Elder Financial Abuse - An Epidemic

Elder financial abuse has become a hidden national epidemic
by TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND: TIMES COLUMNIST
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched: 12/09/2007 04:28:47 PM PST

AN EX-CONVICT who works at an Antioch car wash "befriends" an 82-year-old customer with dementia. Over time, he not only persuades the World War II veteran to give him more than $300,000 in cash and annuities, but he also gets the elderly man to change his will making him sole beneficiary.

An East Palo Alto woman takes out a $200,000 loan on her 92-year-old grandmother's house without her knowledge. She leaves the wheelchair-bound senior alone in a house full of rats while she goes on a $75,000 shopping spree -- buying herself a champagne-colored Hummer.

After her arrest, she gets a mortgage broker to bring her loan documents in jail so she can take out another $400,000 loan on her grandmother's house.

Members of a nomadic crime family stage a string of car accidents with a 96-year-old Alameda woman. They scare her into thinking she'll lose her license if she doesn't pay them for the bogus damage to their car. They're able to keep playing the same cruel hoax over and over because she has dementia and forgets each incident moments after it happens. They swindle her out of $100,000.

All across California, shameless predators are robbing vulnerable seniors of their hard-earned nest eggs. Former Attorney General Bill Lockyer called elder financial abuse "the fastest-growing crime in the country."
It may not leave bruises or broken bones in its wake, but when an elderly person is suddenly deprived of the safety net that it took a lifetime to weave

-- with no chance of ever making the money back -- it takes a terrible psychological toll.
In fact, it's common for seniors to die within weeks of making the traumatic discovery that someone whom they trusted has robbed them.
Countless lives have been ruined. Huge sums lost. And, with 75 million baby boomers across the nation hurtling toward senior citizenship, it's going to get a lot worse. We believe current laws are inadequate for dealing with the situation.
When a predator steals all of an elderly person's resources, it's the state that must step in and provide for him or her.
That means we taxpayers get saddled with the tremendous cost of caring for the tsunami of destitute elderly people.

Elder financial abuse is a national disgrace.
Yet where is the public outrage? Why hasn't the Congress passed a single piece of comprehensive legislation to protect vulnerable seniors? Why have lawmakers in Sacramento done so little to address this statewide contagion? Have we become so obsessed with youth that we don't care that our elderly parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are being ruthlessly exploited? And that we pretend we aren't aware of their suffering?

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