Granny and Clyde: When Seniors Scam Seniors - WSJ.com

Image by epSos.de via FlickrBy JASON ZWEIG and MARY PILON

A grim category of crime is on the rise: senior-on-senior financial fraud.

According to regulators and prosecutors, there has been a significant increase recently in the number of cases in which older investors have been taken advantage of by elderly scam artists.

"That's a definite new trend," says Denise Voigt Crawford, the Texas securities commissioner. "We're seeing more cases of older people ripping off other older people. Someone joked that seniors ripping off their peers is becoming 'the new retirement plan.'"

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Japanese Prisons Face Swelling Elderly Population

By MARI YAMAGUCHI
Handrails run down the middle of the hallway to help prisoners make their way from one end to the other. Adult diapers are neatly stacked in a corner. When an inmate chokes on his rice and coughs, a supervisor rushes over to rub his back.

Welcome to the world of old-age prisons. Japan's population is aging faster than anywhere else, and with that has come an even sharper rise in elderly inmates.

The number of Japanese prisoners aged 60 or older has doubled over the past decade to more than 10,000. That outpaces a 30 percent increase in the general population for that age group. The elderly now represent 16 percent of the nation's inmates.

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Cops: healthcare employee stole $48,000 from elderly victim | LoHud.com | The Journal News

By James O'Rourke

A New Jersey woman was being held in the Rockland County jail Friday, accused of stealing $48,000 from an 83-year-old woman whom she cared for as a live-in health care provider.

Cicille R. Davis, aka Rosalie A. Davis, 44, of 165 Pierson St. in Orange, was arrested Thursday on suspicion of felony forgery and grand larceny charges, Suffern police Detective Craig Long said. Davis had been hired by the victim's family in July 2009 to provide live-in health care at the victim's home. In March, the family began to notice discrepancies in financial records and became suspicious of Davis. The family dismissed Davis without telling her of their suspicions and contacted authorities.
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California has paid scores of criminals to care for vulnerable residents - latimes.com

By Evan Halper

Scores of people convicted of crimes such as rape, elder abuse and assault with a deadly weapon are permitted to care for some of California's most vulnerable residents as part of the government's home health aide program.

Data provided by state officials show that at least 210 workers and applicants flagged by investigators as unsuitable to work in the program are nonetheless scheduled to resume or begin employment.

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The Bay Citizen - Officers See More Sick and Elderly Selling Prescription Drugs - NYTimes.com

Image via CrunchBaseby Shoshana Walter

In Gregory Watts’s 13 years as a San Francisco police officer, he has arrested countless drug dealers. But only recently did he begin to notice that many of them resembled his grandparents.

Easy access to prescription drugs, the authorities said, has created a growing population of the elderly, sick or disabled who sell their medications on the street, often to support themselves financially or to raise money to buy harder drugs.
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In the D.C. area and across the U.S., scams against senior citizens are on the rise

By Dan Morse Washington Post Staff Writer

Murders and violent crimes are down around the Washington region and the country, but one kind of crime is rising steadily: scams against the elderly.

Senior citizens lose at least $2.6 billion a year to thieves, many of whom are in their own families, according to a study last year by the MetLife Mature Market Institute. And that estimate is conservative, MetLife says, given the schemes left unreported.

As the nation ages, the number of targets increases. By 2030, the United States will be home to 34 million people older than 75.

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Queens Prosecutors Make Use of Broader Vision on Hate Crimes - NYTimes.com

By ANNE BARNARD
 
In the public’s imagination, the classic hate crime is an assault born of animus against a particular ethnicity or sexual orientation, like the case of the Long Island man convicted in April of killing an Ecuadorean immigrant after hunting for Hispanics to beat up.

But in Queens since 2005, at least five people have been convicted of, or pleaded guilty to, committing a very different kind of hate crime — singling out elderly victims for nonviolent crimes like mortgage fraud because they believed older people would be easy to deceive and might have substantial savings or home equity.

And this month, Queens prosecutors charged two women with stealing more than $31,000 from three elderly men they had befriended separately. The women, Gina L. Miller, 39, and Sylvia Johns, 23, of Flushing, were charged with grand larceny as a hate crime.

This approach, which is being closely watched by prosecutors across New York State, has won Queens prosecutors stiffer sentences, including prison for criminals who could otherwise go free, even after draining an elderly person’s savings. Without a hate crime, theft of less than $1 million carries no mandatory prison time; with it, the thief must serve for a year and may face 25.

The legal thinking behind the novel method is that New York’s hate crimes statute does not require prosecutors to prove defendants “hate” the group the victim belongs to, merely that they commit the crime because of some belief, correct or not, they hold about the group.
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Elder Abuse Resources
Elder Neglect and Abuse: An Annotated Bibliography (Bibliographies and Indexes in Gerontology)

Elder Abuse Detection and Intervention: A Collaborative Approach (Springer Series on Ethics, Law and Aging)

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Scam Alert: Protect Your Medicare Card From Identity Thieves - AARP Bulletin Today

By: Sid Kirchheimer | Source: AARP Bulletin Today

I recently found a wallet in a parking lot. It belonged to a 66-year-old man and held his driver’s license, $47 in cash, family photos, some credit cards and grocery store cards, and two unscratched lottery tickets.

I don’t know if those tickets proved to be winners; the wallet was quickly returned, intact, to its rightful owner.

But if an identity thief had happened upon that brown billfold, the crook would have hit the jackpot because of one more item it contained: a Medicare card.

That card contains the holder’s Social Security number—the holy grail for thieves. With that number, they can secure new credit in the owner’s name, and if that act goes undetected, the owner’s credit history could be damaged.

Credit cards in a lost wallet might also be used for a brief buying spree, but their loss poses little long-term danger. Cardholders are liable for only $50 in fraudulent charges, no matter their amount, and many card issuers waive even that fee when lost or stolen plastic is promptly reported.

The photocopy defense

So, what’s in your wallet?

If you keep your Medicare card in it, consider this advice:

“You should not carry your Medicare card on a daily basis,” advises Linda Foley of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a California-based advocacy group that helps combat identity theft and assists victims. “Instead, make a photocopy and cut out the last four digits of your Social Security number, or use a black marker to hide them.”
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Granny Get Your Gun -- In These Times

Is America on the verge of a geriatric crime wave? By Nathan Comp Crime is generally a young person’s game, but that hasn’t stopped an ever-growing number of older Americans from breaking the law. Following a decline through most of the ’90s, over the past 10 years arrest rates for those over 50 have shot up 85 percent, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Experts predict that these numbers will continue to climb well into the next decade, as 35 million baby boomers expand America’s graying population from 16 to nearly 25 percent. Is America on the precipice of a geriatric crime wave? Read More