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Joined by a Hingham man who told the story of how his 93-year-old mother lost $9,500 to a scam last winter, Secretary of State William Galvin urged lawmakers Tuesday to act quickly to address what he said is an uptick in scams targeting senior citizens and other vulnerable people.

Duane Wanty told the Joint Committee on Financial Services that his mother got a call last winter from someone who said they were her granddaughter and claimed to have injured a pregnant woman in a car crash. The person said they needed $9,500 to post bail and begged their “grandmother” not to tell anyone about the situation.

“My mom went to the bank, withdrew $9,500 in cash with no questions asked, and left. Within an hour of delivering the money to a Lyft driver, another call came in asking for another $9,000 as as supposed manslaughter charges had now been filed. At that point, my mother broke down [and] told me what was going on. I even spoke to the supposed defense lawyer on the phone and was half-convinced myself that this was real,” Wanty said. “But then I was able to confirm that my niece was OK. And that’s when the con unraveled, but too late.”

Wanty’s mother’s story was featured in the Boston Globe and Galvin this summer filed legislation (S.2460 / H.4124) with Sen. Paul Feeney and Rep. James Murphy (the two co-chairs of the Financial Services Committee) to give banks an opportunity to step in when an elderly or disabled customer seeks to make an unusual or suspicious transaction. The secretary’s office said bank tellers currently cannot pause a transaction “even if it is obvious that the person making the withdrawal is the victim of fraud.”

“Essentially, they give the financial institutions a right to pause the transaction while they determine whether there is a need for this transaction to go forward. It also gives the opportunity to family members to be contacted to make sure that, in fact, the individual who’s doing this knows that their perhaps other family members are all right, that there is no urgency,” Galvin said. “And it interrupts the scam, and that’s the single most important [thing] that we have to do.”

That Galvin’s bill is co-sponsored by the Financial Services Committee chairmen suggests it could emerge from that committee, but there has been pushback to the idea. Kathleen Murphy, president and chief executive of the Massachusetts Bankers Association, told the Boston Globe this summer that banks already train their employees to spot fraud and scams, and that the legislation would be difficult to implement.

“We need action before the session ends,” Galvin said Tuesday. “If this was somebody holding people up on the street, we do something immediately. This is no different.”