Stay Alerted: Most Common Crimes Against The Elderly

It’s a dirty shame when criminals take advantage of everyday people by scamming them into giving them their investment money or savings.  It seems especially worse when their targets are the elderly.  They prey on the weakest.    

Seniors are easy marks for financial scams and statistics show that one out of every 5 seniors has been victimized in some way.  Because of this ongoing and growing problem, there is a new program launched to train medical professionals to train them how to assess when a senior may be vulnerable to financial predators.  The program was developed between cooperating agencies. 

The Investor Protection Trust, the North American Securities Administrators Association, and the National Adult Protective Services Association.  They ran a pilot program first and found it worked.  They caught a few bad guys including one who is now serving a 99-year prison sentence.  He bilked millions from elderly investors. 

The doctors are trained to ask certain questions about the seniors’ money situation.  They are then able to see if there are any indicators that there is something amiss.  Sounds like a good and practical program.

Financial Crimes Against Elderly

Don’t you wonder how people sleep at night?  When the guilt of the scummy things they’ve done come back to haunt them? For some reason a con artist, I feel, should have some type of human empathy as part of their makeup.  One of the most recent scams making the circuit targets seniors.  

The caller poses as the elderly person’s granddaughter or grandson.  The caller has a story – thrown in jail while on a trip with friends – car accident – whatever story works.  They feed off the information given up so easily by the elderly.  They eventually put on a person of authority to take the financial information needed to steal the cash from the bank accounts of grandparents just trying to help.  

The lies told to these seniors can cause dangerous stress.  The financial consequences can be devastating to already live on a tight budget.  So this story leads me back to my original question – how do these con artists sleep at night knowing they’re ripping off seniors who may have limited funds and may be in a frail state due to their age ?

Violent Crimes Against The Elderly

This poor senior – an eighty-year-old man had one of the worst weeks of his long life.  Earlier in this particular week, he was a victim of a home invasion.  He was tied up by the thugs, pistol-whipped, and robbed.  They took his credit cards, his computer, and his truck.  So the man decides he’s not going to do something before trouble finds him again.  He decides to take a self-defense class and learn how to handle a gun.  Four days after he was robbed, he was shot in the leg by his own son as the gun was being loaded during class.

Senior Committing Crimes Against Other Elderly

On a sad – but yet interesting strange note – a story about a 98-year-old woman murdering her 100-year-old roommate recently made the headlines.  The interesting part of this bizarre story is that our society is now expecting to see more and more crimes being committed by seniors.  People are living longer therefore we’re bound to see an increase in the senior criminal element.

Laura Lundquist is the senior charged with strangling and smothering Elizabeth Barrow, her 100-year-old roommate.  The two shared a room at a nursing home and Laura was jealous of Elizabeth because her bed was closer to the window.

Barrow had recently complained to a nurse at the home that Lundquist had blocked her path to the bathroom by putting a table near the end of the bed. The nurse moved the table ignoring Lindquists’s objections. When the staff showed up to wake Barrow they found her dead and the table had been moved back to the end of the bed.

After the incident, the staff moved Lundquist to another room with a different roommate. After spying on a plastic bag she said to her new roommate  “I hope I don’t have to use that”.  She was then sent to the hospital.