565 arrested in fraud schemes

I saw that headline on CNN and MSNBC today: 565 people were arrested in fraud schemes in five countries, the U.S., Canada, Costa Rica, the Netherlands, and Spain. The MSNBC article is here. And here is a Department of Justice fact sheet summarizing the crimes. Some of the crimes listed are eerily familiar.

Although this investigation is more recent than the one that included my mother's misfortunes, my thoughts went to all those names on all those little scraps of paper. They weren't real names, of course, but they were real to her. Did they arrest John Mason, Steve Mercer, Claude Azzario, Lewis Marley, Victor Torres? What about John Henry, Harry Diamond? What about all those customs agents and Lloyd's of London representatives demanding fees to deliver her lottery winnings?

I had to disconnect Mother's land line and change her cell phone number twice to get rid of Steve Mercer. Otherwise, he would still be calling, as would they all.

Little scraps of yellow paper everywhere

That January day my mother's house was littered with junk mail, magazines (including duplicates), boxes of stuff everywhere. She usually knew when I was coming and tidied up a bit, stashing boxes behind furniture and in every corner of every closet and under beds. I took her by surprise that day. One thing was ubiquitous -- little torn pieces -- corners, half pages -- of lined yellow paper. I was still finding them until the day I closed on the house. Sometimes I still find them in her purse -- when I can get near it, that is. She guards it with her life.

Mother wasn't totally crazy yet. She had had the presence of mind to write down the name of every caller, date of the call, area code and phone number, the amount of money they wanted and where to send it, all on little snippets of yellow paper. Her memory was selective, but she had retained more than she wanted to admit. The snippets of paper served as reminders for the narratives she wrote of the scams. One such narrative was already in process before I found her out. A villain named Claude in Canada had identified himself as a government official wanting information about the Canadian lottery. The narrative started out: "Dear Claude" and was titled "Canadian Sweepstakes Group." Claude called often and occasionally sent gifts. He had a French accent.

I stayed in touch with the FBI agent who wanted all the information I could muster for an ongoing California-based investigation of the Canadians (Costa Rica was new to him). Mother liked the idea of helping the FBI so I had little trouble convincing her to gather up the little scraps and continue her narrative writing. It kept her occupied while I held her captive (her words) in Fayetteville as much as I could. The information was scattered and not well organized, so she was the only person who could conceivably pull it together. I was shocked at how well she could do this and how well she could still write. Yes, it was a slow and painful process, but she managed to organize the information into surprisingly coherent lists over a few weeks time.

How to find a lawyer in two hours

You might be wondering how I found a lawyer so fast that I was in and out of court within a few hours of initiating my search. Well, the morning of January 16, my law student daughter called her friend Amelia who was already a full-fledged lawyer, specializing in guess what -- guardianships, trusts, and estates. Although Amelia practiced in another state, she started making phone calls to Little Rock and within an hour of contacting her, we had a recommendation -- George. Concurrent with that, my brother-in-law made some contacts too. The first lawyer he referred me to said I had no chance of winning in court, so I scratched him off the list. The second lawyer he spoke with, Susan from a fancy Little Rock law firm, thought there was a slim chance, but while they talked, I set up an appointment in Little Rock with George at noon that day. You know the rest. We later got a $250 bill from the fancy Little Rock law firm for that 20 minute conversation with Susan.

Thank goodness for Amelia. I was still in denial about the extent of my sweet, elderly mother's vulnerability to swindlers, scams, and obsessive spending. Amelia said firmly, "get the credit cards"! I did as told, and just in the nick of time too. It was to be a year before I succeeded in cancelling all of them and year and a half before I could pay off the debt.

John Mason

Let’s pick back up on the evening of January 16, 2004. My sister and I return to Benton and try to call Mother to be sure she’s ok. Her phone was busy for 45 minutes.

The next morning, I head back to Little Rock, determined to persuade Mother to return to Fayetteville with me for a few days before the next court hearing on January 21. I also had some work to do.

First, I requested her checkbooks. She handed them over, one by one, as long as I promised to copy the registers and give them back. A notable exception was the checkbook for the Bank of America checking account that was overdrawn and frozen. Failure to obtain that one would turn out to be a catastrophic error.

The next thing on my agenda was to find out who she spoke with for 45 minutes the night before. At first she said, “it was a wrong number”. I pressed on. “Well, it was a telemarketer, but I told him I couldn’t talk to him.” Me: “you talked to someone for 45 minutes.” Her: “Oh well, Mary Ann called, and then Malcolm called too.” Me: “their numbers weren’t on your caller-id.”

