Overview

Something was wrong with Mom's money. He just couldn't prove it. The credit card charges didn't make sense. Groceries seven times the national average for a woman who never topped 105 pounds. Hundreds at Sam's Club five days before she died while she was housebound in assisted living, barely eating, her apartment nearly empty. The caregiver had an answer for everything. So did the lawyer. So did the bank. Then the caregiver died. Or disappeared. The body was the wrong weight. Seventy pounds too heavy at cremation. No obituary. No funeral. No daughters on the death certificate. A death at a hospital an hour from home, one she'd visited months earlier, driving past three closer ones to get there. Eight days earlier, Charles Wallace had blocked a $250,000 annuity payout, the last big payday from his mother's estate. It started simply enough. A caregiver knocked on Joell Fleming's door with bagels and a smile. The 78-year-old widow - sharp-tongued, fiercely independent, survivor of five marriages, let a predator inside. Esmarelda Gomez sat in the room when the neurologist scored Joell 16 out of 30 on cognitive testing. She watched the diagnosis happen. Then the spending exploded. Within three years, nearly $1 million was gone. Children removed from medical power of attorney. A new will naming the caregiver for a six-figure annuity. Credit cards used at the caregiver's home address twenty-five miles away the last charge the day after Joell died. Doctors, lawyers, banks, and Adult Protective Services all missed it. From 700 miles away, Charles Wallace spent five years pulling a decade of credit card records and building the forensic case the professionals never did. Cards that went from two declines in seven years to a 59% decline rate. Two cards cycled at the register within seconds of each other. A dual food supply prepared meals for his mother, bulk groceries for someone else's household. She'd done this before. An elderly man years earlier. Same playbook. Same attorney handling both victims across thirteen years. Fired from a caregiving agency for misusing client data, she kept working privately invisible to every system designed to stop her. Then came the exit. A secluded house purchased before she emptied the storage unit. A U-Haul returned with 460 extra miles. Forty-three boxes never delivered to charity. A death at a remote hospital she'd established herself at months earlier. Eighteen months later, her executor quietly bought that house. The Caregiver's Game is a forensic true crime investigation and a warning for every family with an aging parent. It exposes how caregiver fraud hides in plain sight and it arms you with the warning signs before it's too late.

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​​Charles E. Wallace Jr. has a technology background in the finance, banking, healthcare, and collections industries. Charles is married with two daughters and two grandchildren. When he's not spending time with his family, working or writing, he enjoys coaching youth basketball, outdoor activities, and cooking. The Caregiver's Game: Unraveling Financial Deceit in the Shadows of Dementia is his first book.

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