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CARE Targets Consumer Fraud
By Dave Downey, North County Times
April 3, 2005
Eighty-eight-year-old Maxine Sullivan remembers well the call she took from a telemarketer two years ago.
When someone on the other end said she could have her very own, uniquely comfortable, electric adjustable bed for the low price of $5,000, Sullivan thought of her persistent leg cramps and back pain, and rattled off her credit card number over the phone.
"I guess I was a sucker," said Sullivan, in an interview last week at her Lake Elsinore home. "They make it sound so easy and so great, that it's everything you would ever want."
But it wasn't so great. After sleeping on the bed half a night, she knew it wasn't what she wanted. It didn't soothe her back and legs. It made things worse.
"It was hard as a brick," said the spunky woman with curly light brown hair, who once drove logging trucks in the Pacific Northwest for a living.
She picked up the phone. Sullivan told the company the bed wasn't working correctly.
"They told me I must have done something to it," she said. "And when I asked them to take it back, they hung up on me. They got real smart."
Sullivan's experience is hardly unique. Consumer fraud is one of the fastest-growing crimes in Riverside County and across the nation, and ---- as the population ages ---- senior citizens are increasingly becoming the primary targets, said Margo Hamilton, regional manager for the county's Curtailing Abuse Related to the Elderly program.
"One reason they are targeted is because they have money," Hamilton said. "They have saved. They have assets. And they are usually at home. Also, that generation doesn't like to be rude. You and I have no problem hanging up on somebody, but that generation has a hard time hanging up on people."
Hamilton said statistics show that Americans lose an estimated $40 billion a year as a result of telemarketing fraud, and that half of victims are at least 50 years old. Still, in her opinion, the country's leaders are only gradually coming to recognize the severity of the problem, and its potential to get a lot worse because the huge Baby Boomer segment of the population is rocketing toward retirement age.
"It is a silent issue, and it doesn't come to the forefront until it happens to us or to someone in our families," she said.
Nominated for national award
In Riverside County, officials recognized the severity of the problem several years ago. Hamilton said that is in large part why the program was just named by Harvard University as one of 50 semifinalists for a national award that annually honors the best government programs. Six winners are to be selected from that group on July 27 for the 2005 Innovations in American Government Awards. Each winner will take home a $100,000 grant ---- twice as much money as the Riverside County program operated with in its inaugural year.
County Supervisor Jeff Stone said the program is attracting national recognition because it helps potential victims "identify investment scam artists who prey on vulnerable seniors who must live on a fixed income, while their expenses are rising at a faster pace."
The program, which goes by the acronym "CARE," traces its roots back to the mid-1990s, when Hamilton was working on the staff of former county Supervisor Kay Ceniceros. Her job was to field calls from senior citizens and address issues of concern to them. Before long, it became apparent that one of their biggest concerns was consumer fraud.
In July 1997, Hamilton persuaded Ceniceros' successor, Jim Venable, and other county officials to launch a pilot project in the 3rd District, which today stretches from Temecula and Murrieta to Hemet and Idyllwild. Hamilton recalls the debut well. The fledgling program had a budget of $50,000 and a staff of one.
"When I started this it was just me and my telephone and my computer, working out of my home," said Hamilton, who lives in Hemet.
In 1998, the program reached out to Palm Springs and the desert. By 2000, the program had expanded to include the entire county. Today, it has 10 full-time staff members, an annual budget of $750,000 and a half dozen offices, including one in Lake Elsinore.
Having started out under the umbrella of the county Office on Aging, the program now operates under the oversight of Adult Protective Services.
In the almost eight years of its existence, CARE has taught more than 27,000 senior citizens how to avoid becoming victims of consumer fraud through weekly workshops at churches, mobile-home parks and community centers, Hamilton said.
The program has trained nearly 9,000 people who regularly work with seniors to spot and report financial abuse leveled against the elderly, she said.
And, as of March 1, a total of 3,459 victims of consumer fraud had been helped. In working with those senior citizens, Hamilton said, CARE teams have stepped in to prevent potential victims from completing deals for products and services that would have cost them $16.4 million. And, she said, teams have recovered $17.4 million in losses for victims.
"If we can show people how not to lose their money in the first place, that is a whole lot easier than trying to recover the money after it has already been spent," said Dorothy Miller, district coordinator for communities in the Interstate 15 corridor north of Murrieta.
Typically, Miller said, just 10 percent of losses are returned. Often that is because seniors signed contracts that limit their options.
Someone on your side
Maxine Sullivan exhausted her options. When the adjustable bed was late in arriving, she called to cancel the purchase because delivery in three days or less was "guaranteed." When a hard-sell negotiator from the bed company offered to reduce the purchase price by $1,200, she decided to go ahead and buy it.
When the bed arrived, it was anything but the soft product advertised over the phone. And mechanical problems with the bed prevented her from being able to prop her head slightly, the way she liked.
"I wanted it to come up like if you had two pillows under your head," Sullivan said. "But it wouldn't stay there."
When the company wouldn't cooperate, Sullivan looked for and found a pit bull of an advocate in CARE's Miller.
"We try to threaten them in a very nice way," Miller said.
Miller and the CARE team contacted the Better Business Bureau and filed a complaint. The case went to arbitration. Eventually, a judge ruled in Sullivan's favor and ordered her $3,800 returned.
"It is wonderful to know that you've got somebody on your side," Sullivan said.
Of course, said Sullivan's friend Grace Cox, 72, who lives two doors down, the whole thing never would have happened had Sullivan followed the simple precautions of not buying over the phone or with a credit card.
"I'm taking her credit cards away from her," Cox joked. "And I told her she can't order anything over the phone or I'll kick her butt."
"She's the mouthy one who tries to tell me what to do," Sullivan shot back.
Sullivan finally did get what she wanted. After getting her money back, the spunky 88-year-old drove down to a bed store in Murrieta.
"I bounced around on different beds and said, 'I'll take that one,'" she said. "And I just paid cash for that."
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