Millions of dollars are lost yearly to financial fraud and older adults may be uniquely vulnerable to these crimes (Burnes et al., 2017). North American and international research which suggests that a variety of social and cognitive factors impact fraud vulnerability (Deevy, Lucich, & Beals, 2012; Judges, Gallant, Yang, & Lee, 2017). However, financial crimes against older adults is an understudied topic in China. In the current study, over 300 older adults (M age = 67.05) reported on their fraud experiences, social support, loneliness, and interpersonal trust, and completed cognitive testing measuring processing speed, working memory, and episodic memory. Results showed that fraud victims (one-third of the sample) were older, had lower levels of social support, higher levels of loneliness, and worse performance on processing speed and working memory tasks (ps < .05). Next, a binomial logistic regression was used to analyze the collective and unique predictive power of these variables. While controlling for age (p = .001), the results showed that only loneliness (p = .029) could significantly predict victim status above and beyond the other predictors (ps > .05). Overall, the model was significant, p < .001. The importance of loneliness in this sample may be explained by cultural differences in the importance family and community cohesion.
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