A few months ago, I got a phone call from a number that looked exactly like my bank’s. The voice on the other end knew my name, knew I banked there and calmly explained there had been suspicious activity on my account. For a few seconds, I almost believed it. I’ve spent my career in the business community, I know the warning signs and I still had to stop myself and think it through before I hung up and called the bank directly to confirm it was a scam.
If it can catch me off guard for even a moment, I think about what it’s doing to the small business owners and families across the San Fernando Valley who don’t have the same instincts built up, or who are simply having an ordinary busy day and pick up the phone without thinking twice.
I hear about it constantly now. A Valley business owner I know had an employee wire several thousand dollars after receiving what looked like a routine payment request from a vendor they’d worked with for years, only the email had been spoofed. Another told me about a longtime customer, a woman in her 70s, who came into the store in tears after realizing she’d sent gift cards to someone she believed was her grandson in trouble. These are not isolated stories. They are becoming the norm.
The numbers back that up. Americans lost an estimated $159 billion to scams in 2023 alone. Seniors lost over $33,000 each on average. Nearly one in four Americans reported being targeted. And increasingly, this isn’t a lone scammer working out of a basement. Much of it is organized crime, run at scale, using every channel available: text messages, social media, spoofed phone numbers, fake emails.
Contemporary solution needed
Last week at the Valley Industry and Commerce Association’s Congressional Breakfast, a member of the California delegation expressed support for expanding the Do Not Call list as a way to combat scams.
That’s a 1990s solution to a 2026 problem. Scammers today don’t need to call a landline. They text, they message on social media, they spoof caller ID, they impersonate banks and government agencies with alarming precision. A registry that only governs telemarketing calls will do next to nothing to stop the kind of organized, cross channel fraud that’s actually draining our community’s savings.
I’ve also heard some in Congress float a narrower fix: requiring peer to peer payment apps like Venmo and Zelle to reimburse every disputed transaction. I understand the appeal, but as someone who represents small businesses across the Valley, I’d urge caution here too. Scams don’t just happen on payment apps. They happen through wire transfers, gift cards, cryptocurrency and retirement accounts. Making platforms absorb every loss would raise costs for the small businesses and everyday customers I represent, without touching the actual criminals behind these schemes. If anything, it risks making the problem worse by guaranteeing a payout regardless of how the fraud occurred.
Invest in law enforcement
What our business community actually needs is bigger and more direct. We need real investment in law enforcement to identify and shut these operations down. We need one federal agency clearly in charge of coordinating the response, instead of a patchwork of agencies each handling a piece of it. We need a straightforward system for victims to report what happened to them. And we need serious international cooperation, since so much of this activity is being run from overseas, out of reach of any single U.S. agency acting alone.
The Valley’s business community is resilient, but resilience shouldn’t mean absorbing billions of dollars in fraud year after year while Congress reaches for solutions built for a problem that no longer exists.
I’m grateful that we have multiple members of our state’s delegation on the House Financial Services Committee that are looking to tackle this issue. Our seniors, our small businesses and our families deserve a fix that matches the size of the problem.
Nancy Hoffman Vanyek is president and chief executive of the Greater San Fernando Valley Chamber of Commerce and has been named to the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Valley 200 list of most influential business and community leaders for 10 consecutive years.
