The victims are extremely socially isolated,” Weber said. There are no home health care companies, and virtually no attorneys to help with estate planning. There are almost no accountants or social workers. “There aren’t enough doctors, virtually no specialists. The obstacles to staffing LEOs impact other social safety nets as well. It’s not only law enforcement that is sparse. Before Weber’s internship program began, Accomack County had four investigators to follow up on all crime reports, leaving few resources for complex investigations of high-tech crimes targeting elderly, and often uncooperative, victims. Local law enforcement agencies responsible for the safety of these remote places are understaffed and underfunded officers regularly leave for other career fields and more liveable pay scales. Investigators literally have to take a sheriff's office boat, Coast Guard vessel, or helicopter to investigations on the water or the inhabited Chesapeake islands.” Now take all that, and add in a cypress swamp to the south, the North Atlantic Ocean and barrier beaches to the east, and the Chesapeake Bay to the west and north, and you start to see why this is so unusual. We’re talking about an area of more than 2,100 square miles of water and land. They’re only accessible via Maryland, by boat or a bridge-bay-tunnel that connects with Virginia Beach, a round trip drive that can take three hours or more. Accomack and Northampton are the only counties in Virginia not attached to Virginia. “Worcester County, Maryland has the highest unemployment rate in the state. “These are inhabited islands in the poorest, most rural of counties,” he said, complicated by some parts of the region belonging to Maryland and others to Virginia. They may be poor, but their income is steady. The criminals targeting senior victims with bank and credit card fraud are often acquaintances or even family members because pension and Social Security checks keep coming during the off-season. He described a “tyranny of distance” that isn’t miles but inaccessibility, islands with their own dialects and cultures, dependent on seasonal industries like crabbing and tourism. “This is more like Alaska than the rural East,” Weber said. Elderly citizens are frequently victimized no matter where they live but in isolated places, there’s no one to catch them before they fall. Retirees move to the Delmarva region for its wild beauty and discover too late there are no resources as they age. Pursuing justice for those victims foreshadowed the program he now oversees, training student interns to investigate elder fraud on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. “You can’t hide a million victims,” he said of the Ponzi schemes that robbed pension funds of billions, in his prior career at the SEC. He’s a lawyer, a State Guard JAG officer assigned to the Maryland National Guard, a certified fraud examiner, and most notably, the retired chief investigator for the Securities and Exchange Commission who blew the whistle on misconduct in the Bernie Madoff and R. (His flat hat was on a shelf behind him during our interview, his badge in lucite beside it.) The child of a Holocaust survivor and the first in his family to speak English, let alone attend college, he was driven to achieve. Weber began his career as a National Park Service law enforcement ranger in upstate New York, finishing a law degree while rangering full time. I also discovered that the “accounting professor” was far more complex than he seemed from the modest release on the university website. It turns out that the program revolves around an especially vile sort of rural crime: fraudsters and scammers preying on vulnerable, isolated elderly victims. Weber, intern investigators, Worcester County (Maryland) Sheriff’s Deputies and Ocean Pines Police outside the State’s Attorneys Office in Snow Hill, Maryland.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |