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The Predator Next Door: Unmasking the Invisible Threat of Eldercare Fraud, A conversation with Charles E. Wallace Jr., author of The Caregiver's Game
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In this episode of Scam Rangers, host Ayelet Biger-Levin sits down with Charles E. Wallace Jr., author of The Caregiver's Game: The Caregiver's Game: Unraveling Financial Deceit in the Shadows of Dementia. Charles turned into a fraud investigator after his mother fell victim to financial elder abuse. Together, they pull back the curtain on the subtle, malicious ecosystem of caregiver grooming, which drained hundreds of thousands of dollars right under the noses of family members and financial fiduciaries.
Charles discusses the "paradox of modern banking", how digital transaction networks fail to capture age-based vulnerabilities or notice when an elderly person's life savings are systematically bled dry through discount retail stores and unauthorized credit accounts. From the devastating isolation tactics used to separate his mother from her family to discovering a trail of prior victims left by the very predator hired to protect her, Charles explains why the financial industry must shift away from administrative silos and move toward behavioral, real-time transaction monitoring.
We also explore the gaps in standard Adult Protective Services investigations and why Charles believes banks need to give families better collaborative dashboard tools to monitor and protect generational wealth before it’s too late.
A link to the book: https://www.amazon.com/Caregivers-Game-Unraveling-Financial-Dementia/dp/B0G322349C
About the Host
Ayelet Biger-Levin is the Founder and CEO of RangersAI and the host of Scam Rangers, a podcast exploring the human side of scams and the people working to protect consumers from financial and emotional harm.
Through her work at RangersAI and her leadership within the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, Ayelet partners with financial institutions, policymakers, and advocates to elevate scam prevention beyond controls and technology toward trust-based, customer-centric protection.
Be sure to follow her on LinkedIn and reach out to learn about her additional activities in this space:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayelet-biger-levin/
RangersAI: https://www.rangersai.com/
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Transcript
Discovery of caregiver's misconduct
00:00:01
Speaker
And so I kept digging through stuff and eventually found online through, um, from the social media websites that the daughter, the caregiver was selling my mother stuff and was able to find some of that.
00:00:15
Speaker
And in the process of, through the discovery, I was able to convince my attorney to go to their, her attorney. And I got into her email account. So I got 6,000 emails from that carrier, which gave me more information of how she was a predator going back to 2009. Oh, wow. It all explained why the U-Haul was dropped off 100 miles south of town because in November of 21, about five months before my mother passed, she bought a small home out in the outskirts, the middle
Introduction to elder financial abuse story
00:00:44
Speaker
of nowhere.
00:00:44
Speaker
But it was 15 minutes north where that U-Haul was dropped off. Wow. So we've never gotten the house, but I've always assumed there's a good amount of stuff there. And I'm wondering where what money she used to pay for that. Oh, yeah. She had enough ah took to pay for that easily.
00:01:01
Speaker
At the core of almost every scam is persuasion, emotional manipulation, trust, urgency, isolation, and control. But it can start with attending to the most basic human need, companionship.
00:01:14
Speaker
And sometimes those tactics don't come from someone far away online. Sometimes they can come from someone sitting in your parents' living room. In today's episode, we explore a devastating case of elder financial abuse through the story of Charles Wallace and his mother, who became the victim of a caregiver during her early stages of dementia.
00:01:34
Speaker
What began as companionship slowly turned into grooming, manipulation and financial exploitation, as well as isolation, most of it happening without the family realizing it at the time.
00:01:45
Speaker
This story is a powerful reminder that scams are not always about technology. They're about psychology. At Rangers AI, we talk a lot about recognizing persuasion techniques before the emotional manipulation takes hold.
Scam Rangers podcast and fraud prevention
00:01:59
Speaker
Because whether the scam begins through a text message or through a trusted person entering someone's life, the patterns are often surprisingly similar. And the better we understand those patterns, the better we can protect the people we love.
00:02:14
Speaker
to scam rangers a podcast about the human side of fraud and the people who are on a mission to protect us I'm your host Ayelet Bigger and i'm passionate about driving awareness and solving this
00:02:33
Speaker
Welcome to Scam Rangers. Throughout our journey on Scam Rangers, we had many conversations with individuals in the industry who are fighting scams. We also had a number of scam victims who turned into scam fighters.
00:02:45
Speaker
But today we're going to cover the scam impact from a different perspective. We're going to talk to someone who has a loved one who was a victim of a scam. Charles Wallace is our guest on Scam Rangers today. Welcome to the podcast, Charles. Thank you. I'm so happy to have
Caregiver's manipulation and financial control
00:03:01
Speaker
you, Aaron. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your story with us. So your story started um a little different. It actually, maybe most of it happened after the scam unfolded. So first, maybe before we get into that, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, what your daily focus is, and then we'll jump into your story.
00:03:20
Speaker
Sure. Yeah, my background has been in technology. I've been an IT t project manager, application development manager, worked in the banking industry, worked in healthcare, care worked in finance and other areas over the last 20 years, and have never worked in the fraud department. So that's not something I usually have done.
