Thieves and scam artists prey on older Wichitans

Vicki Heigele showed up at the door of the the blind, elderly woman in Derby last year.

The brother-in-law from Minnesota couldn’t get the blind woman to take a call. Heigele, a nurse from the Mental Health Association of Sedgwick County, drove there to do a welfare check.

A guy with tattoos and piercings answered her knock. “He slammed the door in my face,” Heigele said.

Heigele returned with three Derby police officers. When they couldn’t get an answer, one called the home health care person who was supposedly caring for the blind woman.

Show up here in 10 minutes, the officer told her, or he’d force the door. Heigele listened to the officer calling.

“Well,” the woman told him. The elderly woman had died. Months ago.

The Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office prosecuted 169 cases last year involving crimes against people 65 and older.

Most cases involve financial crimes, Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said. Only a fraction of cases are prosecuted, because many of the thefts are by family members, and victims don’t want to prosecute.

The home health person, Heigele said, had moved herself, her daughter, her granddaughter and various boyfriends into the home. They turned it into a party house before and after she died.

And before the woman died (at a hospital of natural causes), the thieves coaxed her into signing over her house, furnishings and checking account, totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Because of those signatures on the documents, there was no prosecution.

They fall for lies

“The amount of theft from older folks (done by) housekeepers, relatives, children, strangers, door-to-door salesmen, landscapers, tree trimmers, medical workers, etc., is staggering,” said Robert Short, a Sedgwick County prosecutor. “They are some of the most dramatic stories I see.”

Thieves play on the good nature, loneliness or the dementia of the elderly.

Marty Moreland saw an elderly man who’d fallen face down on the sidewalk of 63rd Street South last year.

Moreland, a Sedgwick County sheriff’s sergeant, pulled over.

“I just need to get to Derby,” the elderly man said.

“Why do you need to go to Derby?” Moreland asked.

“I need to get to the Wal-Mart to send a money order.”

“Why?”

Moreland, telling the tale, shook his head.

“This elderly individual was walking to Derby, a six-mile round trip, to send people a money order because they told him he’d get more money if he’d send money,” Moreland said.

“He wasn’t in any shape to walk to the end of his own driveway to pick up his mail,” Moreland said.

Robbed, scammed, abused

Nationally, nearly 8 percent of people older than 60 are abused financially or physically, mental health officials estimate. What that means, said Mary Beth Steiner, is that an estimated 7,000 Sedgwick County people may be getting robbed, scammed or abused every year.

Only one in every 15 of these cases ever gets reported, Steiner said. Even fewer result in criminal charges.

Bennett and Avery Elofsson, another prosecutor, said the bulk of elder-abuse cases they encounter involve money. Usually, they said, they’re reported after someone notices bills going unpaid or a sudden change in spending habits.

“All of a sudden for somebody who never used an ATM for the last 20 years, now they’re going gangbusters three times a day for the last three months. That’s fishy,” Elofsson said.

Physical abuse is harder to uncover, mostly because in those cases the victim often lives with his or her abuser, who blames failing health or clumsiness. “No one’s going to beat up Mom or Grandma out in front of everybody,” Bennett said.

Sometimes financial abuse ends in physical harm when there’s no money left to pay for the victim’s living expenses or medical needs. Sometimes an abuser tells a victim, “Write me a check or I won’t give you your pills,” Bennett said.

In 90 percent of cases, it’s a family member stealing or doing the abuse, Steiner said.

Most victims don’t want to prosecute their own family.

Like the U.S. Navy sailor who survived combat in World War II.

‘My daughter took it’

The sailor had served as a radar operator on two aircraft carriers, including on the USS Shamrock Bay, which took part in the battles to retake the Philippines from Japan in World War II. The sailor remembers Kamikaze suicide attacks on his unit’s convoys.

He’s 93 now, and gets around with a walker. “I’m barely making it,” he said.

Last June he opened mail from his credit card company and learned that he owed thousands of dollars he’d never spent.

“My daughter took it,” he said. “I can’t even tell you what’s in my heart about this.”

She’s 53; he thinks she bought illegal drugs.

The sailor called police; they told the daughter to move out. He’s still paying off the card debt.

He was so humiliated and shocked that he barely survived, he said. He’s still alive because of his pet dogs, Ava and Maiza. “If I ever lose them, you might as well put me out there with Eva, my wife, in the ground,” he said.

$100,000 gone

Elder abuse cases are the most time-intensive cases Bennett sees; they involve sifting through years of financial and medical records.

His advice for prevention: Check in often with elders. If something looks fishy, call authorities.

He first realized how bad elder abuse is in 2009. That February a woman called the district attorney’s office, wanting information on what she’d been told was a class-action lawsuit.

A man, the woman said, came by one day saying she needed new lightning rods for her home; he could see that from the street. He offered to replace them for a fee, then came back again and again, wanting more money for service and repairs. Eventually he said he needed cash to hire an attorney to sue the manufacturer because the rods were defective.

“By the time we found her, nearly $100,000 was gone,” Bennett said.

A judge ordered two men convicted in the case to serve prison sentences and pay the woman $94,585 in restitution.

But as with most scam cases, it’s unlikely she’ll get more than a fraction of that back.

Robbed while hospitalized

The man with the oxygen tubes in his nose did not want his name published.

