Senior Financial Exploitation

Much recent attention has been centered on senior financial exploitation. In particular, many elder care advocates in our state and throughout the country are working to educate the older generations on common techniques used by hucksters to take advantage of unsuspecting seniors. Usually this awareness effort involves explaining the most common small-time scams targeting this group like the “foreign lottery” scam and the “call from grandchild” scam. See here for a previous post here discussing some of these issues.

When using these types of scams the perpetrators usually try to profit by collecting smaller amounts of money from many different seniors. Hundreds or thousands of calls and emails are sent out in those scams with only some seniors falling into the trap.

Our New York elder law attorneys know that there are different, larger scams that seniors also face. In many ways these individual efforts are far most dangerous because they involve much more than losing a couple hundred or thousand dollars. These bigger efforts can literally involve swindling millions from unsuspecting seniors.

Some of society’s most unscrupulous are willing to do anything to make a buck–including taking it from others. The elderly are particularly vulnerable, which is why the senior financial exploitation business has grown into a multi-billion dollar a year industry. Getting accurate data on the overall scope of elder abuse is difficult because so much does not get reported. However, a federally funded National Institute of Justice study found that about ten percent of Americans over sixty had been targeted for some form of financial exploitation. A Met-Life, Inc. study last year estimated the annual loss from this financial abuse was nearly $3 billion.

Scammers target everyone, but our New York elder law attorneys know that seniors often make the ideal target because some have disabilities, may be less knowledgeable about the Internet or tech issues, and often live more isolated lives. To top it off, after a lifetime of building and working, many seniors can be counted on to have some assets and savings used to fund their golden years.

According to an AARP writer who pens a weekly column on these issues, some of the most commonly used current scams include:

Articles Posted in Senior Financial Exploitation

Pair Tries to Scam Woman Out of Multi-Million Dollar Manhattan Apartment Building

Officials Warn of Common Scams Targeting the Elderly