Team Effort Musters Protection for Seniors

Gardening. A summer home. Leisurely afternoons. Weekends with grandkids. That's how most people envision retirement.

But all too often a dishonest person robs the elderly of golden years of leisure. Elder fraud is one of the most prevalent crimes in the nation today. In fact, the Colorado Attorney General has declared war on it.

Denver District Attorney Bill Ritter has had a special program to prevent and prosecute elder fraud for several years. According to Lisa Curtis, director of Consumer services for the Denver District Attorney's office, elder fraud makes up about 30 percent of all fraud cases that pass through their office. That's disproportionately high considering only 17 percent of Denver's population is more than 60 years old.

Financial ruin characterizes these crimes. Curtis, who promotes crime prevention and Consumer education to the citizens of Denver--especially the elderly--said the amount of money taken by these swindlers varies annually. However, because of elder fraud, she noted that seniors' life savings are whittled away by more than $50 million each year. And that's not counting the cost to these seniors' quality of life and dignity.

Extension's Consumer and family educators across the state have provided educational workshops and information for years in efforts to prevent Consumer fraud, and recently some of those Extension agents as members of the Extension Gerontology Team, have stepped up educational efforts to focus on scams and fraud targeted at the elderly. Extension along with longtime partner the American Association of Retired Persons, were part of a recent agency collaboration spearheaded by state Attorney General Ken Salazar to educate Colorado seniors about misleading sweepstakes. The "November Sweeps" campaign encouraged seniors to drop unopened sweepstakes mailings at banks, grocery stores, senior centers, Extension offices and other collection sites.

"Many senior citizens are afraid of the violence in their neighborhoods," Curtis said. "But the idea of being afraid of their telephone, their mail, their visitors, is not conceivable. They have a trust of someone who comes to their door or mails them an official-looking letter--there's an air of legitimacy to it. They think the government wouldn't allow such a thing if it weren't legal. We tell them that if they see a stranger at their door today, don't even open it."

Curtis explained that for a number of reasons, elder fraud is tough to fight. Many scam artists move around a lot. They base their scams out of the country, making it harder to trace their phone calls to victims. They have to be caught in the act to be prosecuted. Worse yet, the perpetrator often is the victim's child, sister, niece, nephew, nurse. Perhaps the biggest obstacles are the very traits of the elderly that make them a target--their desire to please and be polite, feelings of overwhelming embarrassment at being a victim, a slipping mental capacity, difficulty saying no, an eagerness to trust. Those same traits make avoiding and reporting the crime especially difficult for them, she said.

She cited an incident of an elderly woman who got conned by a home-repair scam. "A man claimed that her roof was in bad shape and needed immediate repair. The first time the ‘roofer' took money from her for ‘repairs' he did, he got a sense that she may have dementia. He drove back to Denver from Arizona every month and demanded more money from her, telling her she'd never paid him. Her memory was slipping, so she'd write him another check each time. In all, he took her for $42,000."

Elder fraud comes in all shapes and sizes–an adult child who skims his parents' bank accounts for "extra" care-expense money, telemarketers, utility or government employee imposters, sweepstakes contests, and the "travelers"–those pirates who pose as home-repair experts demanding money for unneeded, often imaginary, household repairs.

That's where Extension comes in on another collaborative effort called "Project Colorado." Extension agents and gerontology team members Gale Loeffler, Arapahoe County, and Barbara Martin-Worley, Denver County, worked with several agency partners to develop Project Colorado training materials to show financial institution employees how to spot and report elder fraud.

The Project zooms in on the one thing these swindlers have in common--a need to access their victim's money. By training financial institution employees--bank tellers, loan officers and others--to identify potential cases of fraud, these crimes can be prevented and the criminals can be caught.

A Colorado State University created videotape is part of the training kit."It reconstructs the true story of a woman who was taken for thousands of dollars by a home-repair scam," said Loeffler."Two crooks were perusing Mildred's neighborhood when they saw her in her yard. They stopped, told her that the roof on her house was in bad shape and gave her an estimate to repair it. When she told them she didn't have that kind of money, they ignored her and crawled up on the roof to do the ‘repairs' anyway. After spraying silver paint on the roof, they scared her and demanded money."

"An alert loan officer foiled the crime," said Martin-Worley. "The two scam artists drove Mildred to her bank to wait for her to withdraw the money they were demanding from her. Because she showed signs of being upset while she talked to the loan officer, he sent the bank guard out to the parking lot to talk to the ‘travelers.'"

Mildred's case is a perfect example of the results that can come from training tellers and loan officers. Both suspects were convicted of felony theft by the Denver District Attorney's office. One is serving a prison sentence in Louisiana and the other is on probation in Texas and paying restitution.

Most of the elder fraud prevention efforts in Denver now focus on training people to spot and report it. Financial institutions are a critical part of our efforts to protect seniors," said Curtis. "Reaching this audience with educational messages about elder fraud can stop a crime and lessen the losses. Being successful in fighting elder fraud depends on working together with agencies like Extension and the banking industry to increase awareness and education about types of scams, how to spot them, and how to intervene once someone's suspicious. Our work is just starting," she said.

Photo Cutline: Lisa Curtis, director of Consumer services for the Denver District Attorney's office, is working on a program to prevent and prosecute elder fraud, which makes up about 30 percent of all fraud cases that pass through their office. She said a successful fight against elder fraud depends on working together with agencies like Extension and the banking industry to increase awareness and education about types of scams.

For more information, contact your local Colorado State University Extension office.

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Uploaded Tuesday, September 25, 2007

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