00:03:36
Speaker
So my mother was going into dementia state basically in 2017, 2018. She lived in Dallas. I lived in Southern Illinois outside of St. Louis, about 600 miles away. And i had suggested that she maybe get someone to help her with with cooking. She wasn't eating as much as she should.
00:03:55
Speaker
And in doing that, she was open to somebody knocking on her door essentially and asking her, hey, do you need some help? And with that, in walked somebody who was actually a predator, unfortunately. And you covered the story on your book, um The Caregiver's Game, that you recently published. So we'll definitely put a link to that in the show notes. So walk us through that. How did it happen? How did she meet the predator? And I think most of the story is really what you found after she passed, right? Yeah, so and unfortunately, I was 600 miles away, so I was relying on my mother's fiduciaries.
00:04:31
Speaker
She had a CPA and a broker she'd worked with for 30-something years, had an attorney that was friends with the broker, so all seemed to be folks that would be watching her her well-being. um She was cognizant enough and social enough that she could carry on a conversation for about five to 10 minutes, and most people wouldn't think anything of it. But if you sat with her for half an hour, you realize there's some issues going on.
00:04:53
Speaker
um She lived in a high-rise condo, had a lady next door who had a caregiver, and she got to talking to that lady and saying, yeah, I could use somebody to help me cook. And this was in early 2018.
00:05:05
Speaker
And so she started helping her cook, and it gradually rolled into somebody who started doing some other chores for her and then started spending the night for her but with her, basically, because she didn't want to be alone. Her husband had left in 2017. He had medical issues and moved um down to Austin, so a good 200 miles away. And she had always been married off and on for actually five marriages off and on. And so she'd never been alone. And this was the first time and she didn't like it. So if somebody would stay with her, she did. And so she convinced the lady or so it seemed she convinced the lady to stay with her and would spend the night um going into 2018. That's when she first started going to see neurologists was in 2018. She finally went. Her doctor um got a referral to her.
00:05:47
Speaker
And one of those things that I never thought about was the caregiver went in the room for that first doctor's appointment. Caregiver saw what the doctor was doing with the with my mother as far as questioning and giving her tests. I didn't know anything about dementia whatsoever. i had assumed, you know, she's just getting older. She was 75, 76 years old or so. They're a little older. She apparently scored really poorly on that. um It was a moderate level of dementia at that state. But we didn't see those scores until years later. The caregiver stayed there with her, got intertwined, what I would call basically groomed my mother and was able to get my mother to initiate an annuity for $250,000.
Investigation into the caregiver's fraud
00:06:26
Speaker
And then also eight months later, initiate a new will that folded my the caregiver into the will for another $300,000. My mother had no background of ever giving money to people outside the family.
00:06:38
Speaker
And the CPA knew it, had seen what she did on her taxes. She was kind of cheap, didn't give a lot to charity as far as large dollars amounts. So those dollar amounts were pretty large.
00:06:48
Speaker
um And we didn't find out about all this stuff until my mother passed in early twenty two And i'm I'm assuming that during COVID time, you were still kind of far away. and Yeah. So when we were yeah going into early 20, after talking to her and noticing that she wasn't you know communicating as much on the phone, I said, well, I'll come and visit you. And I picked March of 20 to go visit. And the week I was to fly out was the week they closed everything. and So i didn't see my mother again in person until January of 22. My sister saw her the summer in 21, but by then most of the financial damage was already done. um we hadn't
00:07:26
Speaker
We didn't know that until later, but she had moved into an assisted living in the middle of 21. My sister saw her and said, yeah, she's probably not doing really well. And like I said, in March of 22, she did pass. um And that's when we found out from the executor what all the caregiver had earned.
00:07:42
Speaker
She had gotten the annuity, got the will set up. The annuity was outside of probate, um but I was able to contest the will. The attorney suggested contesting the probate as well. I'm sorry, not the probate, the um annuity. And I was able to block it in June of 22, so about 100 days later.
00:07:59
Speaker
But in that time frame, I was able to get into my mother's broker account, start looking at statements and looking at checks. and following um what was going on and suddenly found that will not will sorry suddenly found an obituary online that showed the caregiver had been married to an older man back in 2011 who had passed and four months later she got his house and his broker account. Wow. So hold on. Let's let's um back into that in just a second. So this is kind of starting to be really a pattern of behavior by the caregiver. But with your mom during that time, and you mentioned you have other siblings who live a little closer. What were the signs that or signals that if at all, in hindsight, are obvious that something was off there, but that you kind of didn't really maybe pay attention to, but were tells that something is off? Yeah, no it was, um and actually I was the closest. My siblings were on the west coast, so they were farther away. So I was i was assigned to watch my mother, and I apparently didn't do very good. So the the signs were basically, i thought my mother had Parkinson's initially, because when I saw her in 17, had the tremors and was moving around like that. Dementia wasn't something I ever thought about, um just tracked it up to old age. But when I went to go visit her back in March of 2018, right after that caregiver started working there, suddenly the refrigerator was full of food, more food than she could ever eat in six months. And the caregiver said, well, if you need receipts, your mom will have to ask because she hired me, which was one of those things that, you know, I didn't think of anything of it, but you're going hire a caregiver. The person who's the one that needs a caregiver shouldn't be the one that hires them because then you can't fire them when you find a problem. and That was a big deal, unfortunately.
