Adding insult to injury, the bank where Paiz worked, Union Bank in Bellevue, didn’t return the money until Kongsore scanned and emailed a bank investigator an incriminating letter Paiz wrote her parents, Kongsore says. She adds that the bank still hasn’t formally apologized. Union Bank didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Paiz couldn’t be immediately reached.
Financial exploitation is “a huge problem in the sense that it’s so profoundly destructive,” says Page Ulrey, a senior deputy prosecutor who became the Seattle unit’s first member. The bulk of her cases are financial, involving victims who rarely get their money back. “They’re usually emotionally devastated as a result of having been betrayed,” she says.
In many cases, it may appear the victim gave consent, but it’s often based on manipulation or deception. Like Kongsore’s father, victims often “have some level of cognitive impairment, which makes it really difficult for them to figure out the truth of what’s going on,” Ulrey says.
As a result, many of her cases hinge on showing incapacity. “Obviously, you have the right to give your money to who you want, even if your family disapproves,” Ulrey says. But when you suffer from dementia, you may no longer have the ability to judge whether another person has your best interests at heart, or to understand the consequences of your decisions.
If an evaluation shows a victim lacks capacity to make financial decisions, “we potentially have a stronger criminal case,” she says.
But capacity assessment by adult protective services investigators and police is uneven across the country. “Law enforcement doesn’t have good tools to assess capacity,” Ulrey says, adding that most jurisdictions lack people who can conduct thorough evaluations.
In 2015, Weill Cornell’s Lachs coined the term “Age-Associated Financial Vulnerability,” or AAFV, to sound the alarm. He defined it as a “pattern of imprudent financial decision-making that begins at a late age and puts older adults at risk for material losses that could decimate their quality of life.” Financial judgment can start to falter before normal cognition does, Lachs says, regardless of whether the person was savvy with money when they were younger. In other words, it can happen even when the person seems normal.
Despite the severity of the problem, the federal government’s response has been frustrating, according to practitioners and public officials. Joe Snyder, who served as director of older adult protective services at the Philadelphia Corporation for Aging, says he’s doubtful necessary funding will arrive in his lifetime. Before he retired, he oversaw 27 investigators with limited resources handling about 3,500 cases a year. Snyder says it was like using water pistols to fight a forest fire.
The Elder Justice Act, the first comprehensive legislation to address abuse of senior citizens, was enacted in 2010 but remained unfunded until 2015—when it was allocated only $4 million. “Dollars appropriated since then have, in Congressional terms, been dribbling,” says Marie-Therese Connolly, a former Justice Department attorney who championed the law, working with the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Originally, the allocation was to be closer to $1 billion, she says.
“Financial exploitation causes large economic losses for businesses, families, elders and government programs, and increases reliance on federal health care programs,” warned a 2014 elder justice report Connolly helped prepare.