He suffers from COPD and other ailments.

After his wife died two years ago, he was hospitalized.

While hospitalized, he learned that his stepdaughter — his wife’s daughter — had opened a locked window at his home and helped herself to $17,000 in glassware that his wife (her mother) had collected, plus $8,500 in gold and silver Krugerrand coins, plus two guns worth more than $1,000.

“My neighbors told me they saw her going in the window, and asked how she could do that when I’m in the hospital,” said the man, who is 72.

“She told them I had died.”

He did not call police.

Abuse prevention

Steiner helps lead Triad, an elder abuse prevention coalition associated with the Mental Health Association of Sedgwick County. Members include bankers, social workers, law enforcement like Moreland, and nurses like Steiner and Heigele.

Two investigators for the District Attorney’s Office created a program with a similar makeup as Triad in 2008. Modeled after others like it across the country, the Financial Abuse Specialist Team, or FAST, meets monthly to talk through cases where elder abuse may be happening and talk about what to do next.

Typically between one and five cases are brought to each meeting, Elofsson said.

Sometimes a situation that catches FAST’s attention turns out to be benign, Elofsson said — like a bank error or a large cash withdrawal that paid for a grandchild’s college tuition.

Other times it’s more serious and leads to criminal charges.

She said she’d ‘adopt’ them

Robert Moon cried as he told his story.

He and Judy, his wife, got robbed of thousands of dollars by a nice woman they met as she walked out of a Dollar Tree store in late 2015, Judy said. “You remind me of my grandparents,” the woman told the Moons. “Is there any way I could ever help you?”

She volunteered to “adopt” them, helping with bill paying. She stole all their savings instead, the Moons said — about $1,000. She talked them into getting a payday loan. She talked them into going to Emprise Bank. “She took it all out of Robert’s account,” Judy Moon said.

The bank realized this was a scam, and said so, Bob said. But it was too late.

The only reason they don’t go hungry now, Robert Moon said, is that they go to the Lord’s Diner at night, and to the Oaklawn Senior/Community Center for meals at noon. Kay Shrauner, the center director, sends frozen meals home with them for the weekend, and Heigele troubleshoots for the Moons when they have trouble with doctor appointments or transportation or other concerns.

Moon is now poor enough that the shirt he wore for the interview had palm-sized holes in it, and a smaller hole in the lower corner of the shirt pocket where he stuffs envelopes containing the record of his meager earnings from Social Security.

Heigele bought him a pair of shoes with her own money when she saw that he’d wrapped his old shoes in 30 rubber bands to keep the soles attached.

Red flags of fraud

In one case Bennett recalled, a bank teller stopped a theft by gently asking an elderly man what he planned to do with the cash he was about to withdraw from his account. Usually he took out $60 a week for “walking around money.” This time he wanted $3,700; a woman the teller had not seen before was with him.

The man said he didn’t know what he was doing. When the teller asked if he needed help, he nodded.

Emprise Bank trains their staff to recognize the red flags of scams, said Ava Majors, vice president in charge of retail operations.

“Most victims don’t want to be perceived as weak, or to have made a poor decision,” she said. “And they are worried about losing their homes, because family members are often watching to see whether they can take care of their affairs.”

Warning signs of a scam include:

▪  “Small ‘investments’ that grow over time,” Majors said. “Sometimes it’s real estate, sometimes jewels, gold. Someone gets ahold of them and says, ‘You must act quickly now.’ And ‘Don’t tell anyone else; act now.’ ”

▪ “Investments of a lifetime,” she said. “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

▪ “ ‘New friends’ showing up with an elderly couple, wanting to make a large withdrawal.”

▪ “Winning a lottery, including a foreign lottery. We had one guy who we told repeatedly, ‘this is a common fraud,’ but he would not believe us. So he kept sending them money, and lost a great deal of money — and lost his wife, who left him.”

▪ The “fake attorney” scam. “They tell you about an opportunity, and then switch you over to someone they say is an attorney,” Majors said. “The ‘attorney’ then tells you this opportunity is on the up-and-up.”

“These scam artists choose people who have spent a lifetime building up their nest egg,” Majors said. “These scams can ruin family situations. We’ve seen children tell the parents, ‘This is not real.’ And the parents don’t listen.”

A cute dog named Lucky

Joy Smith handed over about $150,000 to scam artists, starting seven years ago.

The guy on the other end of the e-mails and phone calls said he was an attorney.

He told her she was about to inherit millions of dollars, and that she needed to pay fees so that he could make sure the money was not from illegal money laundering. She paid several installments of $20,000.

“I even looked at a house I wanted to buy, it was that real to me,” she said.

Banks closed out her account, telling her the situation was a fraud. She refused to believe. “And I ended up on Western Union’s ‘banned’ list, because they also said this was a scam. But I kept sending the money, because I had so many family members who needed help, and I wanted to get that money to be the one to help them.”

She is 73 now, and her legs and back are so diminished that she walks with difficulty. She’s still got a marriage because her longtime companion, Victor Wellman, “is just the greatest guy ever.”

For years after, she considered suicide. Wellman kept her from surrendering to dark thoughts.

She hugged her dog, Lucky.

“Lucky helped too,” she said.

This story was originally published March 3, 2017 at 7:02 PM with the headline "Thieves and scam artists prey on older Wichitans."