00:09:43
Speaker
But she was that was the initial clue. um But even before that, when my mother told my sister that she had found a caregiver, she told my sister, i have a new friend. And I didn't know i have a new friend is a clue a clue also um that a lot of folks will use um to ingrace themselves into folks. um So it was, there were some things going on We asked the CPA a few months later in late 2018, if he could write the checks for her for bills, because she couldn't, she wouldn't be able to write very much. And he said, sure. And one of the mistakes was he didn't have the bills sent to him. He was having the caregiver pick them up in the mailbox and handing them. And in doing that, there was a credit card that was that was initiated at retail store in early 21, that when the bill came, the caregiver was pulling it.
00:10:29
Speaker
And so he never saw it. And she was calling in and paying the bill just enough so it never went to collections. So she was paying it though by writing checks? Over the phone. She would over a phone call it she would call in and have a a check written for, if the bill was $1,000, she'd pay $200. From your friend your mother's account though? No, from her account.
00:10:48
Speaker
It was all, with the the credit card was in my mother's name, but all the activity was by the caregiver. But who was paying for it? The caregiver. She was paying it. She was hiding that this card was in my mother's name from the CPA. He never knew the card existed until after my mother passed. So she paid the minimum payments, but she used your mother's credit? Yes, because she didn't have any credit.
00:11:11
Speaker
So you said and at the beginning of the conversation that you've ah been you know working for financial institutions, but never in fraud. But after uncovering what happened and um you started going a little bit over this. So it's really the will that that gave you all the information that was very off and very different from what you expected. right Yeah, when i when I saw the will, well actually, all the information that the executor showed us, the one was the annuity. know My mother would never had never bought an annuity her whole life. Suddenly she buys an annuity. That was off. And then the the will had changed and structured completely.
00:11:46
Speaker
heard the prior will that I was familiar with was set up with layer trust, which is the exact same style her mother had used on her will. Now it was suddenly, here's a chunk for the caregiver and then the rest of it, the three siblings just split it up.
00:11:58
Speaker
And that was really it. And I was like, well, doubt and then you could see by the signature on on the will, it looked like, a you know, just a squiggly line. Yeah. It was obvious she wasn't cognitive about what was going on. And so then you became a little bit of a fraud investigator at that point in time. Yeah. So tell us kind of how you went about this. What what did you find? What are the insights that you had? So I was able at the end of the month of March when my mother passed, i was able to get into my mother's broker account.
00:12:25
Speaker
I was it was lucky her security word happened to be something I knew the answer to. So I was able to change the password and get in and started pulling the statements. Banks note this little comment. Yes, keep going.
00:12:38
Speaker
I'll leave out the other stuff too. So um I had been in my mother's account before just to watch to see what was going on. um And so I started, i saw these large checks, had a number of them printed, noticed that they were going to the caregiver and they just seemed more than they should have been. And putting it together, put together, my caregiver, the caregiver was being paid gross about $300,000 year for three years um She had no credentials. She she walked around in scrubs with a name tag, but she should have been paid, you know, under 20 bucks an hour and was getting 30 bucks an hour. She was able to get my mother to hand over a bunch of jewelry, high-end jewelry, and get an appraisal done. And we're not sure about the circumstances, but it came up to about $200,000. When we finally found that jewelry, about a third of it was missing. So with that along with something else, about $80,000 in jewelry was gone.
00:13:30
Speaker
um I started going through, it took me while to do the checks and what I could pull, but finally in discovery a few months later, i was starting to get credit card statements finally from the executor. From there, I started contacting places or going online and getting receipts. As I was trying to figure out what was going on because the dollar amount was way too much. The grocery spending was obviously, you know, up 50% from what it should have been for an elderly lady. um the shopping suddenly went from being a concentrated zip code to now it was over four years, kind of metastasized throughout the whole county and more so. And you can kind just see it. Well, that's not the shopping habits of an 80 year old. And so I went through and got receipts. And even in the process of it, one of the receipts I found was from an office depot in June of 21, when she moved to an assisted living on the receipt were garage sale signs.
00:14:21
Speaker
She had bought about five of them. And so I was able to contact the the city that she lived. She lived in a small town, south of town. And for garage sales, you have to get a permit. They're free, but you but they register. So I foated it and got a list of all the the garage sales that had been going on.
00:14:38
Speaker
And they all started
Caregiver's misuse of credit and belongings
00:14:39
Speaker
occurring right after my mother went to the assisted living. um She had moved out of her original condo back in late 2019 and put everything in storage, a large storage unit.
