ConfirmOk Blog

Fraud targeting older Americans has become a major public-safety problem. According to the FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, Americans over the age of 60 reported approximately $7.7 billion in losses in 2025, a 37% increase from the previous year. For sheriff's offices, police departments, 911 centers, aging agencies, and local governments, those numbers raise an important question: What can communities do to stop a scam before a resident sends the money? For years, much of senior scam p

Talk to ConfirmOk about your community If you are evaluating resident check-in systems for an independent living, assisted living, or CCRC community, you have probably already noticed two things. First, "resident check-in" can mean five different things depending on which vendor you ask. Second, the systems range from a $99/month phone service to a $250,000 wired sensor installation, and the pricing pages rarely make clear which one your community actually needs. This guide cuts through it. We

Talk to ConfirmOk about your program If you have ever tried to research senior check-in programs, you have run into the same problem. Every county, every sheriff's office, every Area Agency on Aging, and every non-profit seems to call the same service something slightly different. RUOK. Are You OK? Care Call. TeleCare. Heart 2 Heart. Senior Well Check. Daily Reassurance. CARE Line. They are, in nearly every case, describing the same underlying service: a scheduled phone call to an older adult

Talk to ConfirmOk about reducing your senior services exposure A 71-year-old man named Michael Shamrock Robertson was killed during a welfare check in Stafford County, Virginia in December 2024. His family filed a $77 million wrongful death lawsuit against the sheriff's office. A 43-year-old woman named Irma Espinoza was reported in distress in a drainage ditch outside San Diego in summer 2024. A deputy was dispatched, said he could not find her, and left. She died. Her family filed suit for wr

Talk to ConfirmOk about your situation If you have an aging parent living alone, you have probably seen the commercial. An older woman is on the floor. She presses a button. A friendly voice asks if she is okay. Help is on the way. Cue the music. It is one of the most successful pieces of consumer advertising in the last fifty years. It is also one of the most misleading. The medical alert device industry has built its market around a scene that almost never plays out the way the commercial s

Talk to ConfirmOk about launching your program If you run a non-profit serving older adults, you already know two things about telephone reassurance programs. They work. And nobody seems to know how to fund them. Both are true. The first one has been settled for thirty years. The second one is mostly a discoverability problem. Funding exists in real, recurring, fundable amounts. Most non-profit directors just don't know which doors to knock on. This is the directory you need. It is a current

A patrol officer is sitting at a stoplight. The radio crackles. Dispatch is sending them on a welfare check — an elderly woman in a duplex on the south side of town hasn't picked up the phone for her daughter, who lives three states away. The officer turns on the lights, drives 14 minutes across the jurisdiction, knocks on the door, no answer. Asks the neighbor, no answer. Calls dispatch to try a phone number, no answer. Forces entry. Finds the resident asleep on the couch with the TV up too lou

Talk to us about launching a program in your jurisdiction → In May 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General did something he had only done a handful of times in his career: he issued a formal national advisory. The subject wasn't a virus, a drug, or a chemical exposure. It was loneliness. Vivek Murthy's 82-page advisory labeled social isolation an "epidemic" and laid out a national strategy to fight it. The headline finding: lacking social connection raises your risk of premature death by roughly the sa

Updated April 17, 2026 The U.S. Census Bureau projects that by 2030, one in five Americans will be 65 or older. Among them, roughly 27 percent will live alone. That translates to more than 16 million older adults waking up each morning with no one in the next room to notice a fall, a missed medication, or a health emergency. Telephone reassurance programs exist to fill that gap—and the forces driving demand for them are accelerating, not slowing down. Services like ConfirmOk make it possible fo

Personal emergency response systems (PERS), like fall detection wearables, emergency buttons, and medical alert devices, are some of the most heavily marketed solutions in senior safety - for good reason. For the right resident in the right situation, they work. A relatively mobile, tech-comfortable senior with reliable internet, a charged device, and the presence of mind to press a button in distress can benefit meaningfully from this technology. For some families, a PERS device is the differe

Every year, thousands of seniors experience medical emergencies, falls, or mental health crises alone in their homes with no one aware until it is too late. The National Council on Aging estimates that one in four Americans aged 65 and older experiences a fall each year, and the CDC reports that fall-related deaths among older adults have increased by 41 percent over the past decade. For law enforcement agencies, social services departments, and community organizations responsible for these resi

Updated April 17, 2026 The CDC reports that every year, approximately 36 million falls occur among adults aged 65 and older, resulting in roughly three million emergency department visits and over 32,000 deaths. Many of these incidents happen to individuals living alone, where hours or even days can pass before anyone realizes something is wrong. An elderly welfare check program—structured, consistent, and documented—is one of the most effective tools a community has to prevent those hours of