Not just the elderly, and this would very much help with online scams, as well.
Case in point: my mother, who I would not consider elderly, and who's skeptical enough to pretty much assume everything is a scam, yet wasted a fair bit of time on a scam email from "PayPal".
She doesn't have a PayPal account, and, for reasons, doesn't want one. So she was certain the email was part of a scam. What she did not know was whether it was phishing email from a scammer — her words, so, yes, she's generally well aware of the practice; again, not elderly — or the result of a scammer attempting to set up a PayPal account in her name (in order to defraud her friends and family, perhaps).
So she went to PayPal.com, emailed, called, etc., and they weren't willing to confirm or deny whether they may or may not have sent her an email concerning an account that may or may not exist in her name, for privacy reasons, unless she was first able to log into this hypothetical account that an unknown third party may or may not have set up in her name[1].
She then showed me the email, and it was immediately obvious to me that it was low-effort scammer spam of the "From: PayPal Security <SecurityPayPal@gmail.com>" variety.
Even if only useful for trivial cases like these, it would be helpful if some government agency or trustworthy nonprofit would set up a well-known mechanism where anyone could forward potential scam emails and receive a prompt, semi-automated "obviously a scam / not necessarily a scam, but still exercise caution as follows; …" result.
This would obviously need to be set up with measures in place to minimize its usefulness as a fraud-detection oracle for scammers themselves, but still seems like a worthwhile cause.
[1] I'm not trying to call out PayPal for bad behavior here: while they could have been a bit more helpful by offering useful, general advice, this is otherwise a reasonable response to what, from their perspective, was an admitted non-account holder requesting information about someone else's account in violation of their policies (and possibly the law).
Case in point: my mother, who I would not consider elderly, and who's skeptical enough to pretty much assume everything is a scam, yet wasted a fair bit of time on a scam email from "PayPal".
She doesn't have a PayPal account, and, for reasons, doesn't want one. So she was certain the email was part of a scam. What she did not know was whether it was phishing email from a scammer — her words, so, yes, she's generally well aware of the practice; again, not elderly — or the result of a scammer attempting to set up a PayPal account in her name (in order to defraud her friends and family, perhaps).
So she went to PayPal.com, emailed, called, etc., and they weren't willing to confirm or deny whether they may or may not have sent her an email concerning an account that may or may not exist in her name, for privacy reasons, unless she was first able to log into this hypothetical account that an unknown third party may or may not have set up in her name[1].
She then showed me the email, and it was immediately obvious to me that it was low-effort scammer spam of the "From: PayPal Security <SecurityPayPal@gmail.com>" variety.
Even if only useful for trivial cases like these, it would be helpful if some government agency or trustworthy nonprofit would set up a well-known mechanism where anyone could forward potential scam emails and receive a prompt, semi-automated "obviously a scam / not necessarily a scam, but still exercise caution as follows; …" result.
This would obviously need to be set up with measures in place to minimize its usefulness as a fraud-detection oracle for scammers themselves, but still seems like a worthwhile cause.
[1] I'm not trying to call out PayPal for bad behavior here: while they could have been a bit more helpful by offering useful, general advice, this is otherwise a reasonable response to what, from their perspective, was an admitted non-account holder requesting information about someone else's account in violation of their policies (and possibly the law).