Changing my approach, I began to question her about the ATM withdrawals in Toronto. Relieved that I had changed my line of questioning, she responded haltingly and reluctantly: “ It’s for an investment: I’m an investor in a $120 million dollar fund that generates income for widows and orphans.” She had sent an ATM card to the fund’s “manager” so he could make withdrawals to invest on her behalf! I won’t bore you with all the details of the bizarre conversation that ensued, but it was this person she had spoken with for 45 minutes the night before. She had told him about the court order and asked him to mail her ATM card back to her. He had cautioned her that it was very, very important that she not reveal his name or details about his investment opportunities to anyone. I persevered, and she finally revealed his name, “John Mason.”

The phone works better than a gun

Though the vultures attacked on many fronts, the telephone was the weapon of choice for my mother's victimization. I usually checked her caller-id when I visited; lists of numbers with unfamiliar area codes predominated. I would ask, "Who is calling you?" Her reply -- "..just a bunch of telemarketers." Me: "You don't talk to them do you?" Her: "Oh, no. I just tell them to leave me alone." Uneasy though it made me, I accepted her answer, still in denial about the extent to which my mother would lie to me. Too bad I didn't look up those odd area codes -- they were in Canada.

What did they know and when did they know it?

If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably deduced that lots of people knew about my mother’s penchant for sending large sums of money to Canada and Costa Rica. To name a few:

The FBI. The FBI intercepted a $2000 check to a scam artist in Canada in October of 2002. The agent went to my mother’s house and informed her that the $40,000 or so that she had paid for Canadian Lottery fees had gone to scams. He believed her when she said she understood and would not be tricked again. Foolish man. He described her as such a sweet lady. Those of us who know her are painfully aware that she will smile and nod in agreement and then just do whatever she wants.

Bank of the Ozarks – Along with bounced checks and frequent large cash withdrawals, Stacy told me about a $13,000 transmission to an alleged granddaughter who was a student in Canada in 2003. My daughter was living in Virginia at the time and has never been to Canada.

Simmons Bank – Two tellers there told me of frequent transmissions of large sums of money. Unable to convince my mother to hang on to her money, they even sent a bank officer to her house to offer help and advice. She said she was perfectly capable of handling her finances herself. She stills maintains that position to this day.

Bank of America – You’ve already read about that. Those accounts were opened in July of 2003 and drained by January of 2004.

Western Union. In September 2003, Western Union banned my mother from making wire transfers. She recruited Bill, an elderly gentlemen friend of 40 years, to make the transfers for her. When she ran out of money, he started sending his own money.

My uncle – Around 1995 or 1996, my mother sent $5000 to a lottery scam in Troy, Michigan. When she told my uncle about her winnings, he made a couple of phone calls and determined that it was a scam. Seemingly embarrassed and contrite, she begged him not to tell anyone. Fooled by her demeanor just like the rest of us, he agreed to keep it a secret.

It hardly seems possible that all these people and institutions knew so much for so long, yet Jeannie and I didn't know any of it. Neither of us lives in Little Rock so the likelihood of either of us ever setting foot in any of her banks was very slim. I visited Mother pretty often, but she always had plenty of cash or used a credit card (just wait until I tell you about the credit cards). In retrospect, I think she deliberately avoided ever letting me accompany her to a bank. I had been very suspicious of her financial activity for quite a while, so I sneaked a peak at her checkbook register occasionally when she would leave it on the kitchen counter and never found any irregularities. If I had only known about the four checkbooks hidden in the bedroom.

Ok. My name was on three of my mother's bank accounts. Jeannie's was on two of them. Why weren't we notified? Why did the FBI wait 18 months to contact us? Guess what! Privacy laws! The FBI agent who had worked on her case for eighteen months finally got permission to contact us from government lawyers after Western Union reported Bill's January 14 wire transfer to Costa Rica. He acted quickly.

The process server

Exhausted and frazzled though we were, our day wasn't over yet. Picking up some Corky's barbecue, we raced to the house to eat and break the news to Mother before the process server arrived. I was terrified. I choked down a few bites, and began, gently, oh so gently, to explain the surreptitious activities that Jeannie and I had been sneaking around performing all day. She seemed to grasp the fact that she wouldn't be able to write checks any more which was one of her favorite pastimes, second only to talking on the phone to telemarketers. She interrupted me a couple of times to talk about a $1000 Publisher's Clearing House prize that she was due to receive in a couple of days.

The process server came and did his job; she took the papers inside with little visible emotion. I hugged her and told her not to talk to any telemarketers after we left. As always, she was agreeable and said she wouldn't, but, of course, she did. I scared Jeannie half to death going back to Benton with my erratic and distracted driving.

Making the rounds of the banks

And my sister, what about her? Her name is Jeannie, and she had broken her ankle a month prior to our shockingly personal introduction to the world of criminals who prey on the elderly. She gamely hobbled around on her walker with me (one of the criteria for choosing a lawyer was handicapped access). However, when it came to the banks, she stayed in the car except for the last one. There is a reason for that.

