Authored by Nancy Rommelmann via RealClearInvestigations,

It was summer 2021, and my mother’s desk was a mess, including a torn envelope from the IRS shoved in the back of a drawer.

“Mom?” I asked. “Did you pay your taxes?”

My mother, increasingly forgetful at 84, said she wasn’t sure.She told me to call her accountant of 30 years, who said the taxes hadn’t been paid but that he would take care of it.

That’s not all he took care of.

Within the year, a family member had my mother sign a blank check,which the accountant (or someone in his office) filled out for $25,000 to supposedly take over paying my mother’s bills– a task I was already doing. Instead of using the money for bills,the accountant paid himself the lion’s share of the funds. He then sent me an invoice for work I’d previously paid him for, at which point I told him never to contact my mother or me again.

The accountant does not work in some grubby backroom but for a white-shoe firm in a Manhattan office tower. I don’t know if this firm does legitimate business. I do know that the moment he had the opportunity to take advantage of a decades-long trust, he took it.

He’s not the only one. In the six years since I’ve taken my mother’s finances in hand,I’ve dealt with dozens of schemes meant to bilk the elderly, including phone scammers who promised my mother she had won a Mercedes, home health aides who inflated their hours, people forging my mother’s signature, and a relative who had her sign over her car.

“I don’t know why we had to go to the DMV,” my befuddled mother told her caregiver, after the relative had dropped her off and then driven away.

As hard as I tried to protect my mother from con artists, there is no way I could have predicted all the schemes, both clever and dumb, that industries and individuals constantly perpetrate on the elderly. Some will be strangers; others will be trusted confidantes and family members. Did I mention the beloved attorney who convinced my mother to sign away farm equipment worth nearly $200,000?

Source: ZeroHedge News