The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is charged with protecting the nation’s elderly from financial predators and has answered a recent information request outlining the Office of Older Americans (an agency of the CFPB) challenges and plans for preventing elder abuse. The CFPB reports that persons aged 60 or older lost at least $2.9 billion in fraud and the agency has set out to prevent such steep losses in the future. Just a few measures they are taking including increasing financial literacy efforts, providing more free financial information and resources to seniors, and preventing the exploitation of aging veterans. For more on this continue reading the following article from JDSupra.
She was already in her late nineties, a renowned and beloved philanthropist, bearing a name that symbolizes wealth and status. Her son was already a senior citizen, when he schemed to rob her of her independence, her wealth, her properties, and her dignity. She was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, chronic anemia, and other ailments that affect the elderly. Properties of great value were sold without the mother’s knowledge, or with her dubious consent, and then no record was kept of the distribution of the proceeds. Roberta Brooke Astor died on August 13, 2007, at the age of 105.
On November 27, 2007, indictments on criminal charges were announced against Mrs. Astor’s son, Anthony D. Marshall, and attorney Francis X. Morrissey Jr.
The criminal charges were grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property, forgery, scheming to defraud, falsifying business records, offering a false instrument for filing, and conspiracy in plundering Mrs. Astor’s $198 million estate.
The trial of Marshall and Morrissey started March 30, 2009, and on October 8, 2009 the jury convicted Anthony D. Marshall of one of two charges of grand larceny, the most serious of a number of charges brought against him. The grand larceny conviction carries a mandatory prison sentence, meaning that Marshall could spend between 1 and 25 years in prison. Francis X. Morrissey Jr. was convicted of forgery.
All the money and status did not protect Brooke Astor from the depredations of her son.
If this happened to her, then, for most of the elderly, lacking the benefits of money and status, how may they hope to protect their financial interests from similar scurrilous plundering, when they are old and infirm?
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is involved in providing financial protection against elder abuse; indeed, it is specifically tasked with that responsibility. The Bureau’s Office of Older Americans is charged by the Dodd-Frank Act with examining certifications of financial advisors who serve elderly individuals and it plans to make recommendations to Congress on how to protect older consumers. Recently, the CFPB issued an information request regarding Senior Financial Exploitation.
In considering the challenges that the elderly must face in order to avoid financial abuse, the following outline of the CFPB’s recent information request should be looked upon as a set of questions, the answers to which may provide new ways and means to protect them from the snares of financial predators.
This article was republished with permission from JDSupra.
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