In May 2012, a family member of an elderly Ohio woman obtained a power of attorney for her. Her lawyer drafted a document revoking it, had her sign it, and notarised her signature himself.
That lawyer was Mark Alan Thomas of St. Clairsville. In May 2023 he was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison for stealing more than $882,000 from her between 2012 and 2019, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Ohio.
She was 86, showed symptoms of dementia, and lived in a senior-care facility. Nobody called her pretending to be from her bank, and nothing about the scheme would have tripped a scam-awareness checklist.
Thomas told a banker he needed $200,000 for an educational fund she wanted to set up, then took the money himself. He cashed more than $290,000 of her Treasury bonds.
In 2016 he wrote to three life insurers in her name, asking that her policies be cashed out and the mail sent to him. He kept using his status as a lawyer after his licence was revoked in 2015.
Larigent tracks elder-fraud prosecutions through prosecutors' public announcements. Of the 134 selected cases we had logged as of October 4, 2026, 39 fall into what we classify as familiar-perpetrator, fiduciary or institutional-insider cases. Thirty-four involve a stranger posing as a bank, a tech-support firm or a government agency.
Those counts describe what prosecutors charged and announced, and what we chose to collect. They say nothing about how often either kind of fraud happens.
Most elder fraud is never reported, a scheme someone stopped in time rarely becomes a case, and five of the 39 cases come from a single New Jersey ring. What the cases do show is how this kind of theft works.
That New Jersey ring is the starkest of them. According to a 2016 release from the New Jersey Attorney General's office, a caseworker for Atlantic County Adult Protective Services, together with a caregiver and an elder-law attorney, stole more than $2.7 million from 12 elderly clients between 2003 and 2012.
Five of those 12 were recruited after meeting the caseworker through her official job. The group looked for clients with substantial assets who typically had no immediate family.
The attorney prepared powers of attorney and wills, and some of the stolen money paid the victims' own bills so they would not notice. A second Atlantic County APS caseworker separately admitted stealing $125,000 from a couple he met on the job.
The case did not surface through a bank alert or an APS review. It began when the state Office of the Public Guardian referred one victim's case to the State Police.
In Washington, a federal jury on August 20, 2026 found Linda Laird guilty of exploiting her 81-year-old grandmother, a nursing-home resident with severe cognitive impairments. The D.C. Superior Court had appointed Laird and her parents as co-guardians and co-conservators in November 2017. Nobody had to be deceived into granting that authority.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, Laird and her father redirected more than $21,000 in Social Security benefits and over $100,000 from the grandmother's bank accounts, and Laird spent the money on jewellery, designer shoes and football tickets. She is due to be sentenced in December.
The same pattern shows up inside financial institutions. A credit union manager in Prairie View, Texas, purposefully kept an outdated practice that stopped customers from seeing their accounts online, according to the Southern District of Texas, while she took $211,563.12 from at least two elderly members between 2017 and 2019.
In Ohio, a bank employee hired to protect customers from fraud secretly enrolled customers aged 90 to 103 in online banking and rerouted their statements, then moved about $2 million, according to the Northern District of Ohio.
Set side by side, these cases share a feature that a scam script lacks. In each one, the thing meant to protect the older person became the way in: a power of attorney, a guardianship, a protective-services caseworker, a bank's fraud function.
They also share a narrowing. A family member's authority was revoked. Clients were chosen because no family was watching. Customers were kept away from their own balances. Statements went to email accounts the customers had never seen. In every case, fewer people could see the money than before.
That narrowing is something an outsider can notice and write down without accusing anyone or judging the older person's capacity. A second authority withdrawn, statements no longer arriving, one person now the only point of contact: each is a plain, recordable fact.
Most elder-fraud education is built around the stranger on the phone, and for that threat it makes sense. It has much less to say when the person holding the paperwork is the one taking the money. The question that covers both is simple to ask: who, besides one person, can still see this account?
If this is your family
If one person holds your parent's power of attorney or manages their accounts, ask that a second person also receive copies of statements, or have view-only access where the bank offers it.
Treat any request to revoke someone else's authority, or to send all financial mail to one person, as a reason to slow down and ask why.
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