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The fraud began when Ray Baird, then 65, asked his son Peter for help dealing with the bank. In the years that followed, Peter gained access to his dad’s bank accounts, diverted Ray’s aged pension to his own bank account and ran up debts in his father’s name that led to two caveats being put on Ray’s home.
By the time the fraud was uncovered and Ray, then 74, began to untangle the lies his son had spun, Peter had taken more than $230,000 from him, including seven years of pension totalling $152,423.33.
The scam was elaborate, involving a fake letter sent by Peter to his father purporting to be from the then premier of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, as well as fake phone calls in which Peter impersonated Victorian MPs and financial ombudsman officials to reassure Ray about his missing funds, his unpaid pension and his frozen bank accounts.
The fraud may be more intricate and sustained than in most cases but Ray’s story, which he is telling publicly for the first time at the age of 78, is common; with older Australians the victims of increasing rates of financial abuse, most commonly perpetrated by their adult children – facilitated by a gap in technological ability.
In light of his story, advocates are calling for a redesign of financial services to protect older people.
Experts want to see protections against elder fraud built into Centrelink, which sent Ray’s pension to a bank account in Peter’s name for years, without Ray knowing that Peter had changed the account details through his access to Ray’s MyGov.
“[Ray’s] story is tragic in every way but it is very common,” says Robert Fitzgerald, the age discrimination commissioner. “We know for certain that financial abuse is growing … and, tragically, the vast majority of that abuse is within the family.”
The crimes
In about 2011, on a trip to Thailand, Ray had his credit card stolen. He enlisted Peter, then 40, to help. Peter notified Ray’s bank and told Ray the card had been cancelled and his bank account frozen.
Ray, newly retired from a 45-year career as a French polisher with a business making coffins, had just started receiving the aged pension but is not good with technology, so Peter had set up his MyGov account. Ray says he didn’t once use MyGov or know how to log on.
“My age group, we’re very naive about, you know, technical communication and all that sort of stuff,” he says. “It’s not what we grew up on.”
Ray didn’t realise it but, after getting access to his Centrelink account, Peter almost immediately began stealing his father’s money.
Peter would eventually be convicted of three counts of obtaining financial advantage by deception, for defrauding his father of more than $230,000 – $152,000 of his pension and $78,000 in loans taken out in his father’s name. These loans, as well as other debts that Ray says Peter ran up in his name, but on which criminal charges were not filed, led to caveats being taken out against Ray’s home in Rowville, Melbourne.
“When he came in, I was so shocked by his story,” says Julie Del Pra, a financial counsellor at Each who helped Ray untangle his financial affairs.
While she has seen many cases of elder financial abuse, Del Pra says: “I have not seen the length that the son went to in this to defraud their own father, in the full knowledge of the poverty that he was leaving his dad in.”
The fraud included fake phone calls from Peter pretending to be various politicians and officials, who assured Ray that they were looking into his situation and it would be fixed soon. The calls came at least weekly for more than five years.
Many times during this period, Ray says he was on the cusp of marching into a bank or Centrelink branch to ask about it all but Peter would reprimand him, telling him he was sorting it and that getting involved would just mess things up.
“I would question him about it. And he would say, ‘Leave it to me. I’ll find out.’ And then within a couple of days, I would get a phone call from who I thought was the local Victorian ombudsman for finance, my local member of parliament, all these prominent people, saying: ‘Yes, Mr Baird, your bank accounts have been closed, but we’re working on it, your pension’s still being paid in.’
“Now, I find out later that it was him all the time on the phone.
“Many a time I said, ‘Come clean, is there something going on with the bank account, just tell me so we can sort it.’ He would turn around and say, ‘On mum’s grave there’s nothing going on.’ It was going on and on but I didn’t really know what to do, honestly.”
Peter’s fraud came to light after he was convicted and jailed in 2020 on 18 fraud offences relating to other victims. In the judgment, which was reported in the newspaper, Ray was mentioned.
Ray called his local MP’s office – an MP he believed he had been speaking to for years – only to be told that the real Kim Wells MP had never heard of him or his case. Ray, with help from his daughter, began investigating and the whole story unravelled.
Ray went to the police, who laid charges against Peter. “I must say, and I’ve been asked this many times, he was never violent to me at all,” Ray says. “And let’s face it, why would you be violent to your bank account?”
In May 2023, after pleading guilty to the charges against him, Peter Michael Baird was sentenced to four years in prison for his offending against Ray, though much of that was served concurrently with his sentence on the other fraud charges.
In sentencing, Justice Frank Gucciardo noted that Peter had an “unremarkable upbringing” with a good education and that there was “neither gambling, drug or alcohol issues in the family, nor any form of violence”.
The judge noted Peter’s did not have a gambling or drug addiction, and that his “offending was motivated by the need to present as a man with money”. He described his conduct as “reprehensible”, saying what he did “defies decency”.
Peter has since been released from jail and Ray has an intervention order preventing his son from contacting him.
The cost
Ray went for about eight years without access to his bank account or his pension. To survive, his wife – “she was fantastic over the whole thing,” he says – worked seven days a week.
Summer was easier, he says, in part because he would work as a cricket umpire in exchange for a small amount of money, and because he didn’t have the funds to heat his home – which made the Melbourne winters difficult.
He collected furniture people were throwing away on the street and used his skills to repair the items and sell them on Facebook marketplace. “I’m very embarrassed about this even now,” he says.
