California Nursing Home Abuse Lawyer Blog
California Seniors and Fraudulent Telephone Calls
Older adults are becoming especially susceptible to elder financial abuse, and a recent article in the San Mateo Daily Journal suggests that police have noticed a “rise in fraudulent telephone scams that target seniors.” Elder abuse can take many different forms, and scammers often prey upon older adults who aren’t familiar with new financial technologies and have money saved. And this form of abuse can occur anywhere—at the home of a caregiver or at a nursing home. For example, we recently wrote about a financial abuse scheme at a Palo Alto care community for the elderly.
What have some of the recent scams looked like? According to the San Francisco police, there’s a new telephone scam in California in which an older adult receives a phone call from a person who claims to be a paralegal who is calling from the Attorney general’s office. The caller then tells the elderly victim that there’s “a warrant for her arrest” and that she’ll need to “pay a fee by using a Vanilla prepaid cash card, or risk being sent to jail.” When the scam first was reported by a woman in South San Francisco, the victim described the caller as having a “Russian accident.”
First, it’s important to have a clear idea about why hospices are bringing in relatively healthy older adults, and how these companies are profiting from non-terminal patients. How did this start to happen? In short, many hospice care centers have begun recruiting patients with aggressive marketing tactics, and many of those patients aren’t terminal. It’s in the financial interest of a hospice chain to “find patients well before death,” the Washington Post reported. And the reason is simple: “Medicare pays a hospice about $150 a day per patient for routine care, regardless of whether the company sends a nurse or any other worker out that day. That means healthier patients, who generally need less help and live longer, yield more profits.”
