Caring For Mom Is An Education In Scams And Fraud
Authored by Nancy Rommelmann via RealClearInvestigations,
It was summer 2021, and my mother’s desk was a mess, including a torn envelope from the IRS shoved in the back of a drawer.
“Mom?” I asked. “Did you pay your taxes?”
My mother, increasingly forgetful at 84, said she wasn’t sure. She told me to call her accountant of 30 years, who said the taxes hadn’t been paid but that he would take care of it.
That’s not all he took care of.
Within the year, a family member had my mother sign a blank check, which the accountant (or someone in his office) filled out for $25,000 to supposedly take over paying my mother’s bills – a task I was already doing. Instead of using the money for bills, the accountant paid himself the lion’s share of the funds. He then sent me an invoice for work I’d previously paid him for, at which point I told him never to contact my mother or me again.
The accountant does not work in some grubby backroom but for a white-shoe firm in a Manhattan office tower. I don’t know if this firm does legitimate business. I do know that the moment he had the opportunity to take advantage of a decades-long trust, he took it.
He’s not the only one. In the six years since I’ve taken my mother’s finances in hand, I’ve dealt with dozens of schemes meant to bilk the elderly, including phone scammers who promised my mother she had won a Mercedes, home health aides who inflated their hours, people forging my mother’s signature, and a relative who had her sign over her car.
“I don’t know why we had to go to the DMV,” my befuddled mother told her caregiver, after the relative had dropped her off and then driven away.
As hard as I tried to protect my mother from con artists, there is no way I could have predicted all the schemes, both clever and dumb, that industries and individuals constantly perpetrate on the elderly. Some will be strangers; others will be trusted confidantes and family members. Did I mention the beloved attorney who convinced my mother to sign away farm equipment worth nearly $200,000?
Rich Target
Predators targeting the elderly are on the rise because there have never been as many to prey upon. An estimated 67 million baby boomers live in the U.S., with a combined wealth of $85 trillion, according to Federal Reserve data, a veritable banquet for thieves, made all the easier by online trickery.
“It’s absolutely through the roof,” said Heidi W. Isenhart, a Florida attorney specializing in cyber-scamming of the elderly. “They’re called numerous times, they’re harassed; they give a little money and then the people come back. They’ll even say, ‘We’ll send a car for you to take you to the bank.’”
It seems everyone has a story of an elder who has been taken for a ride. My friend’s failing father fell for numerous scams, including agreeing to pay $26,000 for security for his computer. “This is for a desktop that cost $500,” my friend said. “I was able to claw back about half the money, then the guy disappeared.”
In 2024, the FBI received 836,000 reports of cyber fraud, with people on average losing $20,000. That’s a 33% increase in cyber fraud incidents since the year before, and the actual numbers are certainly much higher, as many who are victimized often don’t have the awareness to realize it or are too embarrassed to admit it. One growing scam uses AI’s ability to clone voices to fool victims into thinking loved ones have been arrested or abducted and need cash immediately.
Several measures now before Congress aim to combat scams and fraud targeting people 60 and older. The Scam Compound Accountability and Mobilization (SCAM) Act passed the Senate in December 2025 and now moves to the House. The STOP Scams Against Seniors Act was introduced that same month, but has yet to be passed into law. While the first bill targets international fraud and the second aims to coordinate federal, state, and local efforts to protect seniors from scams, the cognitive struggles of older adults will undoubtedly make it difficult for law enforcement to gather evidence and catch wrongdoers.
Which means their loved ones must step in and play the role of cop, which I discovered when an Eastern European kept leaving messages on my mother’s answering machine, asking for her banking information. I told my mother that under no circumstances was she to speak with him.
“But he sounds so nice,” she said. I told her that sounding nice was the scammers’ stock in trade.
It did not compute. My mother was living by herself, lonely for a voice on the phone, making her an easy mark. Scammers know how to ingratiate themselves; how to make the person feel lucky (a Mercedes!) or frightened, as with the phone threat my mother received telling her the police were on their way to arrest her. A frightened person is more likely to believe the anonymous voice on the phone telling her he can make the trouble go away, all she needs to do is provide her social security number.
I called the Eastern European scammer back.
“Why are you calling my mother?” I asked, along with a few choicer words, whereupon he launched a volley of expletives, which I let my mother hear on speaker.
My mother looked chagrinned. Yet despite my taping signs on her walls that read “ALL THE CALLERS ARE LYING TO YOU,” she fell for a similar con the following week.
Family Fraud
A sad fact that makes sense when you think about it: The people your parents love most will likely be the ones using them as an ATM machine. According to the National Council on Aging, abuse and neglect incidents are perpetrated 60% of the time by a family member.
“I do see some of that manipulation by children, by grandchildren,” said Isenhart. “But what I see more is one child saying to the parent, ‘My brother hates you, and he hasn’t been in contact with you, and I’ve done everything and I need everything.’ That’s just classic exploitation. And then they move in with them, and possession is nine-tenths of the law. And then they are in full control of everything. It is supreme gaslighting.”
In my mother’s case, something akin to this happened when an unscrupulous lawyer, at the behest of a relative who’d set his sights on my mother’s savings, tried to gain access to her bank accounts by badgering the bank’s call center in the Philippines in the middle of the night. The gambit was unsuccessful due to the lawyer’s incompetence (and the call center’s savvy). While red flags were added to the account, they were insufficient to catch the check on which the same relative forged my mother’s signature, to hand off to this same attorney. My raising the roof about this went nowhere. Same for the bank manager’s suggestion that my mother file a suspicious activity report.
“I don’t want him to go to jail,” my mother said, looking crestfallen and confused. It’s almost certainly the case that the relative and the lawyer did not fear legal action from a frail, forgetful 85-year-old wanting to keep the people she still remembered as close to her as she could.
