Here’s something most fraud detection systems get wrong: they wait for the bad thing to happen.
A suspicious charge pops up, an alarm goes off, and by then, someone’s already lost money. It’s like calling the fire department after your house has burned down—technically helpful, but not exactly ideal.
Carefull, a financial safety platform designed to protect older adults and their families, is flipping that script. And they’ve just brought in some serious brainpower to help them do it.
Meet Gregory Samanez-Larkin, Ph.D., a Duke University neuroscience professor who’s spent the last twenty years studying how our brains handle money decisions as we age. He’s now joining Carefull as their Research Fellow, which is a fancy way of saying he’s embedding himself directly into the team building their AI-powered financial intelligence engine, GreyMatter.
From Lab Research to Real-World Protection
Samanez-Larkin isn’t just adding a prestigious title to Carefull’s website. As a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke and a Professor of Marketing at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, he’s bringing two decades of research on how motivation, cognition, and brain function influence financial decision-making throughout our lives. His particular focus? How aging affects our relationship with financial risk and vulnerability.
The cool part is what he’s actually doing there. He’s working shoulder-to-shoulder with Carefull’s product teams, data scientists, and engineers to translate academic research into tools that work in the real world, right now, for real people.
“My role is essentially to serve as a periscope into the scientific world,” Samanez-Larkin explained. “There is an enormous body of research that can teach us how people make financial decisions and evaluate risk. What is exciting about Carefull is that we can take the most relevant findings and translate them into products and services that can make a difference in people’s lives today.”
Looking for Patterns, Not Just Problems
Here’s where things get interesting. According to Max Goldman, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Carefull, financial vulnerability doesn’t start with a single sketchy transaction. It builds over time through changes in behavior, judgment, relationships, and life circumstances—often long before traditional fraud systems would even notice something’s off.
“Financial vulnerability rarely begins with a single transaction,” Goldman said. “Changes in behavior, judgment, relationships, and life circumstances can emerge long before a traditional fraud system recognizes a problem. Greg brings decades of scientific research into how people make decisions across their lifespan, and he is working side by side with our team to translate that science into a smarter way to identify and respond to emerging financial risk.”
Think about it: when someone loses a spouse, retires, or moves to a new city, their spending patterns change. Their financial routines shift. Those changes happen in an emotional and psychological context that matters—a lot. Understanding that context creates opportunities to spot vulnerability early and step in with support before things go sideways.
Finding Signals No One Else Has
Samanez-Larkin is particularly excited about what the team is discovering by combining scientific expertise with advanced data science. They’re identifying patterns that wouldn’t show up in a simple review of transactions.
“A tremendous amount of effort over the last 10 or 20 years has focused on catching a scam or fraud after it has happened,” he noted. “But by then, there can already be enormous financial loss. Carefull has shifted to prevention and earlier awareness. We are building models that help us identify changes before they spiral into catastrophic financial and social outcomes.”
And he’s confident they’re onto something unique: “I believe we are finding signals that no one else has right now. When you combine scientific expertise with Carefull’s data science and engineering expertise, we are discovering patterns that don’t emerge from a straightforward read of transactions. That combination of disciplines is incredibly powerful.”
The Human Side of Financial Protection
Ronald Long, a longtime leader in the fight against elder financial exploitation, sees Samanez-Larkin’s appointment as a major win. “Greg has consistently brought thoughtful insights, data-driven perspectives, and a deep commitment to protecting older adults,” Long said. “His addition to Carefull’s team is a significant win for the company and for the broader effort to combat elder financial abuse. I have long believed that fintech companies are uniquely positioned to help solve this challenge, and Greg’s leadership will help move that vision closer to reality.”
What makes this approach different is the recognition that financial decisions are deeply personal. They’re tied to our independence, our identity, our family relationships, and our sense of purpose. Especially as we age.
“Financial decisions touch people’s sense of independence, purpose, and meaning,” Samanez-Larkin said. “There is a tremendous opportunity to help, and that is exactly what we are doing by focusing on a solution that provides support without creating fear, resistance, or damaging relationships. So much of navigating money management is navigating the psychology beyond the finances.”
Science That Ships
For Samanez-Larkin, this role represents something rare in academic research: the chance to see scientific insights turn into working products that help people immediately, not years down the line after countless studies and publications.
“This is a really rare opportunity for me because I get to be deeply involved in developing the products to protect people,” he said. “I’m able to think critically across the entire process with the team and then evaluate in real time whether what we are building is actually working the way we intended. As a scientist, that is exactly how I want to work.”
By catching fraud and scams earlier, identifying vulnerability before it leads to financial harm, and intervening faster, Carefill is operationalizing insights that have sat in research journals for years. The goal is simple: turn small warning signs into opportunities for support, not wait until they become catastrophic losses.
In other words, they’re finally calling the fire department before the house burns down.