Sweetheart Swindles: What to Do When You Suspect An Aging Friend or Family Member is Vulnerable to the Con?

A number of years ago,  a friend of mine was riven with anxiety because his widowed father seemed to be under the sway of a woman who, in the eyes of the family and the man’s long-time friends, was “bad news.” His father had been a shrewd businessman, his son would lament, unable to understand his father’s late-in-life willingness to casually hand cash to the woman.  This was before I had begun working in elder law, and I remember thinking that perhaps the father was just “in love,” and I questioned whether it was right for the son to interfere.  Didn’t the father have a right to be a fool in love? 

We all know that conmen and conwomen are out there, but I suspect we also tend to have faith in our individual abilities to avoid falling into their traps as we age. 

When it comes to watching others, perhaps we are amused by lighthearted movies that portray swindlers as relatively benign, with the “victim” just as likely to pull a reverse con as to be truly harmed.  For example, think of the 1998 movie Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (which as actually a remake of 1964 movie, Bedtime Story),  with two competing, debonaire charmers played by Michael Caine and Steve Martin and their mark, a woman of a certain age, who proved to be several steps ahead of them.  In movies we treat the deeds of many criminals as entertainment — remember Good Fellas and The Sopranos? 

When we are reluctant to intervene, perhaps it is because we’re conditioned to think optimistically about romance, even or especially as we grow older.  Or,  we’re programmed to assume the individual is making a “foolish” but nonetheless coherent decision to continue involvement with the person who everyone else sees as “a problem.”

These thoughts were running through my mind as I read an amazing, recent story in the New York Times, A New Wife, A Secret Past, and a Trail of Loss and Blood.   I won’t spoil it for you here by trying to summarize it, because much of the power of the tale comes from reading the details slowly.

At the same time, the story does raise a question in my mind, one that I’ve confronted often in elder law, about whether the individual’s vulnerability is due to a cognitive impairment.

That question can be compounded by the fact that traditional preliminary assessment tools for age-related cognitive impairment typically do not screen for the person’s ability to assess risk. If one has concerns about a loved one’s vulnerability, how does one go about putting an end to the con?

In the New York Times story, the victim’s friends talked about how they had tried to use reason or logic to explain the swindle, unsuccessfully.   A New York police detective tried to intervene, using dramatic evidence from another investigation of the same conwoman.  Again, unsuccessful. 

My reaction to that was this is a man who could be at an early stage of cognitive impairment, with a discrete inability to recognize risk.  In the same way that this man seemed to be blind to the woman’s congame, I saw clients in our Elder Law Clinic who were “blind” to the reality of the offshore lottery scammers or magazine salesmen.  That narrow impairment would later be recognized as an early stage of a much more obvious form of dementia.

Eventually, in the New York Times story, when the money was gone and the older man finally admitted to himself what had happened, he went to a district attorney’s office seeking “justice.”  He was advised, however, that it was “highly unlikely that a jury would convict” because of the particular pattern of this man’s “trust.”  To me, the pattern was both amazing, but also not-so-amazing, especially when I compare it to other cases with less dramatic consequences.

So, as you read the full tale, think about whether that D.A.’s evaluation of the likelihood of obtaining justice is accurate or not, especially if there is an organic base for the target’s vulnerability.  Here, to call upon the theme from an old t.v. game show, it is not just the $64,000 question, but the $1,836,725 question.  Sadly, there was also a toll that can’t be measured with numbers.