In a cruel twist, Ray says Peter would occasionally lend him small sums to tide him over or to enable him to go on the occasional trip away with his cricket team. Ray was unaware the loans were coming from his own stolen funds.
The emotional toll was enormous – affecting Ray’s health, sleep and marriage, leading to anxiety and depression and to isolation, because he couldn’t afford to go out and didn’t want to admit to his friends what was occurring.
It caused “enormous rifts” within his family, he says, particularly in his relationship with his daughter, who suspected Peter of wrongdoing. Ray has reconciled with his daughter, who he says has “worked her backside off” to try to sort out the financial mess Peter left Ray in.
Ray is stoic and plainspoken but several times in the course of telling his story he has to stop to cry.
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“I know I get emotional talking but it does me good to talk about it,” he says, wiping his eyes. “Later on, I’ll go home and think I’ve got that off my chest. You know, you can’t bottle that up.”
He knows that elder abuse, particularly when the perpetrators are one’s children, carries with it some shame, which is part of the reason why he is speaking to media for the first time.
“You don’t expect your own children to do this,” he says. “It’s bad enough when you hear of other people doing this, but when it’s your own children that is just the lowest thing that can happen.”
The system failure
Peter was able to take more than $150,000 of his father’s pension because he was the one who set up Ray’s MyGov account and so had access to his login details, Ray says.
The court found that for years Ray’s pension payments were sent to a bank account that wasn’t even in Ray’s name.
“We see this a lot in elder abuse,” says Del Pra, who adds that she sees “a handful” of cases each year in which Centrelink benefits have been diverted to an abuser.
“We know there is a reliance [by] elderly parents on their children or their grandchildren to help set these things up for them because they don’t have the knowledge,” she says. “Ray doesn’t even have a computer.”
After he became aware of the fraud, Ray applied for compensation from Centrelink on the grounds of “defective administration”, arguing that it had failed in its duty by not verifying that the new bank account was in his name or that the details had been changed with his consent.
After an investigation, Centrelink rejected Ray’s claim, saying that when people were interacting with the service online, it authenticated their identity through their username and password. “When an authenticated person provides new account details, the agency has no requirement or process to verify the bank account,” the investigator wrote in the decision letter about the claim.
Ray says: “The story [from Centrelink is], ‘We’ve done nothing wrong. You gave him the password.’ That’s what they see.”
Services Australia’s general manager, Hank Jongen, said: “It’s a deeply unfortunate reality that some people prey on vulnerable relatives. Support is always available and there are a number of ways people can help us keep them safe.”
Jongen urged pensioners to contact Centrelink immediately if a payment did not arrive on time. He also said Centrelink staff could offer support and correct records, adding extra security measures to prevent unauthorised access and updating or removing nominee access, if needed.
Centrelink was constantly improving its systems to make them more secure, he said, including introducing passkeys, a digital ID and two-factor authentication via SMS.
“Our customers don’t need to be computer savvy to set this up,” he said. “We have digital coaches who can set up options that work best for them. Customers can book a phone or face to face digital coaching appointment by calling their regular payment line, visiting a service centre or booking online.
“We also have a range of personal supports available to ensure everyone gets the help they need. This includes Aged Care Specialist Officers and Financial Information Service Officers.”
Ray lodged an appeal with the commonwealth ombudsman’s office, which upheld Centrelink’s rejection, saying that while it was “unfortunate” Ray was a victim of fraud, the agency was “not directly responsible for the loss he has suffered … That responsibility lies with Mr Peter Baird.”
The decision notice added that Centrelink “does have safeguards and requirements designed to limit fraud” and the fact that they were not sufficient in this instance “does not mean that they, as a whole, were flawed”.
Paul Were, a lawyer specialising in cases of elder abuse at Eastern Community Legal Centre, which represented Ray in his compensation application against Centrelink, called it an “absolute no-brainer” that an institution should have to check with its client before arranging for the client’s funds to be paid into someone else’s account.
“But in this situation, there were no checks that happened. So when those details were changed they didn’t go back to Ray and say, ‘Do you actually want this money paid into your son’s account?’ We think there’s got to be safeguards put in place for that.”
Services Australia told Guardian Australia that its policy required people updating bank details to declare that the account was in the name of the Centrelink customer – but Centrelink did not have access to the beneficiary bank’s data to verify that the account name matched its records.
The age discrimination commissioner says financial services need to take into account how elder abuse commonly starts.
“Most financial abuse starts off by a member of the family saying, ‘I’m going to help you with your finances, your internet banking, your financial transactions’… We don’t want a situation where every relationship involving adult children and older parents around money is seen as suspect,” he says.
“But the truth of the matter is, we now know the risk factors exist, and we can identify what they might be.”
A national elder abuse prevalence study, conducted by the federal government in 2021, found that one in six people over 65 living in the community reported experiencing elder abuse in the previous 12 months.
Children made up the majority of perpetrators in every category of elder abuse except sexual abuse.
“Our government systems are not set up to protect vulnerable people,” Del Pra says. “Therefore they’re exploited to cause harm. It’s quite simple.
“The government knows their systems are causing harm, they know what that harm looks like, of people being forced into bankruptcy, living in poverty, losing their homes. Now, the onus is on the government to act.”
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Watch Ray Baird tell his story on 10 News First at 5pm
