Word: frauds
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...years ago, for instance, after I applied for a credit card at a consumer-electronics store, somebody got hold of my name and vital numbers and used them to get a duplicate card. That somebody ran up a $3,000 bill, but the nice lady from the fraud division of the credit-card company took care of it with steely digital dispatch. (I filed a short report over the phone. I never lost a cent...
...former real estate saleswoman, widow of a judge and mother of a prosecutor, Mary Ann Downs had far more financial and legal acumen than most aging fraud victims. Even so, con artists had little trouble scamming her out of $74,000. Why? How? Her story is a classic study in what makes fraud against elderly people, especially women, one of the biggest growth industries in America. Con men are bilking the elderly out of $40 billion a year, by one FBI estimate...
...this day she cannot really explain what happened. "I got into it, and I couldn't get out," she says simply. But she does admit she was terrified of telling her children. That anxiety keeps many other fraud victims falling for new scams in the hope of replacing some of the lost money so their sons and daughters will never know. Says Shelly Feldman, president of a Florida fraud-fighting organization called Senior Sleuths: "They're afraid their kids will say they can't handle their finances and they'll be put in a nursing home...
...however, the last layer. That is a fraud called "recovery room," reserved for victims who have finally vowed not to be scammed again. In this case, after Downs had moved to Raleigh, N.C., and taken an unlisted phone number, she got a call from a man who gave his name as Virgil Hastings. He said he was a lawyer working for a federal court in California that had impounded the funds of the telemarketers who had fleeced Downs. The court, he said, was ready to return her $74,000--but first she had to send...
...them dividends of 13% a year. Actually, he was running a Ponzi scheme, using money from new victims to make payments--briefly--to earlier ones. O'Donnell was sentenced last month to 16 years in prison after a jury in Denver convicted him on 30 counts of theft, securities fraud and racketeering. Crosson got no money back and must now work to supplement a meager pension. She watches over the houses and pets of absent homeowners in Evergreen, a wealthy suburb of Denver...