Ross Gallabrese DISCUSSION — Erika Kirkpatrick of Jefferson County Adult Protective Services discussed her work during Tuesday's meeting of the Steubenville Kiwanis club.

STEUBENVILLE — Ohio, according to the state Department of Commerce, ranked among the top 10 states for elder scam-related complaints in 2025.

That number, taken from the FBI’s latest Internet Crime Report, was released Monday, which was World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. More than 200,000 Americans 60 and older filed scam-related complaints, a number that was 37 percent higher than 2024, and reported losses among seniors exceeded $7 billion, up 59 percent from 2024.

That issue can touch anyone.

“It’s unfortunate. Gift cards are a huge scam, where perpetrators will say to go and get them $1,500 in Apple gift cards and read them the numbers,” Erika Kirkpatrick told members of the Steubenville Kiwanis Club during Tuesday’s meeting. “So, when they do that, once they read off those numbers, there’s no ever retrieving that money. You’re out.”

Those scams are a form of elder abuse, Kirkpatrick, who works with Jefferson County Adult Protective Services, said while speaking in the meeting room at the Sycamore Youth Center.

“With the banking stuff, you can sometimes contact them, and their fraud departments will sometimes reimburse them, but with the gift cards, you’re not getting any of that back — ever,” she said. “It’s hard to trace, and most of the time it is going overseas.”

Kirkpatrick is one of two people in her department, which is run by the county Department of Job and Family Services, who handle the adult caseload, from taking calls to handling investigations.

That can add up to a lot of work — in 2025, Kirkpatrick said, there were 258 reports of elder abuse in Jefferson County. Of those, she added, 180 were screened in.

“So, we investigated 180 different referrals, anything from abuse, neglect, self-neglect and exploitation,” Kirkpatrick said. “Self-neglect actually is our biggest allegation, meaning not just that that person can’t take care of themselves, but sometimes they just don’t know where they can go for help or how to get that help.

“We live in a very rural area, so there are a lot of people who don’t have transportation or who don’t know how to even get into different programs. So, we do end up investigating all of those,” she added.

So far this year, she said, there have been 109 reports, a number she said keeps them busy, pointing out that she had received three calls before coming to the meeting.

Scams, Kirkpatrick explained, are massive, especially those involving romance.

“It’s a very weird dynamic that occurs, but these people are so vulnerable,” she said. “They get monthly income checks most of the time. These people know how to word things to make people feel important and recognized in a way that they are not always used to. But we do see, on the other side of the exploitation, the family members who exploit them. But we do have a lot of scams.”

This year, Kirkpatrick said, their focus is on self-neglect, since it is the highest allegation. She called the number of cases of elder abuse an epidemic, adding seniors sometimes get forgotten, and she and her co-worker say it is very important to make elder abuse as recognizable as possible.

A graduate of Indian Creek High School and Kent State University, Kirkpatrick said August would mark her 10th year in the job. The department, she said, is county-run and state-supervised. The minimum age of a person for an adult protective services investigation to be launched, she added, is 60. That number varies among states — in West Virginia and Michigan it is 18, for example.

She said when it comes to reporting abuse, people should follow their instincts.

“We like to always say that we would rather have somebody report with their gut, just feeling that something is off,” Kirkpatrick said. “With adult protective services, you don’t have to have hard evidence of any type of abuse, neglect or exploitation, but just that feeling that something is off, because normally your gut doesn’t lie.”

She said that while her department’s name can create fear in the minds of some senior citizens, those concerns can be unfounded.

“We have a scary title,” Kirkpatrick said. “When we walk into somebody’s house and say adult protective services, and they’re like, ‘Don’t take me from my house,’ and we’re like, our goal is to be the least restrictive as possible.

“We want to make sure seniors can age comfortably and safely in their own homes,” she added. “Our goal is to never rip somebody out, so that is a scare tactic family members like to use to try and make people feel, ‘Oh no, these people are here and they are taking you out.’ That’s just a control thing some people try to use with them. So, our goal is to always keep them in their homes as safely and as comfortably as possible.”