by Garee T. Gasperian, Esq.
I am an estate planning attorney with a practice concentrating on providing legal services to protect elders. I have been involved in numerous conservatorship matters and am on the panel of attorneys appointed by the Los Angeles Superior Court to represent proposed conservatees. I counsel families on how to safeguard a senior from undue influence and draft documents to provide some protection. The best safeguard, taking away the senior’s control, is something the senior will usually not agree to do.
Recently (and unfortunately) I was on the other side of the desk when a close family member (let’s say my father) was swindled out of $200,000. How did this happen? My father likes to trade through a brokerage account using his computer access. Like many ninety-something-year-olds, he really does not understand the computer (except how to trade). The swindlers caused him to believe his computer, including his brokerage account, was compromised. Very trained in finding the weak points or buttons of their victim, the scammers caused my father to believe that he needed to take shoeboxes of cash to the local CVS and clandestinely hand over the box through the back window of the “couriers’” car.
The irony is that we had safeguards in place. We saw the big withdrawal from his account and were notified of other potentially harmful acts he was taking. So why didn’t these safeguards save the day?
My father was “programmed” to believe he was about to be swindled by an unidentified family member and instructed to lie to his loved ones. Yes, you read that correctly.
When family members (and financial institutions) asked what he was doing, he had wonderfully plausibly believable reasons. While having our doubts, we just let it go. And that, my friends, was our mistake. We believed his stories because, after all, that was my dad (he was the parent, not me).
We should have been in his face. We should have drilled down further to get answers to his answers. In other words, I should have interrogated him like an experienced trial attorney. But because he was my dad, we did not do that. And that is where I and other family members failed. You can’t be Mr. Nice Guy. If it does not sound right, it most likely is not right. Do not let it go. You must challenge them – yes, get in their face. If I had done that with my father, I could have rescued him from handing over hundreds of thousands of dollars to the scammers.