00:14:48
Speaker
And it looked like the lady was starting to empty my mother's storage unit at that point. So I tracked that down. One of the receipts that didn't make any sense was when the caregiver emptied the storage unit January 1st of 22, she supposedly went to a couple of charity locations to get rid of the stuff, which is what she was supposed to do. Asked for the receipts. She had told the CPA there's 120 boxes that we're going to be moving. So I take the receipts and I add it up and it's 77.
00:15:14
Speaker
One of the charity re locations I contact and they're there and they said, yeah, that would have come in a few months ago, but every Friday we have 50% off and stuff probably is gone. I said, okay, that's fine. Call the other place. No answer. Email. No answer. I look down the bottom of the receipt and the organization has misspelled their name and their footing. And I'm like, oh, this isn't good. And so I take the Google Map and go drive down using Google Map around to see the building and the building's boarded up. Well, that sounds very familiar with the recent, you know, government supported charities and child care facilities, right? Yeah. whatnot yeah absolutely and so i go on the Google map you drive around and there's building next door and you see these guys moving furniture and it looks like what you might think of when people are doing stuff that they're not supposed to be doing um so I went from there and said well what else is going on and I looked at the U-Haul receipt and noticed that she had dropped the U-Haul receipt a place that was about 70 miles south of town but why would you go through that much trouble if you're taking things to charity And so, and she dropped it off with 460 miles, which she had accumulated over a three day period, which is a pretty good amount. um You all doesn't track their trucks. So if you drop one off in the boonies, it's there in the boonies, you'll just someone that spots it.
00:16:28
Speaker
But they found a place and dropped it off and it didn't make any sense. And so I kept digging through stuff and eventually found online through, from the social media websites that the daughter, of the caregiver was selling my mother stuff and was able to find some of that.
00:16:45
Speaker
And in the process of, through the discovery, I was able to convince my attorney to go to their, her attorney. And I got into her email account. So I got 6,000 emails from that carrier, which gave me more information of how she was a predator going back to 2009. Oh, wow. It also explained why the how the yeah U-Haul was dropped off 100 miles south of town because in November of 21, about five months before my mother passed, she bought a small home out in the outskirts, middle of nowhere.
00:17:14
Speaker
But it was 15 minutes north of where that U-Haul was dropped off. Wow. So we've never gotten the house, but I've always assumed there's a good amount of stuff there. And I'm wondering where what money she used to pay for that. Oh, yeah. She had enough ah took to pay for that easily. Yeah.
00:17:32
Speaker
So one other thing I think you mentioned in an earlier conversation about shopping patterns, and that kind of brings me to the next question. You mentioned something about shifting from Neiman Marcus to Target. Do you want to tell us a little more about that?
00:17:46
Speaker
Absolutely. So my mother had two credit cards that she had had with a a large bank, and she'd had them for probably 15 to 20 years. And they're pretty known. One of them is pretty well-known card. And it appears that she had stopped using the lesser card to just use the one card because she wanted the airline miles so she could fly to Seattle.
00:18:03
Speaker
And suddenly in 2019, when the carrier of her got access to the card, the other card started being spent just as much. And so the shopping pattern changed. And so instead of just using one card and she was spending about say 1500 a month on her credit card bill, going to Neiman's and places like that. Suddenly both cards are getting used and both cards are spending about 15 to 2000 every month on each The pattern changed from the the high-end stores to suddenly she's going to the Neiman's, Tuesday mornings, um I'm sorry, Neiman's, Target, Tuesday mornings, and other discount stores. It looks like at the end of 2018, about six weeks after that first neurology visit, it looks like she went and tested to see if anybody was watching. because she went into a discount perfumes type store in a, we'll call it a seedy side of town and spent $1,200 with four different $300 transactions. None of them were declined and none of them were questioned. And it looks like, you know, it looks like you're buying Christmas gifts. except my mother never would have gone there. If she was buying Christmas gifts like that, it would have been at, you know, the Neiman's and places like that. So from there, she kept going and she spent $500, $400 at Target every seven to 10 days.
00:19:17
Speaker
And just, it was just amazing the amount of money she spent. And I would, my first thought was, You've got someone who's almost 80. Why in the world would they be buying in what I would call an accumulating mode? um What I didn't understand at the time was the credit card systems can't check for age as part of the you know transaction monitoring.
00:19:36
Speaker
So it could have been an you know a with someone in college, kid in college spending that much at Target. um It looks the same as someone who's conning an 80-year-old at the same time.
00:19:48
Speaker
And so the only thing that possibly could have slowed them down was, were the
Challenges with banks and legal systems
00:19:52
Speaker
declines. um The decline started happening. There was almost no declines previously. Suddenly declines are in double digits on both cards every month, but the cards remained active. So declines meaning who declined? The the bank. they When you went she went to a Target or even the grocery store, occasionally the card would get declined. And she would pull out the other card and run it and it would work.
