As it all came out, his daughter Mary was sitting there flabbergasted. He was asked to tell his daughter if the man called again. Often you have to terminate your cell phone, or scammers will just keep calling.
It took us about a week to get back as much of the money as we could. I called his adviser and said, “We got $79,000 back, yay!” And he said, “You are not going to believe this. He just tried to wire $50,000 more.” But the bank had restricted his account, so he couldn’t.
Even though we had told him he was the victim of a scam, the police were involved, his daughter Mary was now on his account, he still did it. What are they saying to him that is so persuasive he won’t listen to anyone?
How often can you help actually catch scammers?
It’s very difficult to catch them on a small scale. Many are part of larger organized crime organizations and may be based in foreign countries.
How does your job affect you, dealing with all these things?
I like my job because it’s interesting, but it’s hard. Oftentimes there is not a lot we can do. If your clients don’t have issues with mental capacity and there is no illegal activity going on, or if adult protective services can’t do anything, our hands are tied.
My parents have passed away, but I do look at some things in hindsight, with my father. People that tend to fall for scams are statistically more likely to make decisions on their own, less likely to take advice from others, more likely to take risks and to take those risks to get bigger returns. They also overestimate their abilities, and that all describes my father.
My father got involved with an attorney that created trusts, and charged a lot of money for creating them, so my dad had a trust that was overcomplicated for the money he had. It turned out to be a problematic trust, and he wound up giving more to his church than he had anticipated, because of how the trust was written. Ultimately, that attorney went to jail for the stuff he did to a lot of people.
Lots of people think these are unsophisticated people that get scammed. That’s not the case. I have doctors who have made horrible decisions with their money because they are highly intelligent and overestimate their abilities, and are trusting of people who present themselves as sophisticated. Scammers have a script. They are very good at what they do.
We see clients who have capacity, and the courts aren’t going to take their rights away from them, but they are trusting the wrong people. It’s hard for us in St. Paul [Minn.] to say, “You can’t trust that attorney you see every other day, because that attorney is violating ethics and you shouldn’t have bought him a car.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.