The FBI received more than a million fraud complaints in 2025. Its Financial Fraud Kill Chain — the rapid-response process built to claw money back before it disappears — was initiated in 3,900 incidents that year. Of the 642 involving victims aged 60 and over, with $65.4 million in reported losses, it helped freeze $32.9 million.
That is a genuine success rate on the cases it reaches. It is also a tiny fraction of a million complaints. Law enforcement is not indifferent; it is outnumbered. Your complaint will be one of hundreds of thousands, and the first days — the only days when recovery is realistic — will likely pass before anyone reads it.

A trusted contact designation is only as good as the person behind it. Adult children travel. Friends screen unknown numbers. A neighbor may not grasp why a call about a wire transfer is urgent, or what to say next.

When your institution contacts TCL, a trained paralegal on our staff handles that communication under attorney supervision, at every plan level. They know what the call means, what questions to ask, and what has to happen in the next twenty-four hours. On the Advantage and Guardian plans, you also get unlimited phone conferences with a TCL lawyer about any suspected scam directed at you — including review of the letters, emails, texts, and screenshots the scammer sent you.

This is not a choice between your daughter and a law firm. Most institutions permit more than one trusted contact, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau recommends naming more than one so the firm has somewhere to turn if the first person cannot be reached.

Name the people who love you. Then add a professional who will be reachable, who is not part of any family dynamic, and who will not hesitate to say that a transfer looks wrong.

Not everyone wants an adult child to know what is in the account, or to learn about a lapse in judgment. Some people have no family nearby. Some have family they would rather not involve.

Naming TCL gives your institution a responsive contact without opening your financial life to relatives. And because a trusted contact receives no account information as a matter of course, the designation itself discloses very little.

We do not ask for and will not accept your account numbers, usernames, passwords, Social Security number, or any other confidential personal information. We do not need them to serve as your trusted contact, and holding them would create a risk to you that the service exists to reduce.

There is nothing in our files for a data breach to expose. That is a deliberate design choice, not an oversight.

This bears repeating, because it is the most common misunderstanding about the role. Naming TCL does not make us your power of attorney, your guardian, your trustee, or your executor. We cannot execute a trade, move a dollar, or view a balance. Every regulator that has addressed the subject — the SEC, FINRA, and state securities administrators — says so in identical terms.

You keep complete control. We are a phone number your institution can call.

When a firm's compliance department reviews an account flagged for a suspicious disbursement, the trusted contact field is part of what it sees. A law firm listed there tells the reviewer that the account holder took the risk seriously enough to engage professional help, and that any decision made about the account may be examined later by someone who knows the rules.

On the Advantage and Guardian plans we do not wait for the account to be flagged — we write to your institution when you enroll, so the designation is on record before anything happens.

We make no promise about how a given institution will behave. What we can tell you is that when the call comes, it will be answered by someone who understands FINRA Rule 2165, knows what a temporary hold is, and will ask the firm to consider one.

Our entry plan costs less than a sandwich. The average loss reported by a victim aged 60 or over in 2025 was $38,500, and 12,444 people in that group lost more than $100,000 each.

We are not going to tell you this service would have prevented every one of those losses. No trusted contact can promise that. But the arithmetic of a five-dollar monthly cost against a five-figure average exposure is not a close question — and at $19.99 it is still not close.

Month to month, on every plan. Move up or down a plan as your circumstances change, or cancel whenever you like, for any reason, without penalty or explanation. If a family member becomes the right contact, remove us — and update the designation with your institution the same way you set it up.