00:20:15
Speaker
And off she would go. Occasionally, she would get them to try it three or four times. um I was able to get some of the decline information to find out all of this activity because she was deleting a lot of it because she was monitoring my mother's phone and email. So when would come in, she would either reply or, you know, just delete it.
00:20:32
Speaker
So at the time you worked at a bank and so you raised this issue with them, right? I did. So tell me, tell me about that. Yeah, it was kind of an interesting conversation. It was late in 22. got all the discovery information, was starting to find out about transactions and had changed departments from the PMO department over to the customer client experience department, customer experience department. You know, the little feedback buttons you see on the websites, hit this and give the surveys. I ended being the department that got to read those before the AI tools. Now you can use AI and do it. So I got to manually read it. But in the process, discovered, you know, there's groups within different departments, legal and fraud, and they're always looking how to improve customers' experiences. And I said, well, hey, I think I've got an example of financial elder abuse. I've got all this information. Do you guys want to use it as a case study? So I gave them the information, gave the group the information. They said, well, since it's your mother, you can't be involved in it.
00:21:28
Speaker
um We'll do our own research. And a couple weeks passed and I noticed they stopped. And I had gone, we were i was using we were using a tool for risk and they were monitoring that type of activity as well. And it turns out that they were already doing some type of program to address financial elder abuse, but they were only doing it for human interaction at the branch through the call centers.
00:21:49
Speaker
They weren't doing anything to address digital transactions. And so I asked the the person who was part of the the fraud coordinator, I said, hey, you know, Why do you guys stop? and They said, well, we we've got this stuff going on. I said, but it doesn't cover this issue.
00:22:03
Speaker
And they said, well, we'll just get it on the next one that comes up. And i laughed and I said, you didn't catch this one. How are you going to catch the next one? And that's when usually a lot of those folks stop talking to me um because they didn't like the conversation.
00:22:15
Speaker
And it was interesting because I had talked to a guy who worked with the group that does the algorithms for the credit cards. And I said, do you guys do this and this and this? And he said, yeah. I said, well, why wouldn't you have noticed the grocery store bill, you know, percentage wise going up 50, 60% over time? And he couldn't answer it.
00:22:34
Speaker
And I said, well, why wouldn't this stand out as, you know, as an 80 year old? And that's when I discovered, he said, you can't use age, but I discovered that's part of the the credit process. you The same reason you can't use it from getting credit. So I said, but even the change in patterns as far as location and all this stuff, it should have been a big flag for some things going on.
00:22:53
Speaker
You know, at a minimum, you know, call APS. um Because apparently there were four banks involved in this um fraud that this woman did. Two of the banks did call APS. But the ones my mother was directly involved with, one's credit card and one with her main checking account, those did not, those didn't call. And to clarify, EPA is Adult Protected Services, right? Yes, yes. And they had information. And at the time, my sister and I didn't know that you just needed um a hint that something was wrong. You didn't have to prove it. um So that was our mistake, that, you know, something was going on. We should have called them, but it was something we missed. So how do they help if something is a hint of something wrong? Well, they'll they'll go and investigate, go and go interview the folks that are going on, and they'll go check out stuff. In the case with this one, they went and were looking at a financial transaction based on the caregiver and came in and interviewed, and this was in you know early twenty
00:23:49
Speaker
And they said, okay, yeah everything's fine. They interviewed my mother. And like I said, the time, she could handle a 10-minute conversation. But if you talked to her longer, you'd understand there's something else going on. But she didn't, did nothing else happened. And they went on. So it just continued. Like I said, the the CPA should have noticed something, a change in habits.
00:24:07
Speaker
But he kept telling my sister, which was drove us nuts, is, well, she's not drooling, so we're okay. Yeah. And the attorney who wrote the will before he did it, one actually researched financial elder abuse online through these listservs with these attorneys, came back and said, you know, have you asked these questions? And one of them was did you get to be on a doctor's note. So that was November 2019. Well, we'd actually gotten a neurologist note in July saying she didn't have financial capacity. And he explained why. Well, they ignored that letter email for that letter.
00:24:41
Speaker
And in November, they got a different doctor's note from a friend of my mother's who was a doctor um that lived in a condo with her, building with her. But he had never done any tests because he was a ah general.
00:24:52
Speaker
And the letter was typed in all caps and misspelled my mother's name. But they took it. And so he went on and created the will. And after executing it, asked the broker and the CPA if they'd write a letter kind of capacity.
00:25:06
Speaker
The broker who worked for a large financial institution, they said, in no way. um But the CPA worked on his own. He said, sure. So the attorney took a letter from a CPA giving his medical advice that my mother had expect financial capacity. And they just moved right on.
00:25:24
Speaker
Scams don't begin with money moves. They begin when trust is manipulated one message at a time. Rangers AI builds ScamRanger to help step in before the damage, detecting scam messages and guiding people while they still have the power to choose. And on the ScamRangers podcast, we bring you the voices on the front lines, experts, advocates, and leaders fighting back.
00:25:47
Speaker
Because stopping scams means protecting people before they're pulled in. Learn more at rangersai.com.
