Report: Theft of Utah seniors’ assets could reach $365M annually
A draft report estimates Utah’s elders may have suffered losses of nearly $1 million per day last year because of financial abuse, a state legal enforcement officer said Wednesday.
Jilenne Gunther, an official with Utah Adult Protective Services, said a study of 80 reported cases of financial abuse of Utahns age 65 and older in 2010 leads her to believe the average victim is exploited to the tune of $96,300. The numbers are preliminary for a final report to be released later this year, but Gunther said costs from unreported cases could reach $365 million annually.
A similar report issued in February, based on 2009 data, showed the theft of seniors’ assets cost individuals, taxpayers, businesses and the state government $52 million annually, a figure Gunther said was conservative. She said the crimes have grown worse as a result of the recession. And, once again, the most common perpetrators are elders’ children and grandchildren.
“The enemies are often close to them. And that’s disturbing,” she said. “One of the things I’ve noticed is a lot of times these seniors are being exploited because they need help with their finances.”
Utah was the first state to take on a large study of elder financial abuse. The Utah Bar Association has offered assistance to other states and the American Bar Association to develop grant funding for similar programs.
Gunther has found that one of the main sources of exploitation comes when an adult child or grandchild has been given financial power of attorney for an elder relative, which allows them access to the relative’s bank accounts.
A typical case, she said, would be a woman with limited capacity who asks her adult child for help with finances.
“No one watches or oversees that child, which leaves that senior open to exploitation even more so due to her limited capacity,” Gunther said. “They then go on shopping sprees, buy cars, buy their pornography, all with their loved ones’ money.”
In about half of elder financial abuse cases, she said, “if there had been a trusted monitor, the abuse could have been stopped sooner or avoided altogether.”
The Bank of American Fork has held a series of seminars where Gunther spoke on elder financial abuse. The bank also collaborated with Gunther to set up a monitoring program it calls AccountSmartTools for Seniors, a package of products designed to prevent fraud for customers age 55 and older.
The program, launched Wednesday and expected to require a small fee, offers third-party online monitoring and other services in which trusted monitors keep watch over bank transactions.
Salt Lake City resident Marti Weber attended a September seminar where Gunther spoke about the problem. Weber’s mother recently had been a victim of traveling fraudsters who “repaved” the driveway to the mother’s home in rural Colorado with a water-soluble slurry. By the time Weber’s brother figured out the scam, the check her mother had written was already cashed.
Though the scammers didn’t otherwise invade the mother’s account, Weber felt duly warned. Weber said she hopes Colorado banks soon offer the same sort of watchdog services the Bank of American Fork has implemented.
“I see this as a really smart way to handle money,” she said. “We weren’t very proactive in my family about this. If there’s one message I’d like to see get out, it’s ‘don’t think this won’t happen to you.’”
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Help to fight elder financial abuse
The Bank of American Fork has introduced a package of protections designed to avoid financial abuse of its older customers, working with Jilenne Gunther, Utah Adult Protective Services legal enforcement officer. For information on the bank program: bankaf.com
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