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| Eleanor & Stanley Podolski, Jr. |
MARYLAND HEIGHTS • Coded locks on
the retirement center doors speak to the challenges confronting patients
and their caretakers. The security is supposed to keep people such as
Stanley Podolski Jr. in, not out.
He landed here after
wandering off from less-secure facilities. Podolski, 88, has dementia.
Still, he remembers growing up in north St. Louis. Being a butcher
there, then a loan officer at Pulaski Bank when it was on Cass Avenue.
He remembers being involved with St. Stanislaus Kostka Church, an independent Catholic congregation with Polish roots.
But
he needed prompting to remember how he foiled a crime a few years ago
that victimizes more folks like him every year. Somebody tried to rob
part of his precious nest egg.
It wasn’t done with a mask
and gun. Rather, blame fell to a woman he liked dealing with who sat at
a desk off to the side of the teller windows at Regions Bank, 11920 New
Halls Ferry Road, in Florissant.
Podolski invested
$25,000 in certificates of deposit there in 2013 with the help of
Kathryn Ann Smith, now 66, a bank associate, according to a police
report that laid out what happened next.
When Podolski’s
certificates matured, police records say Smith suggested that he put the
cash in a money market account, which he did.
Six months passed.
Then
Podolski wanted the cash in the money market account to be invested in a
new batch of certificates of deposit. Smith was to complete the
necessary forms. Podolski received a letter in the mail — without
Regions Bank letterhead — detailing the five different CD accounts.
When
Podolski checked his balances one day, there were discrepancies. With
the help of his son, a former auditor and bank board member, they found
monthly withdrawals they didn’t know about from the former money market
account worth at least $22,000.
He had been the victim of
a type of abuse that can be a tricky arena because it’s often laced
with shame, diminishing mental health, stressed family dynamics and
hopelessness.
Experts say financial exploitation of the
elderly typically involves a person in a position of trust: anyone from a
caregiver to a longtime hairdresser. There’s also the garden variety of
scam artists who befriend seniors by telephone, online or in person.
And
it’s a crime that will be a threat for a long time, with about 10,000
people turning 65 every day nationwide. Pockets of St. Louis County in
particular, which saw tremendous growth following World War II, are ripe
territory for financial abuse of older adults.
There are systems in place to help, but with limited effectiveness.
A
Missouri law passed last year, for example, gives financial firms
greater authority to step in if they have cause to believe a senior is
being exploited.
The state, meanwhile, has seen a spike in calls to its elder abuse hotline.
In
2015, there were 27,595 calls to the hotline, of which 5,497 were about
finances. In 2012, there were 23,693 calls, including 4,174 regarding
finances, a fourth of which are typically substantiated.
“We
are worried that elder abuse is underreported, not just in Missouri,
but nationally,” said Celesta Hartgraves, director of the state’s
Division of Senior and Disability Services.
She said more
people will be abused as the number of older adults increases. She said
seniors can be lonely. They tend to listen to scams. Some have greater
financial resources yet suffer cognitive declines. They are often
embarrassed to report being taken advantage of.
“Seniors are really attractive targets for that kind of fraud,” Hartgraves said.
Raising suspicions
Podolski’s case is unusual in that the victim got his money back just before dementia set in.
But that’s probably only because Stanley Podolski had a son — and a former bank auditor at that — as an advocate.
Even then, it took pushing for answers.
Podolski
said in an interview that he had told the bank branch manager about his
suspicions of missing money, but the manager initially suggested that
it was Podolski, 85 at the time, who was probably mistaken. The manager
described Smith, who had worked at the bank for years and was about to
retire, as golden.
The more Podolski and his son pressed,
the less the bank’s story held up. Surveillance tape didn’t place
Podolski at the bank at the time of withdrawals. Signatures were off.
And, amid Podolski’s chats with the manager, Smith walked off the job,
never to return.
St. Louis County police found her at
home, in the 10400 block of Durness Drive. Her elderly mother let them
in and a detective explained the investigation. According to the police
report, Smith said she had no idea what the detective was talking about.
The detective, who didn’t believe her, showed her a withdrawal slip.
“That’s my handwriting, but that was for my mother’s money market,” Smith told police.
She
clammed up and refused to say more without an attorney. Police arrested
Smith on the spot. She was accused of forgery and financial
exploitation of the elderly, charges to which she pleaded guilty.
“I caught her,” Podolski said from the retirement home.
Eleanor, his wife of 66 years, sat beside him, helped him navigate his history.
“She probably thought he wouldn’t remember,” Eleanor said about her husband being targeted.
Changing the law
In
typical cases, seniors aren’t financially savvy enough to detect fraud,
or don’t have children who hawkishly monitor their finances. There are
seniors who have their savings drained and are too embarrassed to talk
about it.