00:25:56
Speaker
So after your investigation and everything you found um afterwards, I think one of the questions is, what could the financial institution do? And as a community, I think, you know, what are what are the things that we need to to better consider in situations like this? And then I want to dive a little bit into your research about the care, the specific caregiver and the pattern. Yeah. I mean, one of the things I found out, for example, and I know there's some programs from different organizations that are trying to work with branches and um different areas as far as how to have a conversation with someone who comes in and wants to suddenly create a wire for $10,000 to Africa or something. And I know they, but but this was this was pretty good. She went in, um was able to actually get my mother to introduce her to the private banker at the bank, ingratiated her with her, even got the lady to have the caregiver's email put on my mother's account. So that if there was anything going on, they all would contact the private banker say, oh yeah, no, I've met her. Yeah, she's fine. She's just working for her.
00:26:58
Speaker
And they they just moved on. And it was like, now there's a change in financial habits here. You know, do you contact, ask if, you know, do you have ah a power of attorney or someone like that or a family family member that we could speak with just because we'd You know, we're seeing some different habits. I mean, the credit card changes were pretty dramatic. And you would think, well, it would have been neat if they had combined the two cards as far as their activity. But that doesn't happen. Everything isn't done in silos.
00:27:25
Speaker
It would be nice is can that information show up on, you know, a dashboard online when you log in to see that type of activity? Can you capture the declines on under the statement so that you have a permanent record? The CPA had no idea about the declines. But if he'd suddenly seen 10, 20, 40 declines on a bank statement, he might have finally had a clue. Even afterwards, he never really seemed to act like he thought there was any issue. And that and that brings me to a question. you know, I've heard another story of um such grooming. And in that scenario, the the criminal really befriended the victim. So it's kind of almost a fine line between abuse and companionship where the person is feeling lonely and there's someone and they're happy to spend money. and And clearly in the scenario that you're talking about, there were a lot of behind the back, the credit card with your mother's name, with her paying the minimum statements and things like that. There was a lot of um You know, activity that that is clearly intentionally malicious. But how do we I think from a matter of proof and and with the CPA kind of being here, probably trying to cover his Kardashians, as someone told me yesterday, but cover his his you know intentions and what he did in his
Caregiver's criminal history
00:28:43
Speaker
work. How do you explain that?
00:28:45
Speaker
Or how do you know what's what's right or what's wrong? And what are the signs that say, no, this is not out of goodwill. This is too much. This is crossing the line. Yeah. I mean, and and it's and it's a challenge. um One of the things, and the reason the caregiver, for example, came and found my mother is the lady next door, her daughter was showing up every day and watching. And because she was basically hovering, the caregiver wanted out because she had she had no opportunity to steal. My mother's place, on the other hand, you when she came in, no one was watching and she basically had free will to do whatever she wanted and she did. But as far as, you know, the banking institutions, like i said, some type of, if you can't give the records to the customer as far as declines, because I know it comes out of a different process. But make it so that if there's some way to see something. In this case, my mother, the declines were really a big deal because that was a huge clue.
00:29:39
Speaker
And the shopping pattern that had changed with the way AI is being plugged in all over tools these days. You could easily create a map to show, hey, in 2017, this was her shopping pattern. In 2021, this was her shopping pattern. Something changed dramatically, you know, and then you have to have a conversation with them. And if they're not going to have a conversation, you have to ask them, who can i have a conversation with? And the more you try, the more you try to talk to them, then you can find out something. But it's, I might, you know, I don't, not sure the, all the rules because I didn't work on that side of the building. But, you know, you may have to turn the card off.
00:30:15
Speaker
you know, hold the account for a bit until you get something. i mean, my mother wasn't capable of writing something, but if you had asked her to write something, you would have seen if she signed it, the difference between that and what's signed on the account when she signed up, set up the account that something's going on and there needs to be somebody, but I know it's hard, but it's, I know there's tools online now that you can sign up and aggregate your accounts online. And some of them are monitoring them pretty well. And you can get alerts every day for changes. um I recently made a purchase, and you know, out of the country and got in it i wrote an alert the next day through that service that said, hey, you know, we want make sure this was you of kind of stuff, which is pretty normal um kind of stuff. But it was it was just it was just kind of frustrating when I realized the information was there.
00:30:59
Speaker
And it's just a matter of how are you looking at it to do that. Yeah. And so let's go back to the caregiver, because i I think I asked a question about, you know, how do you know if it's a companion or a caregiver crossing the line here? But in this case, there was there were more cases in the past. So take us down what you found when you continue to investigate that.
00:31:20
Speaker
Sure. So when I was able to get into her email account and and went back to 2009, which I wasn't expecting, what the the the agreement was, they said, if you'll give us some keywords, we can do some, we'll do a search on our on our email. So I jokingly gave them 150 phrases and words.
00:31:37
Speaker
And they said, um no, you can't do that. Can you maybe cut it down to 20? I said they said, it looks like you're fishing. I said, because I am fishing, but here, I'll give you 20. And so when I did that, I got all those. And the first few emails showed that she had been fired from a caregiving organization in January of 09.
