George Hutchinson
Prosecutor
Fraud on the Elderly
There are two things that I've seen going on with the elderly lately. First, I see the typical home construction/home improvement fraud cases. Those have been around for quite some time. We seem to see a lot of those folks focusing on the elderly. Probably the hope is that they could scare the elderly person into accepting services that they don't really need, a lot easier than others. Plus, you're preying on a group of victims that has trouble remembering events, recollecting what was promised in exchange for certain services. They're just a more convenient, easier victim. That's something that we see on a fairly regular basis.
The second thing, unfortunately, is victimization by the person's own family, typically taking the form of a very general, very broad power of attorney, and basically ruining their financial lives, right up to and including selling their homes out from under them.
Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot that we can do for them, because unless we can prove that they are incompetent to sign that paperwork then there really aren't too many places that we can go. If we succeed in proving that they are incompetent, what kind of witness does that make at trial?
Computers
Computers are becoming a big thing. Typical criminal trespass cases include disgruntled employees destroying the computer systems as a final act of revenge. We're seeing computers come up a lot in more traditional crimes. People are just storing information on it. Particularly true of identify fraud cases, which are becoming pretty big. People are essentially manufacturing either completely fictitious identities with the help of the computer or compromising real people's identifying information.
One guy that I just tried a little while ago was doing this: he would use his home computer to generate miscellaneous identifying documents, not necessarily issued by the government. He would create birth certificates. He'd create student ID cards, diplomas, employment verification letters, fake W-2s, all of which are very easy to generate. Sometimes he would counterfeit Social Security cards and then he would use those to obtain legitimate Georgia ID cards, which are somewhat easier to get than Georgia driver licenses, as I have come to understand it. They don't require as much identification. They don't do as much in the way of checking. So, having obtained a Georgia identification card, what he could do is obtain a Georgia driver license, presenting the identification card as his proof of identify. We introduced 14 real Georgia driver licenses that he had, all in different names, and all bearing his picture.
We occasionally get Internet child pornography cases. We get someone who goes on line, pretending to be a juvenile, receive child pornographic images, all of which resulted in the man sending them being prosecuted. We've got a lot of contractor fraud, construction fraud. Our mainstay are the forgeries and the internal employee thefts and embezzlements.