Common Estate Planning Scams

Speaker: Maritess Bott

Maritess:

Yeah, it’s been crazy. We had a couple of things happen recently with our clients, and even though I know there are lots of scams out there, I can’t believe some of them. Sometimes I’m just dumbfounded.

Anyway, the first one I want to talk about is when somebody is overly nice when you’ve gone through somewhat of a tragic event. What I mean by that—so what happened was a woman passed away very young and unexpectedly. Her surviving spouse, of course, was grieving. All of a sudden, this family friend was very nice to him and wanted to take care of things for him.

Essentially, she’s like, “Okay, I know this is a lot, let me take over.” She took him to a lawyer and signed over power of attorney rights to her. She also made him sign a will. He has minor children, so she put in this will that she was going to be the guardian of the minor children—when she, again, is just more of a family friend. They’re not close at all.

She proceeded to plan everything with respect to the funeral, spending lots of money there. She proceeded to get all the mail and make sure that she’s kind of taking over the finances. This occurred over the course of three months. That’s pretty crazy and scary.

The only reason I knew about it was their financial advisor—who prepared life insurance for them—was kind of curious and wondering, “What’s going on here? Who is this person?” She was filing claims. I had a chance to talk to him. I know the financial advisor, and I was asking him what’s going on.

Sadly, he’s also going through his own health challenge. It’s just a tragedy all around. He was saying, “No, I hardly even know this person. I don’t know what she’s doing.” He was kind of confused.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to right the wrong by updating his estate plan and choosing people he wants, instead of this random person that just sort of came out of the blue to “help” the family.

We haven’t really uncovered everything yet. I don’t know if there’s anything fraudulent that’s happened—hopefully not—but we’re hoping to be able to uncover all of the statements and see what’s happened over the last three to four months, and see what she’s paid and what she’s reportedly doing. And then, of course, take care of the minor children in case something happens to him as well.

This is just a scam that I feel is very common—not common in the obvious sense. It doesn’t feel like a scam to the person, but when you really look at all the steps that happened right after the death of the spouse, there’s truly something different and wrong about it.

I just try to tell clients and forewarn them: don’t make big decisions when somebody passes away. Talk to an advisor—somebody you know, somebody you can trust—and get guidance. Not somebody who just randomly shows up and says, “I’m going to help you.”

That is the moral of the story: just be careful. When you lose someone—or your family has lost someone recently—be on top of them. Take care of them. Check in on them. Make sure no one’s taking advantage of them in that vulnerable state they’re in.

Number two is another scam, which is really dumb-sounding to me.

A person who had lost her husband two years ago was contacted by a gentleman. This woman is 79 years old. The gentleman created a message to her through Messenger on Facebook and said, “I know you because of this person”—just somebody she knew from a long time ago. He said, “She told me that we should connect and thinks we might have a connection.”

This 79-year-old woman, of course, was intrigued by it because she was getting some attention from this man. Turns out, this man allegedly is 62 years old, allegedly is a doctor, allegedly works for the UN. They talked for two months straight, and she’s thinking this man really likes her and wants to be in a relationship with her.

Last week, she tells me, “Oh yeah, this guy’s going to come over.” And I was like, “What? How? You don’t even know him.” Because this guy allegedly lives in a totally different city. I asked, “How much do you know him?” She said, “I know him. We’ve been talking every day.” I was just confused. Who is this person?

Granted, there are love matches that happen online all the time. I don’t want to be totally pessimistic about that. But the dots didn’t add up. We don’t have a 79-year-old woman being sought after by this 62-year-old man, and they’re talking every day, and now he’s going to show up at her house?

We did a little digging. We talked to someone who does private investigating as a profession. He did us a favor by checking things out. We couldn’t find the guy on the internet, by the way. We took his name—couldn’t find a thing about him.

What happened was, the investigator said, “Here’s what we know about this guy.” He found an inquiry in a forum where scams are being reported. The inquiry detailed exactly what this guy told the woman—exactly, to a T. I mean, he’s been doing this to many, many women. If you look at the comments, hundreds of comments from people who already had the same scam. Whoever it is—it’s probably someone from some foreign country—there’s no real person. They just created this identity.

They even posted pictures, and it’s the same pictures that the 79-year-old client had—same exact pictures.

Luckily, we were able to show her this proof. She did not allow this person to come into her life anymore. There was no money exchanged—nothing—just conversations for the last two months. My guess is, the plan is always to woo these women and eventually ask, “Oh, I really need…” because, according to all the comments, they say things like, “I really need some money for this because I have to go to this country,” and so on—some random need of thousands of dollars. Then the women would send it.

It’s terrible. It’s a total scam that’s probably been going on for a long time. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have probably already been paid out to these people, and it makes me so angry that they’re getting away with it.

The woman I’m talking about is someone I know well, someone I really would think wouldn’t fall for this. She’s a dear woman—dear, dear client—and she lost her husband two years ago. Certainly, she’s a bit on the lonely side, and this male attention, of course, was welcome for her. But I’m glad that nothing really happened, and she did learn a harsh lesson, unfortunately.

The moral of the story is: please, please, please talk to someone. Talk to me, talk to an advisor before you start embarking on a relationship where there’s no way to connect the dots—no way to confirm this person’s identity. Don’t fall for tricks that are probably tried and true. These people are very, very conniving. They have their ways.

I honestly believe that these are two scams that are probably more prevalent than we think and expect. If you have any suspicion of a family member or friend going through things that seem really odd—if it smells funny—get it checked out. Come to us. Let’s take a look at it and see if there’s anything unusual about it. Make sure you’re not giving out money to random people who just want to take advantage of you.

Again, I’m Maritess Bott. Thanks for listening to our video blog today. Hopefully, you learned a little something, and we’ll chat soon.

Take care.