How Criminals Steal $37B a Year from America’s Elderly

I caught my grandfather's caretaker, along with my aunt and uncle (who had POA), stealing more than half his net worth. This began after a stroke left him cognitively impaired with 24/7 care. I did a complete financial audit and there were some minimal phone scam payments, but by far the bulk of the financial exploitation came from the caretaker and family members. He was left so financially ruined that I had to move him out of his home at age 89.

I ended up petitioning for guardianship and won. This was a painful and long process but it was ultimately the only logical choice.

Part of the problem is the secretive nature of finances. My aunt and uncle did most of their theft by putting undue influence on my grandfather to get him to sign things and then claim he was the one making all of the decisions. This undue influence included threatening him that they would abandon him if he didn't do what they wanted. The court overwhelmingly showed his incapacity which made these lies obvious.

To make matters worse, there were over a dozen amendments to my grandfathers estate documents within a 2 year period. You'd think there would be a lawyer that says no to these things, but it turned out my grandfahter's lawyer was later found complicit. He was disbarred because he got caught stealing money from several of his elderly clients.

And my grandfather's financial advisor knew about all the abuse as well, but did not do anything about it. He claimed he was alerting the POA (my uncle) about it all along, but he wasn't able to do anything else.

When I reported it to the police they did open up an investigation, but they put it on the backburner. Why? Because elder abuse is not well understood by law enforcement. When the culprits are the victims family members, it is just not taken as seriously.

The bottom line is that elder abuse is a complex problem. It isn't one that can be solved with technology alone. It will take a combination of technology, the law, and awareness. Even then, it will be difficult to solve.

This is a reason why we must fight against too much of our data being put online, by accident or by design. My parents complain of getting these calls where the callers give details which are often quite accurate, and then fish for really confidential information. Vendors like Google being tied to everything from flight booking to wedding receptions has led to this situation. It makes harvesting of information pretty trivial.

I feel like fraud is America's fastest growing sector, and that frightens me a lot. The burden of proof is far too much on the consumer, and even what should be slam dunk cases are not investigated. A coworker bought an expensive camera from Japan. The seller sent him tracking info and serial number. He was excited for days for it to arrive, and when it did he got an empty box. A few days later, an e-bay listing for the same, rare model of camera showed up in the area. He called the number, got a call back, and caller ID matched a dude who matched the name of his delivery driver and was listed on Facebook as a working for the company. Should be a slam dunk, right? Police were thoroughly uninterested in a $1500 item that was incredibly obvious. Insurance simply paid out.

I've had my credit card stolen twice times, including one that was clearly part of the target hack , though wasn't obvious at the time - at the time, it was simply a fraudulent charge that my bank caught despite being made at my local target (which itself gives me pause, because how did they know it wasn't me?) That happened in the right time range. Most people I know have had it happen to them. Quite frankly, I've known several unclassy people who have engaged in such behavior - they pretty much bragged about it, and so I stopped hanging with groups that would allow them to join (and then laughed when reading Facebook posts from former friends that they were dealing with said fraud)

If you think you get a lot of junk/scam phone calls, get back to me after you turn 60. My parents' volume of junk calls has pretty much increased by 50% year on year, every year after they retired. It's never-ending. I was shocked when I went home for Thanksgiving to visit. They get these calls every 30 minutes or more! And the scammers are getting even smarter and bolder. One ploy they have is they pose as a family member who's in trouble or needs a loan right away. Or the scary "IRS is gonna call the cops" one. Or the standard "I'm from your credit card" or "you won a sweepstakes!"

Sit down and have the talk with them. Even if you think they're cynical enough or that they (currently) have the mental wherewithal to not fall for this crap, sit them down and give them the briefing.

The FCC and phone carriers have proven for decades that they don't give a single shit. They're not willing to solve it. This needs to be solved by elder education, and as [most of us here are] younger people, I think we have a moral duty to make sure that education happens.

My father lost $10K from a phone scammer. The scammer dug up personal details from various public records and weaved it into a plausible scenario. Dad thought he was saving his nephew from being framed for drunk driving by a crooked small-town cop. They even got nephew's voice impression correct, or at least good-enough. His mental facilities for judgement & scrutiny were waning.

It appears they dug up minor details on various elderly and cold-call bunches of them. If a call receiver shows curiosity, they hang up, collect more personal details, and call back days later with a more complete scenario. Thus, I don't think they actually practiced voice impressions, but use shere mass fishing/phishing to see who bites, and then focus on the biters. They leverage coincidence via mass trials.

T-Mobile sometimes sends me a caller ID of "SCAM CALL". Got that for the "This is the IRS" scammer.

Useful trick: don't answer by saying "Hello". Predictive dialers listen for that to distinguish humans from answering machines and voicemail. If they don't hear "Hello", they hang up quickly.

My mom is not even elderly and already falls for a bunch of crap. It wouldn’t matter if I educated her on this subject 10 times, she’d fall for the first scam right after the conversation. Some people are just so gullible that they can’t be helped. I know the HN audience here would like to find a quick fix such as phones that only allow calls from certain people or let elder answer only identifiable ring tones from family, but none of these would help people like my mom. I think the only effective solution would be swift enforcement, monitoring and severe prison time, readily enforced without mercy. Criminals need to get in in their head that if this is behavior they want to engage in, they will pay with their life.

While educating the elderly can help in the short term, I feel like this shows structural problems such as personal data protection and phone carriers' unwillingness to fix these sort of issues.

I'm not saying phone fraud is non-existing in my home country of Belgium, but I've never received a single scam call, nor do I know of anyone who did, so the size of the issue in the US is surprising to me.

I do remember getting a lot more spam calls while living in Spain for a while, so it seems very linked to countries' law enforcement and carrier cooperation.

Our house phone has a built in option to only ring if the incoming number is on a white list. Our number had formerly belonged to someone who owed many debts. We've had it in place for 4 years and nothing bad has happened because of it. Not that I've noticed anyway.

One defender you may find useful. At least, the recordings are very entertaining:

The Jolly Roger Telephone Company

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Well, maybe since more than 5 years ago, I have read thousands of reports, warnings, and complaints filed by people about scam calls on the internet and TV, like social media, sites like http://whycall.me, etc. It's sad to know that there are still many people fall victim to these fraudsters now. We need to keep informing people about these scams, especially our family, so that they won't become one of the victims.

I had to fend off calls like this a lot when living with my mom. I estimate most calls made are scams. It is sad the government doesn't care about quality in communications.

In Fiji we have a Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU). Banks, money transfer companies (think Western Union, MoneyGram, etc), and other financial service providers are required to report suspicious transactions to the FIU.

Short of handing a scammer a bag of cash, there's no way to transfer/receive money anonymously.

While a scammer can do damage, any significant amount would trigger an investigation and be blocked.

It sounds like the US is still the wild west when it comes to this sort of financial shenanigan.

I'm sorry to say this but my faith in this species is quite limited at this point. The nature of this species seems to be extremely primitive. How can we be so collectively intelligent yet such behavior is so pervasive and widespread?

I think a large proportion of the elderly need to be under some degree of supervision, especially in their interactions with the outside world. Ideally their relatives would assume the role of guardians, and failing that, some organization that specializes in providing this kind of oversight.