Chateau Brickyard is a typical retirement home in Salt Lake City. In 98 rooms, seniors live independently in a safe, trusting environment.
But thieves, technology and telephones are turning the elderly into easy targets, even at senior homes like this one, through the use of what the crooks call "Alzheimer's lists" — lists with names and phone numbers of seniors who are supposedly easy to dupe.
"As soon as we found out there was something going on, we immediately started pulling the residents down, talking to them," said Rob Miller, Chateau Brickyard's director.
Thieves were calling room after room, tricking seniors into giving up personal information.
Resident Pam Greeley's trust was shattered. "I thought I was pretty smart, but apparently I'm not," she said.
"I was just scared," resident Lucille Evans added.
What originally puzzled the retirement home's administrators was how did the thieves have the phone numbers? Each room has a different number.
But the Web has made it easy. Several online sites have reverse directories. Type in an address, and the site will spit out the name and number for every person living at that address.
The list for Chateau Brickyard had everything a thief needed. And when the phone rang in Richard Howell's room, the caller posed as a bank employee who needed his personal information.
"My name, my Social Security number and several other things," Howell said.
A caller told Evans that records showed she was dead and that her "file" needed to be fixed. "They asked for my date of birth, my Social Security card number," she said.
Some residents even gave the thieves account information.
The result? The con artists ran up credit cards, wired money, bought cell phones, paint and pizza.
The Utah Division of Consumer Protection sent a fraud investigator to the retirement home.
"It's not like the olden days when you could have a conversation and it's a friendly exchange of information," said the division's direction, Francine Giani. "They're calling you to take your information."
Within three days, investigator Ken Nelson zeroed in on two people in Georgia using the residents' personal information. Georgia police have since arrested two women, Donine Thomas and Shameka Hodge, and booked them in their investigation into the phone fraud cases in Salt Lake City.
A KSL-TV investigation found six other retirement homes in Salt Lake City hit by the same, or similar, scams — and reporters then alerted the centers.
Chateau Brickyard is doing more to make sure seniors stay safe from this kind of victimization, including distributing a reference guide about what to do when called on the telephone.
E-mail: ddujanovic@ksl.com; ngupta@ksl.com.