Elderly, a bit senile, visiting Vegas — man was perfect fraud victim

By Abigail Goldman

Tuesday, Nov. 10, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Wilson Smith met a nice woman in Las Vegas. They spent two days together, it seems, before Smith, in town for only a short visit, headed to a high school reunion and then back home to California — and his new friend started calling.

Smith was 78 and in the early stages of dementia. She was 20-something and persistent. In three years she gutted Smith’s bank accounts, used his financial information to obtain at least 28 credit cards and spent $750,000.

When the fraud was finally exposed, so was the depth of Smith’s Alzheimer’s. He wired her money until there was none, bought her a car, gave her his bank information and let trash bags full of unopened bills pile up in his basement. And yet, when accountants walked Smith through the financial wreckage, the former banker was as shocked as anybody by his unwitting hand in the nightmare.

The woman remains wanted by police. Smith is now in an assisted-living facility. His story, meanwhile, was shown on Capitol Hill in October, part of a short documentary created by advocacy groups seeking passage of the Elder Justice Act. Though 150 short videos were made in this effort, it was Smith’s case — one of the worst horror stories — that was selected to be shown during the Washington briefing.

Investigators closed 1,163 cases of elder abuse in Clark County during the previous fiscal year — a number employees at Nevada’s Aging and Disability Services Division say is a fraction of the whole.

It’s widely believed that for every case reported, at least five go unchecked, said Kay Panelli, chief of the division’s Elder Rights unit. Other estimates are far more grim — national agencies have estimated that almost 90 percent of elder abuse goes unreported. One study estimated seniors lose $2.6 billion to fraud every year. As the number of elderly Americans increases, cases of abuse are expected to grow, Panelli said. In Clark County, with its large retiree population, there are penalty enhancements for crimes committed against the elderly. Still, across the nation, advocates say, the patchwork network of laws protecting seniors is not enough.

And so Smith sits before the camera, looking dazed and distant as his wife and the accountant who uncovered the fraud tell viewers how a young woman in Clark County dismantled the savings, and life, of an elderly man she met in a Strip casino.

“She wasn’t offering sex. It was worse, in my view,” Cynthia Healy told the Sun. Healy is the accountant Smith’s relatives called when his wife, Pat, bounced a check — the first sign something was off. “She said she wanted to be his friend, and like a drug, that was all Mr. Smith focused on. Phone calls from this woman, and her friendship. He would do whatever she asked.”

She used Smith’s income and credit to purchase 15 to 20 cell phones, plane tickets to Las Vegas from across the country, hotel rooms and several accounts with a shipping company. It’s clear, Healy said, the woman was running some kind of business with help from co-conspirators.

It’s also clear the woman is not done. In late October, almost three years after Healy locked down all of Smith’s finances, a collections letter from a Las Vegas jeweler landed on Healy’s desk in California with the woman’s name on it.

Healy specializes in elderly fraud cases. Smith’s is the worst she’s seen.

“The senior population is so very vulnerable to attention. They want to have someone to talk to,” she said. “But the people being taken advantage of are not unintelligent. This can happen to anybody.”

One-third of the elderly abuse cases Clark County logged last fiscal year involved financial exploitation — the remaining two-thirds were physical abuse and neglect. The vast majority of elder abuse is perpetrated by people who are close to the victim — friends, neighbors, caregivers and family members, said Scott Parkin, spokesman for the National Council on Aging, one of the organizations using the video to campaign for the Elder Justice Act.

There are federal laws protecting children and animals, but not senior citizens, Parkin said. The act, which has been floating around since 2002, would spend more than $600 million over four years to fund sweeping adult protective measures. This year advocates from elder justice groups decided it was time to push hard for the act, Parkin said, launching the campaign and a Web site (elderjusticenow.org) where users are invited to watch videos like Smith’s and submit their own stories.

In October, the Senate Finance Committee passed a health care bill that included the act as an amendment. There are indications the Senate Health Committee will do the same, said Bob Blancato, national coordinator of the Elder Justice Commission. If the Senate’s final health care bill includes the act, advocates are optimistic that it will survive a merger with the House bill, Blancato said.

Of course, this is a tough time to push expensive legislation. But the same national financial strain that could hurt the bill could also drive up cases of elderly abuse, as desperate people become more inclined to target seniors, Parkin said.

Because the victims are often close with the perpetrators, there’s a hesitancy to involve law enforcement, Panelli said. Even when a victim wants to press charges, cases are complicated when it’s revealed the elderly person willfully, if blindly, gave over financial information and assets. The same diminished capacity that prompts such behaviors also becomes a problem when it’s time to testify.

In the end, there’s seldom any chance of recovering lost assets. The Smiths don’t expect to get their money back.

“I have never personally had a case of financial abuse so extreme and so well orchestrated,” Healy said, “What’s frightening is that he is probably not the only victim, and there are no boundaries to how far people will go.”