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The Guarding Unprotected Aging Retirees from Deception Act of 2026, or GUARD Act, is aimed at the fraud that devastates victims long before it appears in a court filing.
Its definitions cover elder financial fraud, general financial fraud, scams and pig butchering, which the bill describes as a confidence and investment fraud where victims are gradually encouraged to make increasing contributions, generally in cryptocurrency, before the fraudster disappears.
The bill passed the House of Representatives on September 15, 2026, and was received in the Senate the following day, where it was placed on the calendar. It is not law, and its text could still change.
In its current House-passed form, the measure would allow state, local and Tribal law-enforcement agencies, along with eligible grantees, to use certain existing federal grant funds to investigate these crimes.
The permitted uses are telling. They include:
The bill also directs the Treasury, through FinCEN and in consultation with other agencies and regulators, to report to Congress on efforts to combat these forms of fraud. A later report would examine relevant Bank Secrecy Act reporting, fraud typologies, the role of digital assets and activities conducted with law enforcement through the Rapid Response Program.
None of this should be read as a promise that every agency will receive a new tool or gain immediate access to institutional data. It is more useful than that. The bill reflects a growing recognition that fraud investigations depend on connections between people, technology, reporting and coordination.
Blockchain analytics, transaction monitoring, cyber threat intelligence and digital forensics are essential. They can help an investigator follow a wallet, identify suspicious movement or understand a technical indicator.
They cannot always explain whether another agency is already investigating the same actor. That missing context has real consequences.
An investigator may spend weeks developing a lead that another agency has already linked to a broader fraud network. A financial institution may review suspicious activity without knowing that the destination wallet is connected to verified victim reports. A victim’s report may be recorded as an isolated complaint even when the same phone number, website, bank account or wallet has appeared in cases elsewhere.
Fraud groups benefit from this fragmentation. They change company names, rotate wallets, recruit money mules and move through several jurisdictions. The reports arrive separately, so the cases are often handled separately too.
In such cases, a national information-sharing & deconfliction infrastructure would not eliminate those challenges. It would give authorized participants a better way to ask a simple but important question early:
Is someone else already looking at this?
The answer is not a single database containing every agency’s case file or every institution’s customer information.
That would be neither practical nor appropriate.
Useful information sharing is purpose-built. It needs verified users, clear permissions, limits on what can be shared, an audit trail and a way to protect sensitive investigative and customer information.
The first step is often not a detailed disclosure. It is determining whether a relevant connection exists.
For example, an agency reviewing a fraud complaint may need to know whether a wallet is connected to another active investigation. A financial institution may need to know whether a transaction pattern has verified relevance to a law-enforcement matter. A federal partner may need to identify the state or local agency already closest to the victims.
Once relevant overlap is identified, the parties with a legitimate need to engage can coordinate through the appropriate channels and under the applicable legal rules.
This approach respects the fact that information sharing is not an all-or-nothing decision. It is a controlled process.
Deconfliction is often misunderstood as an administrative check completed at the start of an investigation.
In reality, it is a continuing operational capability.
A wallet may initially appear in a single victim report. Days later, it may be linked to a second complaint, a separate agency’s fraud case or suspicious activity at a regulated institution. The value comes from identifying that overlap before each organization builds its own disconnected version of the case.
This matters particularly for the agencies covered by the GUARD Act’s focus.
State, local and Tribal agencies are frequently the first point of contact for victims. They may hold the initial report, the financial details, the evidence from a phone or the names of the people most affected. They also may not have a direct view into related reports in another jurisdiction or a reliable route to the institution that can assess relevant activity.
A better national model should help those agencies access context without asking them to surrender control of their cases.
Deconflict is designed to fix the coordination gap that sits between an initial lead and a meaningful response.
Government users can use Deconflict to identify potential investigative overlap across agencies and jurisdictions, connect verified intelligence and engage the relevant authorized counterpart. The platform helps investigators understand whether a wallet, entity, transaction or fraud pattern may already be associated with a relevant case or intelligence record.
That can help agencies:
Deconflict also supports practical investigative training through Deconflict Academy, helping law-enforcement personnel build the skills needed to assess digital-asset evidence, explain their methodology and develop defensible conclusions.
The platform does not determine that a person, wallet or transaction is criminal. It does not replace blockchain analytics, case management, transaction monitoring, cyber incident response or lawful process. It does not authorize a hold, freeze or seizure.
Its role is more focused on helping the right people learn that relevant, verified context exists and creating a controlled opportunity to coordinate.
The GUARD Act recognizes that financial fraud cannot be handled with generalist resources alone. Investigators need specialist knowledge, technical support, relationships with financial institutions and a stronger ability to understand how fraud is changing.
The next step is making sure those capabilities can work together.
A good national information-sharing & deconfliction infrastructure would not ask every participant to share more information by default. It would help authorized participants share the right information, with the right counterpart, at the point when it can still affect an outcome.
That is how agencies move from scattered reports to connected cases.
That is how financial institutions can add verified context to their own reviews.
That is how law enforcement can spend less time discovering, months later, that someone else already had the missing piece.
No. The House passed H.R. 2978, the GUARD Act, on September 15, 2026. It was received in the Senate and placed on the calendar on September 16, 2026. The bill could still change and has not become law.
The bill focuses on elder financial fraud, general financial fraud, scams and pig-butchering schemes, including schemes that generally involve cryptocurrency.
It is a secure and governed capability that helps authorized agencies and institutions identify relevant overlap, connect verified context and coordinate on financial-crime risks without broadly exposing sensitive information.
No. Effective deconfliction can begin by identifying whether relevant overlap exists. Any additional sharing should occur through authorized, purpose-specific and controlled processes.
No. Blockchain analytics and lawful processes remain essential. Deconflict helps authorized users connect verified intelligence and identify investigative overlap so those existing tools and authorities can be used with better context.