ELDERSCAM

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As a former real estate saleswoman, widow of a judge and mother of a prosecutor, Mary Ann Downs had far more financial and legal acumen than most aging fraud victims. Even so, con artists had little trouble scamming her out of $74,000. Why? How? Her story is a classic study in what makes fraud against elderly people, especially women, one of the biggest growth industries in America. Con men are bilking the elderly out of $40 billion a year, by one FBI estimate.

When her ordeal started, Downs was 77 and recently widowed and had just learned she had breast cancer. "I was really at the bottom of the barrel," she says. "I was living in San Antonio, Texas, where I knew no one. I guess I was lonely." Right there is a combination that screams "victim." The American Association of Retired Persons (A.A.R.P.) figures that while anyone 60 or older is likely to be on at least one "mooch" (sucker) list, a woman 75 or older is virtually guaranteed to be. Like Downs, such women are often widows, lonely and suffering from ills that make them desperate for someone to talk to.

They are also usually home at midday and available to take calls from phony telemarketers, far and away the biggest class of crooks preying on the old. Downs' first caller identified himself as Curt and spoke in the sympathetic tones that often win the trust of a senior. He commiserated with Downs over her troubles and then told her that her luck was changing: she had just won a prize worth tens of thousands of dollars. But to collect it, said Curt, she first had to buy something from a company called Professional Marketing Inc. in Las Vegas.

Downs sent a $200 check for a shipment of cosmetics. Instead of the prize, she began getting calls from other telemarketing firms--one in Utah, one in Louisiana and four more in Las Vegas. The firms belonged to a new breed of con artist, those who regularly buy and sell names for their mooch lists, at prices ranging from $10 for an untested "lead" to $200 for the name of someone who has fallen for a whole series of scams.

Downs' name must have been pricey. Chasing the ever elusive chimera of a prize, she ordered all sorts of overpriced junk: flimsy telephone-answering machines, tennis bracelets, money clips, hair spray and what was supposed to be two mink coats. "They looked like they'd been made with rat skins," says Downs. "I just put the stuff in a room and closed the door."

To this day she cannot really explain what happened. "I got into it, and I couldn't get out," she says simply. But she does admit she was terrified of telling her children. That anxiety keeps many other fraud victims falling for new scams in the hope of replacing some of the lost money so their sons and daughters will never know. Says Shelly Feldman, president of a Florida fraud-fighting organization called Senior Sleuths: "They're afraid their kids will say they can't handle their finances and they'll be put in a nursing home."