Health Fraud against the Elderly in China: The Perspective of Vulnerability Manipulation

ABSTRACT

The aging-related vulnerabilities have long been regarded as salient factors affecting older adults’ health fraud victimization. Traditional wisdom tends to focus on how victims’ vulnerability facilitates victimization. Despite its insights, such a focus neglects the importance of offenders’ active manipulation and exploitation of victims’ vulnerability, which may lead to victim blaming. Using data collected from 233 Chinese judgment documents (the court records of the crime) and 13 interviews with secondary victims – family members or close relatives of the (primary) victims, this paper examines how three aging-related vulnerabilities, declined ability in information processing, comfort-driven social preference, and positivity-driven emotional preference, were deliberately manipulated by health fraud offenders. This study provides the latest empirical evidence on how health fraud against the elderly occurs in China and sheds new light on vulnerability manipulation from the socio-emotional selectivity theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Health fraud
• older adults
• fraud victimization
• vulnerability
• manipulation

Acknowledgment

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and editors for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have significantly strengthened our work’s methodology, clarity, and overall rigor. We are also grateful for the constructive comments provided by the team members of the weekly discussion group organized by Prof. Jianhua Xu. Finally, we would like to thank the participants and reviewers at the 2022 Annual Conference of the Chinese Sociological Association for their valuable suggestions and support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In principle, all Chinese judgment documents are expected to be submitted to CJO. However, this expectation cannot be met in practice. A study suggests that some regions only uploaded no more than 33% of judgment documents to CJO (Zuo, 2018). The typical reasons of the selective submission include social and political desirability, fear of disclosing the criminal means, the concern of interrupting other prosecuting cases, and technical difficulties.