“You know in your heart of hearts that when the account balance hits zero, the girlfriend is gone,” says Wendy Johnson.
Johnson has been investigating suspicions of financial abuse of the elderly for six of her nine years on U.S. Bank’s complaints-and-investigations team. Most of the referrals she gets come from the bank’s financial advisers who suspect exploitation by someone a client knows and trusts—a son, daughter, attorney, grandchild, caretaker.
Increasingly, she’s seeing cases of outright fraud. One common scenario, she says, is widows or widowers falling prey to romantic scams. Loneliness leaves many seniors vulnerable, and “human sexuality is very much a factor,” says Johnson, 50, who has a law degree. One client is in his early 70s and continues to give money to a 23-year-old girlfriend. He knows he is depleting his emergency funds, she says, but “I can’t make him stop. From my vantage point, it’s exploitation. From his viewpoint, it’s love.”
Scammers target the elderly because they represent an attractive pool of wealth and may not know a lot about how the internet can be used to rip them off. Some are suffering from cognitive decline. The people Johnson typically used to see being scammed were 80-year-old women living alone without close family. Now, “the internet really allows everybody to be victimized,” she says. “More and more with online, I’m getting men as well.”
Some 17 percent of seniors say they’ve been the victim of financial exploitation, according to studies cited in a report last year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The annual tally for money lost in elder financial abuse was $2.9 billion, a 2011 MetLife study estimated, based on public data. Experts suspect that the vast majority of abuse is not reported and that the true tally is far higher.
The number of elder abuse cases referred to U.S. Bank’s complaints-and-investigations team more than doubled from 2014 to 2015, after the bank launched an education program for employees. It rose an additional 20 percent last year. In 2015 the tally of assets considered “at risk” among suspected victims of fraud at the bank was more than $75.4 million. Last year it was $34.6 million.
For longtime users of social media, all of this is a reminder to watch what we, and our parents, reveal, so we don’t wind up in Johnson’s next interview. Meanwhile, here’s this one, edited for length and clarity.
How do you come across the dating scams?
With one client in his early 70s, it came to my attention when he was trying to withdraw money for his 23-year-old girlfriend so she could have a funeral for her mother. He had already given her almost $300,000 over the course of eight months. She was allegedly all alone, with no family, and said her mother had just died of cancer.
We did a quick search on Facebook and Google and discovered that her mother had posted pictures of her new dogs two hours earlier, and there were lots of pictures of this client’s girlfriend and all of her siblings. Everything she had said was a lie.
When we’re working with people whose mental capacity is not an issue, there’s often not a lot the state or the police will do, unless the client is willing to do something on their own behalf. With these cases, we have “come to Jesus” conversations. The adviser, who was reasonably close with this client, laid it all out—this is what we found, we’re concerned you’re blowing through your money. He told the client that his money was not going to sustain him and that they needed to look at his finances and make some changes based on what he had left.