Watch Out For The Elder Fraud Web

Scams range from petty theft to embezzlement. Your parents may need your help.

- Miriam Cross

There were warning signs: A constantly ringing phone. Bank accounts in disarray after an apparent hack. Messages from her family that went unreturned for days because she was extremely busy. A new man in her life, with whom she talked over the phone but never in person. Rochelle, an active, social, independent 86-year-old resident of Los Angeles, was being exploited by an international fraudster. But it was only months after those signs first appeared that the people who cared about her made sense of them.

Concerned friends and neighbors refrained from asking too many questions out of respect for Rochelle’s privacy. It was only when Rochelle’s son Brad and daughter-in-law Nancy, who live in Sacramento, visited her last September that they realized something sinister was at play. (Last names are withheld to protect their privacy.) Rochelle was in such a deep state of depression that she ended up in the hospital, where the couple found out that she was also experiencing cognitive decline. When they entered her condo, they found scraps of paper with a mysterious name and phone number, a FedEx receipt to Jamaica, and stacks of unpaid bills.

Nancy and Brad are still trying to piece together how Rochelle fell under the spell of a seductive caller, who manipulated her into opening credit cards and lines of credit, as well as buying expensive watches they couldn’t subsequently trace, over the course of several months in 2019. “I think the root of the problem is that she was lonely living by herself, even though she was surrounded by lovely neighbors and good friends,” says Nancy. After talking to Rochelle as she recovered, they found out that she had tried to resist the caller’s demands, but the pressure and the threats became too much to bear.