Scammers bilk elderly Mass. residents out of $44k

DEERFIELD, Mass. — Police said that two elderly Massachusetts residents were scammed out of a total of $44,000 recently in separate incidents involving random telephone callers saying they needed money to bail their grandchildren out of jail.

The two incidents, one resulting in the loss of $14,000 and the other of $30,000, are the latest in ongoing scams where telephone callers target the elderly, said Deerfield (Mass.) Police detective Adam Sokoloski.

The callers pretend to be the lawyer or legal representative for a grandchild who has been arrested, and they need money for bail or to pay for legal representation.

The department gets calls daily from people reporting getting a strange call from someone asking for money. In most instances, the people receiving the call do not give any money, he said. But there are cases when the people getting the call agree to send money to the caller.

“We get calls all the time and it’s heartbreaking when people lose money,” he said.

He said there have been four or five cases just this year in Deerfield where people have given large amounts of money to scammers.

Police would rather hear about it before any money is exchanged than afterward. Because once payment is made, the money is basically gone and there’s very little chance of getting it back.

In the two recent incidents, money in one instance was sent by FedEx to an address in Florida where it disappeared. In the other, $30,000 was wired to Wells Fargo Bank, and once it was received, the account was closed out.

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Scammers bilk elderly Mass. residents out of $44k

Woman, 97, Bilked Out of Thousands of Dollars by Retirement Home Workers, Authorities Say

For eight years, 97-year-old Grace Watanabee called the Symphony Residences of Lincoln Park home.

But Watanabee has been removed from the senior living facility, after Cook County authorities say several employees stole more than a half a million dollars from her bank account.

The accusations have stunned some residents.

"I feel like that shouldn’t have happened there," resident Peter Brown said.

“I’ve never seen such widespread corruption at a nursing home before," acting Cook County Public Guardian Charles Golbert said.

The Cook County’s Public Guardian office had been the ones to discover the alleged thefts, when Watanabee’s banking institution reached out to them.

"This was a woman who made very modest withdrawals, for years and years," Golbert said. "And then all of a sudden checks for tens of thousands of dollars started going out to strangers."

The public guardian says the employees wrote checks for as much as $25,000 to $50,000 at any given time and copies of those checks have been included in a lawsuit against those employees and the parent company of Symphony Residences.

“The employees ranged from the very top of the finance manager to the activities director to the hairdresser at the nursing home to the receptionist,” Golbert said.

Watanabee suffers from dementia and the county’s public guardian has been watching over her because the 97-year-old has no surviving relatives.

In statement, a Symphony spokesperson said “the employees suspected of involvement are no longer employed at the facility and all staff were retrained in company policies relating to receiving gifts from residents and their families. The team at the residences has done everything in its power to prevent this from happening again.”

“Ms. Watanabee had no family visiting, so she was vulnerable so that is how this happened,” Golbert said.

Chicago police have launched a criminal investigation and the public guardian has started to work on getting the money back.

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Woman, 97, Bilked Out of Thousands of Dollars by Retirement Home Workers, Authorities Say