patterns, new authorised signatories upon long-dormant accounts and uncharacteristic wire or wallet transfers, and requiring every such “Suspicious Transaction Report” to be marked with the category; secondly, that the FMU add “Elder Financial Exploitation” as a named category to its quarterly typology tables, so that the next Quarterly Report can count what the present one cannot see; thirdly, that the provincial senior citizens statutes be amended to create an offence of financial abuse of a “Senior Citizen” and to prescribe safeguards of attestation and independent verification for general powers of attorney executed by persons above sixty; and fourthly, that the NCCIA publish its complaint, prosecution and conviction figures disaggregated by the age of the victim, so that state functionaries may be held to a number rather than to an assurance.

The American record shows that the commonest thief of an old person’s money is a stranger on a telephone, and the second commonest is his own child. There is no honest reason to presume Pakistan kinder; there is only the absence of a column in which the answer would appear. A wrong which the law cannot name, the state cannot count; and what the state does not count, it quietly permits. The elderly of Pakistan are owed, before shelters and concession cards, a word in the statute book for what is being done to their money; it is for Parliament and the provincial assemblies to write it.