London senior, 84, scammed out of $136,000 in savings
Woman befriended by neighbour and gave him power of attorney
More than $136,000, gone just like that.
The family of an elderly woman bilked out of her savings is sifting through the financial wreckage after police slapped a 50-year-old man with a string of fraud charges.
The niece of the 84-year-old woman, who declined to be named to protect her aunt’s privacy, is warning others — especially people with elderly relatives — about just how easily seniors can be taken advantage of.
“You save all your life and then you trust one wrong person and, kaboom, your life is changed. You don’t know who you can trust,” the niece said.
“If it can happen to her, it can happen to anybody. We don’t want anyone else to have to go through this.”
London police announced the charges Thursday following a three-month investigation.
Police said the man was a neighbour of the elderly woman and befriended her in 2015.
He gradually earned her trust by helping with errands and repairs to her home and used her information to open online accounts, police said.
The woman didn’t have any children and lived alone in her singlestorey East London home until the spring, her niece said.
She moved into the modest house at her aunt’s urging, after the neighbour tried to move his daughter into the home as a livein helper.
It was a proposal the woman didn’t like, her niece said, and one reason the elderly woman reached out to her family for help dealing with her neighbour.
“He had also talked her to letting him keep her bank books at his house, and when I moved in, she was trying to get her bank books back,” the niece said. “She wanted to go to the bank to check on her account.”
Unsettled by the situation, the niece and her aunt made the rounds to the banks she dealt with, four in total. What they found was staggering. Records from her TD account, shown to Postmedia, turned up months of debit purchases and e-transfers — transactions the woman hadn’t made:
Fireworks bought from an Etobicoke store on April 13.
A $307.53 debit purchase at an auto parts retailer on May 9.
On May 15, $46.64 spent at Canada’s Wonderland.
An $89.27 purchase from Amazon.com on May 8.
“She didn’t even own a computer or cellphone,” her niece said.
The neighbour set up an email for her aunt and used it to access online banking, the niece said.
The banks, independently of each other, gave the woman the name of the man who was accessing her accounts.
The niece and her elderly aunt contacted London police immediately, filing a police report in June.
Her aunt was the kind of woman who would withdraw $60 each week to cover her costs, the niece said. She didn’t have credit cards, never took out loans and was always thrifty.
The niece said the neighbour, who had been made power of attorney to her aunt, had tried to get the woman put in a hospital or care home.
She had mild dementia, her niece said, a cognitive decline that’s rapidly worsened over the past few months. She is now in hospital and her family is unsure whether she’ll be able to return home.
“She’s under a lot of stress and she’s upset,” said the niece.
“She keeps asking if she’s going to get her money back. All this has really gotten to her.”
The woman was defrauded of $136,469, according to London police, who warn that “fraud is said to be the fastest-growing form of elder and vulnerable person abuse.”
Creditors are calling the house as the woman’s family tries to sort out their next steps.
“The police said basically everything he took is gone. She worked hard all her life to save this money,” said a in-law of the woman. “It’s disgusting. “It’s so sickening. I can’t believe this even happens.”
Mark Donald Burrows, who also goes by the name Mark Donald Spiers, is charged with two counts each of fraud under $5,000 and fraud over $5,000 along with attempted fraud under $5,000 and theft over $5,000.