Elder Financial Abuse part 1: Detection and Assistance

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My career in banking started at one of America’s largest banks. I worked at a small branch in Maryland, and sometimes I had to work the drive-through teller window. I met lots of interesting characters there.

One pair that comes to mind, regretfully, is an elder lady and her niece. Her niece started helping her once she became too old to drive and run errands. She would drive her places; help her with her groceries, etcetera. After a while I got used to the two of them and we chatted often. Sometimes, the niece often came to my drive-through window alone. She would cash checks on her way to the groceries, pay her grandmother’s bills, and manage her money.

A year or so after meeting them, I was called into the branch manager’s office. I was questioned about the behavior of this pair, asked why I cashed checks for the niece, and was thoroughly put against the wall. I told them the truth, the two of them came together very often, everything was done by the book, nobody ever said anything was suspicious or anything, so I was unsure what the problem was.

As it turned out, this elderly lady’s niece had a drug problem and had been bleeding her dry. This happened in 1995, before the phenomenon elder financial abuse had even been considered, and so the family was unable to do anything about the problem. Either way I do believe that we at the bank did everything right, except detecting the problem. Back then we didn’t know of it.

This year about 50 million people in the United States will be over 65, and 5 million of them will be over 85. I apologize if I give these statistics about the U.S. alone; it isn’t because I don’t think this is a global problem, but because I don’t have information on this issue abroad. The world’s population is aging and the economic situation in many places is ideally conductive to this kind of behavior.

This is why I will be writing this series of three articles on the subject, because we at the Credit Union believe that awareness is the best help that we can give.

Today I am going to talk about the signs that you can look for to find out if an elder person around you might be suffering from this kind of abuse.

Who commits these crimes?

Unfortunately, there are many things to look out for, but here are some traits of the criminals that have been convicted of these crimes in years past:

• Relatives of the older person, including their children, grandchildren, and all their spouses. In these cases they have a variety of personal justifications for their behavior: substance abuse or economic hardship; a bad relationship with the older person that gives them a sense of vindictive entitlement to their money; the fear that as the older person gets older they will get sick and use up what should be their rightful inheritance (yes, that’s rich, right?); and also those who have a bad

  

  Many victims have signed away property

  relationship with the rest of the family and want to get their money. Much pettiness.
• Professional scammers who live off the elderly. Among them you will find the sweetheart lover scams, personal care attendants or assistants that use their jobs to gain access and steal, people who contact the recently widowed from seeing newspaper announcements, claiming to be friends of the family, and transient criminals offering home services. 
• Unscrupulous business people who overcharge the elderly, use their businesses to gain the trust of the older person and them steal, and those who use confusing and deceptive and unfair business deals to make money.

Are all elder people at risk of being financially abused?

Technically yes, because it’s a matter not of the person but of their circumstances. Financial abuse seems to happen more often to older people with specific circumstances:

• Elderly who live alone and have always considered themselves independent, and oftentimes pride themselves of it;
• People who are isolated, lonely or have had recent family losses. Because of emotional factors, people in these situations are more prone to trust and allow others into their inner circle;
• Older people who are at the beginning stages of physical or facultative degeneration problems. They refuse to allow family and close friends to help, and are often willing to let third parties help them because they aren’t “family” and the victim doesn’t feel judged by getting help from outside their circle. 
• People who are unfamiliar with their finances or financial matters because someone used to help them before, and are now on their own;
• Older folks who have relatives who are unemployed and/or have substance abuse/financial problems. 

Next page: what are the signs of this abuse, and how you can help a victim.