“Seventy-three-year-old Charles S. Bacino lay dying in a hospital bed in Las Vegas, on Nov. 27, 2012, when the man he referred to as his “financial affairs manager” stopped by for a visit to talk about his investments. Even as a morphine drip was working to soothe the pain of Bacino’s terminal pancreatic cancer, his adviser persuaded him to invest $82,000 in notes of a cocoa and banana plantation in Ecuador.

“My dad gave him keys to the house to get his checkbook,” says his daughter Shari Snow, who sued the adviser in September. Snow, who is still trying to retrieve the money, says that less than a month after that hospital visit, her father was dead and the whereabouts of his money was a lingering mystery.

“Law enforcement officials and advocates for the elderly are increasingly alarmed at the rising incidence of financial abuse of senior citizens. The Investor Protection Trust, an investor information organization, said in 2012 that one out of every five citizens over the age of 65 had been victimized by a financial scam. People over 60 made up the largest age group reporting fraud to the Federal Trade Commission last year: 27% were 60 or older, up from 22% in 2011.”

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Read full The Street article here.