We set out around 4:00 pm with a mission to get to all three banks before closing. Our first stop was a Simmons Bank branch on Chenal Parkway. Since my name was already on the account and since I was armed with a court order, it was easy to take my mother's name off and convert it to a guardianship account. Unfortunately, it contained less than $100. I learned later that we had not gone to the branch she actually used -- she was quite notorious at the Rodney Parham location.

Next stop, Bank of the Ozarks on Chenal Parkway where she had a household checking account and a trust account. Yes, in her more lucid days, she had set up a trust. I had high hopes for finding money there, and my name was on both accounts already. Alas, I couldn't close or "freeze" the checking account because her social security and military retirement checks were electronically deposited, and I couldn't move the deposits to another account without a permanent court order. I left there having found a total of about $300 in both accounts and with instructions to call Stacy at another branch on Monday about the checking account. Thus ensued many conversations with Stacy (more on this later) to whom my mother's penchant for transferring large sums of money was well known.

One final stop: Bank of America where I had not previously known she held any accounts. We tried a branch on Cantrell Road, and the wait was just too long. We arrived at the Rodney Parham Branch twenty minutes before the 6 pm closing time. We hit the jackpot. I don't mean money -- there wasn't any. I mean this was the branch she used, and she was well known to Beverly, the bank's VP, with whom I spent an hour.

First, Beverly showed me the Money Market account transactions. Someone at a Royal bank ATM in Toronto had withdrawn $600 to $700 (probably $1000 Canadian) almost daily until the account was depleted to a balance of $13. The account was opened with $30,000. I watched in open-jawed amazement as transaction after transaction scrolled down the screen. "You didn't notice this? The bank can't detect such obviously suspicious transactions?" "No" she said.

Next came the checking account which was overdrawn. Beverly noticed a couple of declined ATM transactions -- one from a golf course in California, another in Canada. "You didn't notice this? The bank doesn't flag declined ATM transactions from odd locations?" "No," she said.

My shock deepened as Beverly described some of my mother's bizarre financial transactions. Among them was a cashiers check for $35,000 to someone in Canada. Suspicious that my mother was being scammed, Beverly, with the help of the bank's fraud investigator, tried to talk her out of purchasing this check. Mother went home, thought it over, came back the next day with Bill, and left with her $35,000 cashier's check. She told the bank it was for artwork. It wasn't; it was for fees on her multi-million dollar "winnings" in a Canadian lottery scam. How do I know this? These frightful two days were only the beginning of the unfolding of the massive fraud committed against my mother. So Beverly, does the bank report suspected cases of fraud to the police or anyone? Don't bother, I know the answer.

I was in there so long that Jeannie finally hobbled inside. We chatted with Beverly and the cleaning people, then left. I had closed the money market account and instructed Beverly to freeze the checking account until I could find some money to pay the negative balance. I left there believing that the account was frozen. Really, I did. There will be more, much more on Bank of America.

Collecting evidence

Where was my mother in all this? Well, she didn't know I was in town, so when my sister and I showed up at the house on Friday just before the lawyer appointment, she was so taken aback that she cooperated, initially anyway. She produced a hefty stack of wire transfer receipts totaling over $53,000 during the prior six months, all of them to numerous individuals in Costa Rica. Of course I had to tell her that the FBI needed them in order to get her to hand them over. But when I tried to persuade her to let me take over her finances voluntarily, she became extremely agitated and angrily refused, so we had to leave her in that state and move on.

After the emergency court hearing, our lawyer advised us to visit her banks immediately and freeze her accounts. Once again, we had to go to the house. Again, she was so surprised that she named without hesitation the three banks where she had accounts. Three banks? Why three banks? I only knew about two.

The day the FBI called

On Thursday, January 15, 2004, my cell phone rang in my office. I answered my sister's call, and thus began a long and trying tale of intrigue, greed, grief, deception, and madness. By 5:00 pm that day, I was three hours away from my home in Fayetteville, sitting in my sister's living room. We listened raptly while an FBI agent described in shocking detail the unhappy fate of $80,000 that my mother had transmitted via check and wire to Canada during the previous one and a half years. Just that week, the transmissions had escalated into thousands of dollars each day to Costa Rica with the help of her friend and accomplice Bill. I knew I needed a lawyer fast. By noon the next day, my sister and I were in the lawyer's office with $53,000 worth of wire transfer receipts to Costa Rica. Within two hours, I had an emergency court order granting me guardianship of my mother's person and estate for 90 days. This from the reputedly "meanest" judge in Little Rock who had never before been known to grant emergency guardianship in such a case. The evidence was compelling.