Last year, Karren Ruesing came across an elderly woman who let a man she hired to mow her lawn obtain power of attorney over her because they were friends and he could use the legal document to take care of her in case she got sick.

But instead of using the power of attorney to help the woman, the man used it to slowly take over the woman’s finances, said Ruesing, a supervisor with the state’s Aging and People with Disabilities program office in Bend.

She said he made himself a representative payee for her Social Security benefits so the money went into his bank account, changed her will and moved her remaining assets from one financial institution to another.

“This person was operating very, very fast,” Ruesing said, adding that the man would have drained the woman’s finances completely if a financial planner hadn’t noticed something was amiss and reported it.

The case is still under investigation, said Ruesing.

State officials investigated and substantiated 672 allegations of financial exploitation similar to the one Ruesing described in 2011, according to a report the Aging and People with Disabilities program released late last year, making it the most common type of abuse committed against seniors and people with disabilities for the fourth year in a row.

“It’s really heartbreaking,” Ruesing said, adding that many financial-exploitation victims never recover the money they lost — or recover from the psychological effects that come with being cheated.

“Once a person has been financially exploited, it kind of sends them on a downward spiral,” she said.

She hopes two developments from last year – the formation of a local elder abuse task force and the passage of a new elder abuse law – will cut down on this crime, or at least make it easier to investigate what happened and bring perpetrators to justice.

One of the biggest problems law enforcement officers face when investigating a financial exploitation case is its complexity, Ruesing said. The work often requires help from forensic accountants or other specialized personnel who understand how the financial system works and can spot suspicious transactions that may have occurred over a yearslong time frame.

“Many times the police don’t have the staffing to do the work,” Ruesing said.

Early last year, Ruesing said, the Deschutes County District Attorney’s Office took a big step toward filling in this gap when it formed a multi-disciplinary team on seniors and the disabled.

Similar to task forces created to take on domestic violence and child abuse, she said, this group brings together law enforcement officials, geropsychiatric specialists, prosecutors and other people who work with the elderly so they can spot elder abuse cases, investigate them and move them through the court system so their perpetrators can be punished.

But Ruesing said even the most skilled investigators need time to build a case, which is where an elder abuse law Gov. John Kitzhaber signed last spring comes in. The new law extends the statute of limitations for robbery, forgery, theft and identity theft from three to six years if victims were 65 or older. It also gives police officers easier access to a person’s financial and medical records if they suspect he or she was the victim of abuse.

Though it’s still too early to say what effects the new task force and the new law will have on the state’s financial exploitation problem, Ruesing said they are both two steps in the right direction. That’s because the number of financial exploitation cases will only increase as the baby boomers — which Ruesing said is one of the wealthiest generations this country has seen – get older and fall prey to the people who commit these crimes.

“It’s going to be everywhere,” she said.