00:31:55
Speaker
And she wrote a letter back to them and bragged that she but had more than just a working relationship with this old man. And within a two months within a month or so, she was back working for that old man personally, convinced his power of attorney to give her access to his credit cards.
00:32:12
Speaker
And even got she even got power of attorney for him at that time in 09, but didn't file it until January 11 when she married him. um I understand that that's not that odd in these cases that that a female helping a male ends up marrying the guy.
00:32:26
Speaker
But she married him. And four months later, he passed away and she got the house and his broker account. And then, but because she doesn't pay bills, she had to move out after a couple of years because she wasn't paying taxes.
00:32:37
Speaker
But she was always moving around. it looked like trying to sell stuff, trying to do things that were, you know, I'll call it predatory in a way. And when she got into that high rise condo through the the neighbor's lady, she was roaming the building. um looking for victims. And I know it because she actually hit up on my brother-in-law one time in the elevator when she went, when my sister and brother-in-law went to go visit my mother for the first time after she started working, date she hadn't met him yet. And they happened to get on the elevator together to go up up to the condo.
00:33:10
Speaker
And she started up a conversation with him acting asking if he needed anybody to cook for him. At which point he said, yeah, I don't live here. And so it's, and went from there. And so she was working the building, trying to do as much as she could to get what she could. The fun part is after my mother passed away, And basically everything was gone. And I blocked the annuity the 15th of June of 22. her email, she's emailing my mother's will and her will to her daughter, which was odd. But seven days later at a distant hospital, she supposedly dies. So now I can't go after her. Now I have to deal with her her broker, her um her estate. But then six weeks later into July, there's an email going around from her from her account to a mystery, we'll call it Gmail account, pushing her will and my mother's will and death certificates. which didn't make any sense. And then they got the utility sheets to start up for that purchase, that small house. So they were paying the utilities for that house. She hadn't finished the sale of that house yet.
00:34:11
Speaker
But once we resolved probate about five months later, beginning of 25, the executor for her will went and bought that small house south of town and then finished the deal. So i'm I'm assuming there's actually probably a bunch of our stuff down there, but we'll see. That is a very odd story.
00:34:32
Speaker
So first of all, I'm i'm so sorry. i Sorry this happened to you. And the fact that you have to you know go and realize and and investigate, but also the thought that your mother was with someone who was not with good intent and probably did cook for her, but did a lot of things that she shouldn't have done.
00:34:52
Speaker
ah For you and your siblings, that must have been very, very hard. Yeah. Now it was, we, we know she was a con. I don't know that the CPA who was are around all the time understood that she was a con, but it just, yeah, it was just one of those things. A number of things happened. um I didn't even mention the reason she left her original condom in 2019 was there was a flood in the bathroom.
00:35:15
Speaker
that it occurred, but it was a large flood, which didn't make any sense. And I had gone back a few months later, the condo's manager asked, you know, do you have the maintenance report for that, for the work? And he said, no, i don't. He goes, but I do remember there was something in the toilet pipe that shouldn't have been there. And eventually he said, yeah, there was actually an adult diaper that shouldn't have been there. Well, at that time, my mother was not going to the bathroom by herself. So there was no way she could have gone back and forth without having noticed water.
00:35:41
Speaker
But that was a driving force that got my mother out of her condo to another place that isolated her that at the end of 2019 that went into 2020. And, you know, you had your pandemic. But that was one of those things. But she cheated everything to isolate my mother, whether it was phone calls, whether it was, um you know, getting us pushed to get off the medical power of attorney after we set up that that letter from the doctor back in July of 2019 to, yeah, just not returning phone calls. you So I wanted to ask if someone is worried about their parents.
Advice on protecting elderly parents
00:36:13
Speaker
and We talked in previous episodes about kids and and us as parents protecting teens from sextortion and different scams. But if we think about our parents, what are the things that we should consider when um if they're showing early signs of dementia or just, you know, they're getting older?
00:36:32
Speaker
What should we be thinking about? I mean, it's one of those things is who's going to be around her. You know, if there's so many people now that live across the country from their parents, you know, how how do you have that? What rules do you have set up as far as someone watching, whether it's a CPA or attorney or whoever? You know, do they have their best intentions and would they say something if they saw something? They're working for you or they're working for the person.
00:36:56
Speaker
They may say no. um In our case, the broker was talking to us for a while and then suddenly he said, oh, I was told not to tell you guys anything anymore. And I'm sort of thinking, you just had someone who can't remember yesterday and you're taking orders from her.
00:37:10
Speaker
Okay. But yeah, it's it's one of those things that every family is a little different and how you approach it, you kind of have the conversation before they even get to where they're starting to get older. you know I was talking to somebody and they said, we don't have any kids.
00:37:24
Speaker
You know, what would we do? And I've got somebody, you know, maybe at the bank or whoever it is that would be someone that could help watch, you know, what's going on. You know, maybe it's set up so there's always two signatures for whatever occurs.
