SEATTLE — The King County unit that prosecutes elder abuse says its tackling a problem that has tripled in the last decade.
According to AARP, nationwide financial scams cost older Americans more than $28 billion per year. Prosecutors call it an underreported problem.
"We really have not been talking about that the way we need to be,” said Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Page Ulrey.
Regarding elder abuse, last year across the state, Adult Protective Services received 65,844 reports. Of those reports, 12,785 occurred in King County.
According to prosecutors, one of the county's recent cases involved Georgio Stevens, who pleaded guilty to scamming 17 victims.
"What he would typically do is wait for an older person to pull into a grocery store parking lot,” said Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Eileen Alexander.
Alexander said Stevens would tell them something was wrong with their car, then offer to fix it while they did their grocery shopping.
"All this time he is charming them and chatting with them and engaging with them and they wouldn't even realize they left their debit card with them,” Alexander said.
According to investigators, Stevens was caught on camera cashing in at ATMs and was sentenced to two years in prison.
In another pending case, a Seattle woman is charged with more than 40 counts of identity theft after allegedly finding victims in the phonebook, posing as an investigator who just detected fraud, and telling people if they gave her their information, she could intervene.
"The defendant would then turn around, use that information, immediately calling the bank and posing then as the victim,” said Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Kathy Van Olst.
Van Olst said that led to transfers to the woman’s account and thousands of dollars in unauthorized payments.
The pending case was filed in August and the Seattle woman pleaded not guilty.
"The people who are being victimized are our parents and our grandparents and our friends and they will be us in the future and as a society, we care, I hope we care about that,” said Ulrey.