He is seniors' antidote to fraud

Fraud against older North Carolinians in the 21st century attacks like a virus, shifting shape with every effort to fight it.

In the 1980s, scam artists typically took older people for $500 or $600 with age-old ruses such as the home repair work that always required one more costly fix.

These days, the losses climb much higher: People who seem comfortably retired can lose $20,000, $100,000, even $200,000 in telemarketing scams by international, savvy criminal gangs.

Carol Spruill, a Duke Law School associate dean involved with public-interest law, says North Carolina's efforts to stop scam artists owe much to David Kirkman, a state assistant attorney general who has served as an antidote to consumer fraud for nearly two decades.

"You can change the law ... but people will find new ways to get around those laws," Spruill says.

Kirkman, 52, got to know Spruill when he worked with law students at Duke's Pro Bono Project in the early 1990s. An active mentor who keeps up with former students for years after they get their degrees, Kirkman radiated passion for law that helped lower-income people out of tough situations.

"He gives students good projects and a variety of issues that make people want to seek justice because of the abusive practices that they are going to encounter," Spruill says.

Kirkman was born in Greenville, S.C., but was reared mostly in Chapel Hill, where he played saxophone and sports at Chapel Hill High School. A self-described chemistry and math geek, he was a pre-med student at Davidson College when he took a seminar called Poverty and the Legal Process. It changed his life's course. He got his law degree at UNC-Chapel Hill, then landed a legal services job in Charlotte.

"I got my law degree in August '79 and had my first jury trial in October '79," he says. "About a quarter of what I did was consumer scams."

One case in particular stands out.

"It was an aluminum siding salesman in Stanly County," he says. An older couple with a house overlooking Badin Lake was persuaded by the salesman to buy partitions to divide what were already tiny rooms -- along with installing a bathroom, even though the home didn't have indoor plumbing.

"The whole thing was to get the house because it was on a beautiful tract of land overlooking the lake," Kirkman says.

The con man tried to seize the land, but the couple didn't own it. When the con man instead sued the owner, who was the couple's son, they turned to Kirkman for help.

"I represented the family and got the whole thing set aside," he recalls. "That stuck with me for a long time and still does."

Increase in scams

Reports of telemarketing scams targeting seniors have risen steadily in North Carolina since a system to track them went into effect in 2000. In the early days of the tracking system, the state received about 100 reports a year. Now it deals with more than 800 a year, Kirkman said. Since the late '90s, more than 400 successful felony prosecutions of home-repair fraud alone have been brought in state and federal court.

Today, practitioners of modern senior fraud use every high-tech tool available, Kirkman said. Costa Rican operations can place phone calls over the Internet that show up on caller ID as coming from the IRS in Charlotte.

What distinguishes Kirkman's legal work is his insight into the specific ways scammers exploit older people, especially those with dementia, said Dr. Virginia Templeton, a geriatrician with Asheville-based MemoryCare. She said scammers target people who have dementia or depression, sometimes picking out shaky handwriting on contest applications that seniors send in.