2002, Sunnyvale, California

By Vicky Mlyniec

This is what you do when your parent dies, I thought, as my brother and I emptied drawers and rifled through musty files at my mother’s house. (She is pictured, right, with her mother.) It felt odd to be there amid her needlepoint sayings and vases of artificial flowers, without her cheerful presence plying us with tea and pound cake.

Tucked among pictures of grandchildren and years’ worth of Mother’s Day cards, we discovered scraps of paper with strange names and dollar amounts, written in handwriting that suddenly showed her age. Drawers were crammed with letters that promised her millions of dollars, or maybe a real diamond, if only she sent back a check.

My 78-year-old mother hadn’t died. She’d been whisked away to stay with my sister until we could get to the bottom of the secret life she’d been leading and sort out all the trouble she’d gotten into. We’d discovered a few weeks earlier that she’d lost much of her savings to Canadian sweepstakes scammers.

Suddenly, the “slowing down” we knew would someday require us to step in had arrived with trumpets. The very traits that made it easy to think all was well - Mom’s sunny disposition and optimism - had made her easy pickings for predators.

As I looked through her papers, I realized that despite my daily calls and weekly visits, I was out of touch with what consumed her time and attention - contests and sweepstakes.

Over the past few years, she’d periodically call to say she’d won a prize, only first she had to pay “shipping costs” or “Canadian taxes.” I lectured her about illegal scams, offered to stem the tide of junk mail that got her onto these sucker lists, or change her phone number. No, no, she’d said, insisting that she’d never really send these people a dime. As frugal as she is honest, I believed her.

Scams operated from outside the country are almost impossible to trace, the police told me when I sought advice. Best thing to do is educate your mother. She needed lots of refresher courses, though.

“Just hang up on them!” I’d urge.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” she’d protest. “That would be rude.”

I offered to be rude for her, but naturally, none of the numbers she passed on to me reached a real person. Finally, I posted a script for her to read: “My daughter says it’s illegal to require payment to receive a prize. If you leave your name and number, I’ll have her call you.”

She’d reported somewhat gleefully that most callers hung up when she read her lines.

“Way to go, Grandma!” my sons cheered.

But then she phoned with “the most wonderful news!” Two men were coming to her house the next day to deliver $9 million. “It’s the one where the FBI agent delivers the money!” she’d assured me.

“I’m calling the police,” I said.

Now that the ante was upped, the police paid her a visit. While they didn’t believe anyone would show up, there was the possibility that an out-of-country scammer might hire “local talent” to drive mom to a Western Union to wire money.

An officer phoned me from Mom’s house to say, “Your mother is incredibly nice. I’m sorry to say, though, that she’s already wired money to these crooks.” How much? “She handed over receipts showing she’s sent $11,000, in small batches.”

My sweet old mother had been driving from one sleazy check-cashing place to another, wiring money in $2,000-to-3,000 batches, all to Canada. I later discovered that when a clerk questioned her about it, she insisted that the money was for her sick brother. She is an only child.

Alarmed, the family convened at her house. Mom’s biggest regret was that we were upset.

“Can I get you a turnover?” she’d offered when I walked in with a grim look on my face. She cheerfully agreed to give us power of attorney.

“You don’t seem angry about losing your savings,” my husband said.

“What good would being angry do?” she replied with a shrug.

“Mom,” I thought to ask, “you can never even come up with a list of things you want for your birthday. What would you do with $9 million?”

Her face positively lit up. “Oh, I had such fun imagining writing a check for one of you kids or my grandkids!”

I told her none of us needed that kind of money and that her grandchildren were quite thrilled with their $20 birthday checks.

“We need you to hang on to your money so it’s there when you need it,” I told her, knowing that she’d just flushed half of all she had down the toilet.

Three days later, she was back at it. A savvy clerk alerted the police when Mom tried to wire more money to Canada. The police discovered that she’d dispatched another $13,000 since their last visit.

While I’d been calling her every few hours to tell her about the trap the FBI was putting on her phone, or that I read that seniors lose billions a year to phone scams, she’d been sneaking out to send more money.

Who had my mother become? Even though she was right there in the kitchen making tea, in many ways, I felt that I’d lost her - that something essential inside of her was gone.

“What do these crooks say to make you ignore what the police have told you, what the people who love you have told you, and break your promise?” I asked.

“What did I promise?” she asked, puzzled and concerned.

She had forgotten. Forgotten her promise, forgotten what exactly it was that the scammers told her. All she could remember was that they were very nice.

She wasn’t threatened, she was charmed! I could imagine them telling her, “It’s such a shame, Tanya. Sometimes a family will step in and stop a winner from sending the rest of the tax, and then we can’t send the prize. I don’t want that to happen to you!”

To protect her, I took the phones out of her house, took her car keys, and confiscated every checkbook. “I feel like I’m under house arrest,” she protested mildly, as we drove from notary to bank. “You are,” I said.

While she stayed with my sister, I changed her phone number, had her mail forwarded to me, dumped all her contest papers, and gave the phone numbers and fake names I’d found to the police, who admitted that there was almost no chance of tracking these people.

Mom arrived home, relaxed and anxious to get back to “normal.” What would normal be, now that her full-time job as hopeful contestant and phone buddy to scam artists was gone? What was her life really like, if we looked closely?

Her fleecing forced me to see that Mom needed more help with lots of things - cleaning, bill paying, simply coping with an increasingly aggressive world. Was she taking her medications properly? How was she behind the wheel? I had her drive when we went to see her doctor for the exam I’d scheduled.

“Slow down!” I pleaded. “You have to come to a complete stop.”

These were the same words I used with my newly permitted 16-year-old. “Watch out!” I yelped, as she changed lanes without a glance.

She shouldn’t be driving, the doctor agreed.

“Maybe the scammers saved her life,” I told my husband later, in a looking-for-the-silver-lining moment.

Even though it’s tough, I’m used to saying no to my kids. It’s far more difficult to place restrictions on my mom - to take away her keys, her car, her private passion. And heartbreaking because I know that, unlike my sons’ restrictions, these measures aren’t temporary.

She’s not going to get better at driving, at caring for herself, or at distinguishing the crooks among her callers. And in the same way many teens get into trouble because we parents would rather assume that all is well, the same assumptions are just as dangerous with our elderly parents.

My mother’s gullibility and innocence were both shocking and poignant. I tried to account for it - is it her age or her temperament? Perhaps both, and more.

She has always been trusting, and no doubt, now her judgment has been compromised by age. She also comes from a generation that, despite having lived through all kinds of global horrors, trumps mine in the optimism department. My skepticism and cold-eyed view of the world are as foreign to her as my love of sushi and U2.

I’ve stopped trying to get Mom to be as outraged as I am by what’s been done to her. Her tendency to skim over unpleasantness is perhaps what’s kept her from taking life’s rough edges too much to heart. Let her coast over this bump, too.

And now, just as I begin to step back as my sons move through their teen years and learn to cope on their own, I will transfer my protection and vigilance to my mother. It’s a wake-up call I wish didn’t have to come from criminals.

Vicky Mlyniec is a freelance writer whose articles and essays have appeared in national magazines and major newspapers, including Redbook, Parents, Family Circle, Parenting, The Washington Post, and The Christian Science Monitor. Also a fiction writer, she is the recipient of 2005 Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction.

Posted by Common Ties on Monday, January 7th, 2008 | Email This Post

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