I wrote down the number before the counselor finished speaking. It was the same number that had been calling my house twice a week for almost a year. The caller always asked whether I’d fallen, whether I needed help getting around, and whether I wanted to order a medical alert button. I had assumed it was one of those sales calls and stopped answering. Now the counselor was telling me that the woman on her file had been listed as my daughter and had attended a sixty-five-minute session using my information. I asked whether she had provided identification. The counselor said she had, and the signature on the consent form was not mine.
I drove to the lender’s office the next morning and asked to see everything connected to the reverse-mortgage application. There was a second phone number on the paperwork, along with an email address I didn’t recognize. The application said I lived alone and that my daughter handled my finances. I have no daughter, and my husband died six years ago. Then I saw the counseling certificate. It had been issued three weeks before the application was submitted, and the person who signed as my authorized representative had used my maiden name. I asked the clerk whether the loan had been approved. She looked at the screen and said no. Someone had stopped the application after the lender requested one final document: proof that the “daughter” had legal authority to act for me.
That afternoon I called the number from the application. A woman answered and immediately said my first name. I asked her why she’d been telling strangers she was my daughter. She went silent, then said she wasn’t trying to steal my house. She said someone had paid her to make the calls and attend the counseling session, and she’d been told the reverse mortgage was supposed to help me “stay in my home.” I asked who hired her. She gave me a name I recognized instantly. It was the attorney who had handled my husband’s estate — and the same man who had called me two months earlier asking whether I planned to leave the house to anyone.