“If we were to take all the cases of financial exploitation we know and try to summarize them in a single word, that word is loneliness,” said Liora Bar-Tur, a psychologist and gerontologist, in a recent talk, “What Is the Story Behind Financial Exploitation?” “Perhaps the money or property taken from them through deceit or malice nevertheless provides them, despite their vulnerability, with a sense of power, control, and love.”
My mother did love this relative, and yet there was no way I was going to let her wind up in that position again. Shortly after the forged check, I took her for neurological testing. It went about as expected: Mom could only name two U.S. presidents – Biden and Nixon – and was at sea with almost every memory question. When the relative and lawyer learned my mother had been assessed as no longer legally able to make financial decisions or sign documents, they screamed that this was a lie, that my mother was fine. But she was not, and there would be no more checks, forged or otherwise. The lawyer soon quit.
Stranger Danger
Next to kin, caregivers for hire present a more predictable set of issues. One is, do you need one at all? (If you think you do, you do.) Another: Your father says he’s fine, he doesn’t want a stranger in his home. Then you find him on the floor of his bedroom, with no idea how long he’s been there, and the only thing he can tell you is that he’s very thirsty.
There were many signs that my mother needed full-time care: leaving the stove on until the boiling eggs exploded and hit the ceiling; mistaking 11 p.m. for 11 a.m. and wandering around her Brooklyn neighborhood, wondering why it was dark out; finding $5,000 in cash in her wallet that she had no recollection of withdrawing.
I am sorry to tell you that if I had a nickel for every person who’s told a story of a caregiver leaving her parent alone, or stealing her jewelry, or whipping out a document the recently deceased grandparent has “signed” leaving the caregiver everything, I’d have about a buck-twenty.
I am not besmirching the profession. My mother, who is now 88, has had nine caregivers over the past five years, and, with the exception of one, they have been hard-working and reliable, doing a job many of us cannot or do not want to do.
“You haven’t lived until you’ve cleaned [excrement] off your dad’s balls,” said a high school girlfriend, who did not have the funds to hire full-time care.
Not many do, the costs of caregiving being exorbitant. While Medicare, under some circumstances, will provide skilled nursing, this will not cover bathing, feeding, and other custodial care. Which means you are either going to do these things yourself or hire aides for an average of $25/hour, which, at 24/7 care, comes to $18,000 a month or $216,000 a year.
That doesn’t include the cost of getting ripped off, as I was by a woman who billed herself as the head of an agency, which turned out to be a lie, through which she would pay two of my mother’s caregivers, which turned out to be a partial lie, in that she would pad their hours and pocket the difference. By the time I discovered this, my mother was in the midst of myriad health crises, making pursuing the few thousand dollars I was out not worth my time, which you can be sure the scammers know.
Start Early
The most important piece of advice I have for those with failing parents is this: Get a handle on their finances five years earlier than you think you need to. This, because they are not going to tell you that things are going downhill, or they won’t have noticed, or they’re embarrassed to ask for help.
Such was the case with my late father, who had been a numbers savant and successful stockbroker. When he asked me to calculate the tip after a pizza lunch, I thought I had better take a look at his bills, and found credit card charges of $52,000, racked up by someone he had entrusted the card to, to buy groceries.
“I guess I stuck my head in the sand,” my father said.
My dad agreed to let me pay off the card and cancel it. But getting involved in your parents’ finances, which can mean putting your name on their banking and investment accounts so you can monitor and steer inflows and outflows, only goes so far. At some point, you may need to take full control.
Psychologist Liora Bar-Tur tells a story of the 85-year-old patient who shared with her children that she was having a secret relationship with the actor Richard Gere. The relationship took place by text and led to the patient sending “Gere” more than $20,000. Trying to convince their mother that she was not, in fact, having a relationship with the actor, that it was all a scam, engendered only anger in the patient: Did her children not want her to be happy and in love? Why didn’t they just butt out of it?
“The only way the children were able to stop the transfer of funds was by activating the power of attorney they held,” said Bar-Tur. “This led to intense anger, crying, profound misery, and threats that she would change her will. After the funds were blocked, she attempted to sell her jewelry” in order to procure more funds to send to her movie star lover.
My last horror story is also the first. It was January 2013, and my mother’s third husband had just passed away. She’d inherited some property and some cash, as well as half the equipment at a tractor dealership he owned. There was an issue with the dealership, my mother said, and asked if I would accompany her to see her late husband’s lawyer.
“He loves me,” she said of the lawyer.
The lawyer’s office was in a small home in upstate New York. Neither he nor the accountant standing alongside him appeared pleased I’d accompanied my mother. As she eased into pleasantries, I could see the impatience of the men. They had a document they wanted her to sign; there would be time for chitchat after.
I asked to see the document, which had my mother signing away her ownership of the farm equipment to a third party. When I asked why she would sign this, the accountant flashed a look at the lawyer, who took back the paper. It wasn’t important, he said. A week later, when I was not around, he called my mother back into the office, where she signed the paper, forfeiting the equipment to her late husband’s former partner, who I later found out was a friend of the lawyer’s.
When I asked my mother why she had signed, she said it was because she had thought of the lawyer as caring; that when her husband was dying of leukemia, he had married them in the hospital room.
I did not, at the time, know the lawyer was playing a rigged game. I wish I had. And I wish I had realized that the characteristics that had heretofore given my mother a splendid and comfortable life – a trusting nature, independent to a fault, a belief that the people she loved would always look out for her – were the very things that would be used against her and open her up to so much danger.
I’m sorry, Mom; I wish I could have given myself the advice then that I’ve only just learned now.