Financial institutions are aware of the risks
but have been somewhat limited by what they can do if they suspect
someone is taking advantage of a client. But the laws are changing.
Wells
Fargo Advisors formed an elder abuse task force in recent years at its
St. Louis headquarters to spot suspected abuse and poor judgment. The
firm said it has worked with the attorney general’s office to get
clients assistance and guardianship.
The task force looks
for red flags, like when a 92-year-old client worth $8 million appeared
confused and thought his accountant worked for the post office. It
turned out no fraud was taking place, but Wells Fargo Advisors asked
police to do a wellness check and filed a report with Adult Protective
Services for possible self-neglect. The man has since been moved to an
assisted-living facility and his neighbor is in the process of being
appointed guardian.
In another case, Wells Fargo Advisors
intervened when a widower in his 60s formed an online relationship with
someone he believed to be a 37-year-old woman. He eventually sent her
$26,000 when she asked for money to resolve a legal matter. The man’s
daughter caught on but wasn’t authorized to make decisions on her
father’s account.
Eventually, Wells Fargo Advisors
contacted the attorney general’s office, and an investigator was
assigned. The man is being assessed for guardianship.
Ron Long leads the task force, which was formalized in 2014.
“A
lot of it was the numbers continued to grow,” Long said of suspicious
cases. “The thought was to have a central place for financial advisers
to call.”
He worked with lawmakers to create the Senior
Savings Protection Act, which was enacted in Missouri in 2015. It allows
broker-dealers to notify certain parties of potential financial
exploitation.
They can also refuse disbursement of funds from a
brokerage account for up to 10 days.
Wells Fargo Advisors
has relied on the new law just once since it passed. The state has
received six complaints and is working to train brokers on how to make
use of the law.
Meanwhile, California-based Wells Fargo
bank was recently slapped with a historic $185 million fine and more
than 5,000 employees have been fired for opening accounts without client
knowledge as a means to boost sales figures.
On a
smaller scale, Kirkwood financial adviser Robert S. Beyer II, 45, was
just convicted in federal court on charges stemming from promising
investors 8 percent to 18 percent annual returns from Heroic Life
Assurance Company, which had a foundation bankrolled by a fictitious
wealthy South American named Jesus Cristobal. Officials said the
victims, in their mid-50s and early 60s, lost about $300,000.
Saying sorry
Much of the responsibility to ferret out abuse remains in the awareness of seniors themselves and their caregivers.
After the incident at Regions Bank, Podolski’s son, Stanley Podolski III, took over control of his parents’ finances.
“I can’t believe that my dad was the only one” who was ripped off by Smith, he said.
He and his parents shook their heads at the sentencing.
“We couldn’t believe that she didn’t get any jail time,” said Eleanor Podolski.
Smith
pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years’ probation. If she
fulfills the terms of probation, the forgery and exploitation of the
elderly convictions will be wiped from the public record.
Ed
Magee, spokesman for St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert
McCulloch, said it was a matter of getting restitution or jail time.
“It was either or,” Magee said by email. “I am sure the victim wanted the money.”
Had
a weapon been involved, he said, there would have been a 10-year
minimum sentence for first-degree robbery. In this case, forgery and
exploitation of the elderly didn’t have minimum sentences.
He said
Smith, who lost her job, had no prior convictions.
“Her
record will be clear after five years but will always be available to
law enforcement and can be used in any future prosecution if needed,”
Magee said.
In an interview, Smith took drags from a
cigarette as she sat on her front porch, which had a large U.S. flag
tacked up from Labor Day.
“It was stupid, really stupid, and I am paying for it,” said Smith, one of her six grown children sitting beside her.
Smith
said she left studies in speech therapy years ago to raise a family.
They lived in a Glasgow Village home that she stays in now.
She
said she went to work at the bank in 1992 to help pay for private
school for her children. First she was a teller, then a teller
supervisor. She was a financial services rep when she got into trouble
in 2013.
She said she didn’t know why she stole from Podolski.
“I
just always figured I’d put it back, but it didn’t happen,” she said,
though she said she paid back the money after being arrested.
An
official from Regions Bank, based in Birmingham, Ala., was apologetic
and said the case in Florissant spawned companywide changes. Those
include security alerts and internal reviews whenever associates process
transactions on inactive accounts.
“There is nothing we
value more than the trust of our customers, and, unfortunately, in this
case, one of our former associates violated both the trust of her
customer and the trust we had in her as well,” bank spokesman Jeremy
King said by email.
He said Regions Bank checked to see if other clients were targeted. “Thankfully, no additional cases were found.”
Smith didn’t want to comment about what the bank could do to decrease the risk of forgery.
But,
she said, with the availability of online banking services by computer
and cellphone, there’s no reason not to check your balances most days.
“Everybody should,” she said.
Full Article & Source:
At 85 he foiled a financial scam; other seniors aren't so lucky
