Program to Protect Seniors to Expand

Federal and state securities regulators will expand their crackdown on misleading investment seminars for senior citizens as part of an effort to protect them from fraud, the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday.

The SEC and state regulators announced Monday a joint program designed to protect seniors against fraud.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said in a speech Tuesday that special inspections of brokerages and promoters offering sales seminars for seniors, now being conducted by the SEC and Florida regulators, would be expanded to other areas of the country. He did not specify the areas.

“There’s surely a place in hell for those who prey on the greatest generation,” Cox told a gathering of the North American Securities Administrators Assn., an organization representing state regulators.

He also said that the SEC would convene a “senior summit” this summer.

Cox told reporters after the speech that he had had personal experience with the techniques of financial salespeople who target seniors. Before his mother died last year, he said, she “was hit upon relentlessly” by mortgage brokers who wanted her to refinance her home loan. Cox said he had to intervene to keep his mother from being pestered.

People 60 and older make up 15% of the country’s population but account for an estimated 30% of fraud victims.