Three years later, a Congressional Record Service report bemoaned a lack of progress. “As a result of this limited federal funding, the federal government has not substantially developed and expanded its role in addressing the prevention, detection, and treatment of elder abuse.”
“It's a fundamentally reactive system,” says Connolly. “The big story is the dearth, the complete nonexistence, the shameful scandalous absence of any credible prevention or intervention research.”
Some progress, however, is being made. In February, the Justice Department announced “the largest coordinated sweep of elder fraud cases in history,” charging more than 250 defendants with schemes that caused 1 million mostly elderly Americans to lose more than $500 million. The alleged perpetrators include people who targeted Marjorie Jones, according to one investigator.
The dragnet, which lasted one year, is part of an ongoing effort “to detect and infiltrate these criminal organizations that are trying to exploit the elderly,” says Antoinette Bacon, a career prosecutor who serves as the DOJ’s national elder justice coordinator. Her position was created through the Elder Justice Prevention and Prosecution Act, a law signed by President Donald Trump in October meant to improve coordination among federal, state and local agencies.
States have been stepping up as well. Thirty-nine of them and the District of Columbia addressed financial exploitation of the elderly in last year’s legislative sessions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. More than half enacted legislation or adopted resolutions. Still, Snyder worries the federal block grant many states rely on to pay for services that protect seniors could be cut dramatically under Trump. “If that goes away, programs will be crushed overnight.”
The financial industry says it’s doing more, too. On Feb. 5, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, an industry body, put into effect “the first uniform, national standards to protect senior investors.” It now requires members to try to obtain a trusted contact’s information so they can discuss account activity. It also permits firms to place temporary holds on disbursements if exploitation is suspected. Loewy, who left her job as a prosecutor in 2014 to join EverSafe, a startup that makes software to monitor suspicious account activity, is underwhelmed by the industry projects.
“They may say they’re focused on it, but they aren’t really doing much more than training employees,” she says. “Exploiters know what they’re doing. They take amounts under $10,000 that they know won’t get picked up by fraud and risk folks at banks. And they steal across institutions over time.”
“We’re going to come to a place where we’re seeing a lot of homeless elderly people.”
The dirty little secret about elder exploitation is that almost 60 percent of cases involve a perpetrator who is a family member, according to a 2014 study by Lachs and others, an especially fraught situation where victims are often unwilling, or unable, to seek justice. Such manipulation sometimes involves force or the threat of force, says Daniel Reingold, chief executive officer of RiverSpring Health, a nonprofit that provides care to about 18,000 seniors in the New York City area. In 2005, he helped establish the first elder abuse shelter in the country.
While many families don’t intervene when they suspect a family member is abusing an elderly relative, Philip Marshall did, in a famous example of elder exploitation. “I was a family member who acted,” says Marshall. “And that’s huge. Because people don’t act. They say ‘we don’t want dirty laundry out there.’”