00:37:37
Speaker
If you have someone as a caregiver that's going to come in and someone's watching, you know, change the mail can't go to the caregiver's house. I mean, to the the patient's place because the caregiver is going to pick it up and who knows what they may pick. I couldn't get the CPA, for example, to run a credit report on my mother. um I had to do it. And the only way I did it was my mother had LifeLock on her old phone.
00:37:58
Speaker
So I was able to do it. And that's how I found out about the other credit card. So yeah, it it's it's a combination of you know different conversations and you know how you're going to communicate and and and who you're going to work with. But every situation is a little
Improvements in bank detection of abuse
00:38:13
Speaker
different. Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and your story. I wanted to maybe one last thing for financial institutions. You shared a little bit about the insights and the patterns and that behavior changes. What else you think financial institutions could do to protect elders? I mean, don't know. don't get, know I don't know all the rules cause I didn't work in that area, but I mean, one of those things is offering products that allow, whether it's the customer themselves doing monitoring of their accounts and activities, or they've got someone who's a co-signer that's doing the monitoring because you're not gonna, you can't be there hundred percent of the time. And so if you have all the information, at least you have something that you can go by. um I kept mentioning the declines earlier. i said, that was a huge red flag. But as a customer, I wouldn't know if I've ever had a client or would remember unless I still had the notice on my email or on my chat. So having that information maintained, something that allows you to aggregate your accounts. Don't make me go buy a third party tool and subscribe to them so that that you know i i so I'm a customer of your bank.
00:39:17
Speaker
and you know It's my account. Can't my account be handled by your bank so that we can do all the monitoring? I shouldn't have to go buy LifeLock and all these you know three other things to to monitor because I'm not going to do it, especially as I'm older. you know And if you watch someone over 70 handling, you know they log out and lock their computer or they turn their flashlight on on their cell and they can't figure out how to turn it off.
00:39:39
Speaker
Why should they have to go through a third-party tool to monitor their stuff? And so it's, there's, there's certain what I would call simple things that I think could be done. Even if you could have a product that says, okay, I know we're not by regulations, not supposed to monitor transaction because of your age, but we have a product that if you sign off and we've got attorneys and, you know, compliance and all that stuff has said, yeah, we're good that we can evaluate transactions based on habit. Say looking at um the labor department, you know, they've got stats on, What does an 80-year-old buy? What does a 60-year-old buy? And percentages. And you can say, okay, you know what? We'll use that as your range until we have you know historical data for you. And anything outside those margins, we'll start contacting you or we'll do these steps. And if the customer says, yeah, I want you to monitor my account as far as stuff that I can't see, I think the customer should be able to do it. Obviously, you know, we'll have to sign something because, you know, we'll come back and have a regulatory issue. But there ought to be tools that are there. You know, they they talk about, know, client interaction and customer experiences. And sitting there, well, here's a customer experience. Can you fix it? And they go, well, we have conversations. And I'm like, well, you're going to need to do a little more because most people are doing digital transactions. And if you're not going to address that directly, you're going to miss a lot of it other than we'll call it the lazy thief that comes in and does something silly like it. Here, let's do a $10,000 wire. Well, that's kind of an obvious one. But if you're doing transactions, more times than not, if you're going to do it through trans transactions like my mother had, and you know it could have been a relative, could have been a niece or whatever, but still, they're not a signer on the account.
00:41:19
Speaker
Those rules are there for reasons. And you know there ought to be something that that allows the customer to watch and monitor and see a change in behavior. And those those tools aren't there.
00:41:30
Speaker
Yeah. Well, you're right. a lot is driven by regulation, but maybe we really need to consider how to protect generational wealth. We want the money to transfer here from generation to generation and not to
Conclusion on elder protection
00:41:42
Speaker
criminals. So they're supposed to support the population and not, you know, go again. So definitely a lot of food for thought.
00:41:49
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of, you know, overregulation, but, you know, you have organizations like CFPB and, you know, maybe the conversation about, hey, you know, you've got the huge population that's now over 60. You've got the baby boomers. What are you going to do to help um protect them? Because financial elder abuse is huge and it's just getting bigger. And the criminals know that they don't have to worry about a lot of stuff because the regulatory reasons stop it. And so off they go.
00:42:21
Speaker
And so, i mean, it's one group that might be able to, you know, do something or have a conversation with. But that's there. There's there's got to be some stuff you can do.
00:42:36
Speaker
Thank you again so much. It was a pleasure to have you on the podcast. I really, really appreciate you sharing your story. And again, we'll put a link in the show notes to your book, The Caregiver's Game, ah where you outline the whole story a little more in depth and go over the takeaways. And I think at the end of the day, we talk about scams and we talk about the impact of scams. And in this scenario, it was not an online scam, but it very well could have been, i think, the There very many patterns are very, very similar. And I think the takeaway is that we we need to do better in protecting our elders and looking out for our family members. Thank you so much for your time today. Oh, you're welcome.