Fraud cases inundate The City's police

SAN FRANCISCO — When an employee embezzled $20,000 from a small nonprofit devoted to helping gay seniors, Neil Sims thought it was an open-and-shut case.

But Sims, president of the board of directors of Openhouse, which was the victim in the case, worries that the investigation will go the way of hundreds of others in San Francisco because the Police Department’s fraud unit has been decimated by cuts and hobbled by understaffing.

“My concern is this young person, without prosecution, could be free to work for the agency across the street or the small business down the block,” Sims said during a Board of Supervisors Public Safety Committee hearing on Monday called by Supervisor Bevan Dufty.

Sims’ story is one of many that have been trickling into Dufty’s office, the supervisor said. There was the business owner who filed a police report after being fleeced of $40,000, only to learn a backlog of cases meant investigators could not look at his complaint for a year. Another man complained he was denied help after his wallet was stolen, despite knowing the name and employer of the person who took it.

“The problem is priorities on the part of the [police] chief,” Dufty said. “Some changes need to happen. This is a blank check for people to commit fraud.”

Dufty, who noted that neither police Chief Heather Fong nor any members of her command staff attended the hearing, said he would lobby for more funding for the neglected fraud unit through his role on the Budget and Finance Committee, which must approve Mayor Gavin Newsom’s proposed spending plan.

Fraud unit Lt. Jones Wong told supervisors that his eight inspectors must deal with 1,230 cases a year, including check fraud, real estate scams, internet lotteries and financial abuse of seniors. The number of inspectors is less than half of the 19 staffers in the unit in 1990, despite there currently being more officers in the Police Department.

Many of the investigations lead to additional victims and require time-intensive financial audits, Wong said. As the economy worsens, the caseload rises, he said. Many of the scams target seniors, along with Chinese- and Spanish-speaking residents. Some 22 of the 81 cases that remain unresolved involve elderly victims.

Those cases are especially troubling because older people should, ideally, testify right away in case they die or their memory fails, Wong said. Supervisor David Campos was worried the strapped department will not be able to deal with the rising tide of fraud resulting from the recession.

“We’re going down a road where more of these crimes will occur,” Campos said. “We are sending the wrong type of message that this type of crime will be tolerated.”

tbarak@sfexaminer.com

Fraud frenzy

Police have seen an increase in fraud cases due to the recession.

• - 19 Fraud inspectors in 1990
• - 8 Fraud inspectors in 2009
• - 81 Backlogged cases
• - 1,230 Fraud cases
• - 145 Approximate amount of check-fraud cases
• - 400 Approximate amount of access-card-fraud cases
• - 325 Approximate amount of embezzlement cases
• - 100 Approximate amount of cases involving financial abuse of seniors

Source: Police Department