
How Criminals Steal $37B a Year from America’s Elderly - arbuge
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-03/america-s-elderly-are-losing-37-billion-a-year-to-fraud
======
porter
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.

------
sn41
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.

------
GauntletWizard
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)

~~~
55555
In conversations about scams, a lot of people blame the victim or say
something like, "well just don't be a sucker", or claim to take a very
naturalistic view where we're all dogs just trying to become top dog. I've
thought about this, and I think a big part of it is that the people who say
that believe themselves to be decent people but ultimately want to leave open
the option of acting scummy themselves in the future (because it makes your
life easier) or perhaps have acted scummy in the past, or currently, and they
want to avoid cognitive dissonance. You can't admit that it's wrong and keep
doing it without thinking you're a crappy person.

So be very wary of people who show a hesitance to empathize with victims.

On another note, our government and society as a whole just doesn't give a
damn about victim-assisted fraud. There are cases where billions of dollars
have been stollen from pensioners and it is obvious who is responsible (often
an open secret) but nothing is ever done. If you want to make money being a
terrible person just commit victim-assisted fraud and spread each crime across
multiple jurisdictions.

~~~
Nasrudith
I can see a few other aspects behind this. First is "I learned it by watching
you" \- people become fiscally successful without merit through scumbaggery
which promotes a cynical view that ethics are for keeping suckers in line.

Second is a "don't feed the trolls" thing. By falling for it they actively
make the problem worse even for people who are savvy. If nobody fell for spam
and scams they would go out of business.

Finally the classic victim blaming for mental security, just world and such. I
won't be scammed because I'm not a moron. I won't suffer police brutality
because I'm not a criminal.

------
ryandrake
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.

~~~
GuiA
Is there any reason to not encourage them to use a cellphone configured to
only accept calls from a whitelist of numbers?

~~~
newnewpdro
Sure, many people want to leave the door open for distant relatives/friends to
phone them if needed.

My parents are immigrants and would about once a year get a phone call from
some person I had never heard of from back home, usually when a friend of the
family died back in the motherland.

Your proposal would prevent such calls from succeeding.

~~~
wavefunction
how is a distant relative going to find anyone's cellphone number? That makes
absolute no sense, since cellphone numbers aren't posted in a public directory
that distant relatives might honestly peruse.

~~~
newnewpdro
I'm talking about elderly people, from the era of land-lines and phone books.
They want to be maximally reachable at the numbers dispersed long ago. They're
often very lonely and it only gets worse as all their peers fade away, the
last thing they want is to obstruct any potential genuine contact.

To suggest they setup a whitelists where only their active set of connections
may reach them demonstrates a profound lack of understanding and empathy for
the elderly.

Furthermore, it's important to keep in mind elderly immigrants are usually
even more stuck in the past, having grown up in nations lagging in most ways
behind the USA. When I visit where my parents came from, it's like visiting a
museum.

How they get the numbers is obvious, I don't think you've made any attempt to
think about this. They tap into the friends network, people search through
their phone books and give out numbers. It's how things used to be.

~~~
mirimir
> To suggest they setup a whitelists where only their active set of
> connections may reach them demonstrates a profound lack of understanding and
> empathy for the elderly.

Maybe you let everything go to voicemail. Or if they're too far gone for that,
you route it to _your_ voicemail. And just pass along what's legitimate.

------
tabtab
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.

~~~
catacombs
Hey, tabtab. I have a friend at a national news organization working on a
story about robocalls and looking to interview people who've been affected by
them. Your story is shocking. Do you have an email address I could pass to
him?

~~~
tabtab
Unfortunately, my dad's mental state and eyes have degraded so much that he
cannot use email anymore. Is a phone interview okay? I can ask him if he wants
to talk about it. He had been too embarrassed to talk about it before, but
time may have changed that.

It is indeed a crazy story. The scammers told him if he went to police or
tried to contact the direct family of the nephew, it would blow the entire
cover of the fix-by-bribery get-out-of-jail method. He was instructed to go to
Target to buy gift cards. Later, Target was uncooperative in providing
details, such as security camera coverage of those cashing in the gift cards
on the other "side". The cards are numbered such that I'm sure they have logs
and/or accounting records of when and where they were cashed in. They could
have used that to narrow down which security camera footage to review. Maybe
investigating Target gift-card scams is an avenue for you. Target confessed is
had happened to others.

~~~
catacombs
I'm sorry to hear that.

I don't want to speak for my friend, but I would assume a phone call would be
fine. Do you have an email in which he could contact you?

------
Animats
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.

~~~
lithos
If you answer and stay silent, all of these calls hang up at 11 seconds
without fail.

I'm curious what happens after 11 seconds?

------
mrhappyunhappy
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.

~~~
gnopgnip
most of these scammers are outside of the reach of us law enforcement, or
pseudonymous

~~~
Double_a_92
Usually they still have someone that picks up the money. I.e. a "friend" of
the supposed nephew that is calling for help.

~~~
mschuster91
> Usually they still have someone that picks up the money

Yeah, somewhere in $foreign_country...

~~~
Double_a_92
No, I meant where the elderly person lives. Those scams usually don't run over
WesternUnion or so.

------
bramjans
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.

------
arichard123
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.

~~~
greedo
I would pay a decent sum of money to configure my iPhone to only accept an
easily maintained whitelist of phone numbers... (I know you can hack something
together with DND etc, but it's a PITA)

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

The Jolly Roger Telephone Company

[https://jollyrogertelephone.com/](https://jollyrogertelephone.com/)

------
tonyquart
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](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.

------
ohiovr
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.

~~~
rtkwe
It's a byproduct of one very important regulation. Phone companies are
required to connect calls they receive, ie they can't block calls coming into
their network from other exchanges. This is a pretty important anti-monopoly
rule because it prevents big companies like AT&T from freezing out small
competitors like the early VOIP players or from trying to squeeze out each
other by degrading service for calls not originating in their network. An
unfortunate side effect is they are somewhat limited in their ability to block
or filter calls and to enforce caller ID. All it takes is one cooperative
operator for a spammer to bypass any protections put in place among the large
carriers.

There was a neat reply all episode about someone abusing this connection
requirement to make money just by sending out calls to 1-800 numbers, keeping
people on the line and getting a cut from the originating exchange.

[https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom-
calle...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/104-case-phantom-caller)

~~~
ohiovr
A phone number rating system could be developed where if they get negged
enough the number just comes in as "spam call" instead of the next town near
you.

~~~
rtkwe
That already exists for Android but it only fixes those not doing CID
spoofing. I get a lot of calls marked as spam but it won't and hasn't fixed
the problem of spoofed caller ID numbers though which are those calls that
match the first 6 digits of your phone number. Those they just constantly
rotate and change to match the number they're calling at the moment. I've had
a few people call me and even my work desk number after some cid spoofer has
used those numbers.

------
markdown
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.

------
psychedictic
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?

------
CryptoPunk
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.

