California Living Trust Mills – Scams, Elder Law Seminars, and High Pressure Tactics
A California company has been sued for the unauthorized practice of law in several jurisdictions after selling living trusts over the phone to senior citizens. The Minnesota Attorney General initiated suit against two California companies – American Family Legal Plan and Heritage Marketing and Insurance Services, Inc., “for operating a ‘trust mill’ scheme through a direct mailing to senior citizens.” After the seniors would respond to the direct mailing, “an agent posing as an estate planner meets the senior citizen at home and sells the person a plan for $2,000 or more” regardless of the taxable estate or financial need for it.
After the initial meeting, a boilerplate trust would be drafted by a person over the phone that often would not account for assets and property that are part of the estate. Then an insurance agent “posing as a representative of the estate planning firm” would meet with the senior to sell annuities on a commission basis – the agent would “not be compensated for the trip unless annuities” were sold. The companies have also been sued by Pennsylvania’s Attorney General, banned by the Better Business Bureau in Pennsylvania, and ordered to halt the sale or marketing of estate planning products in North Carolina by a judge.
As described in Living Trust Disadvantages, a revocable living trust is not right for everyone. This blog keeps a page titled “Living Trusts: Scams and Misconceptions” for further reading. A licensed, experienced, and competent estate planning attorney in San Diego is in the best position to determine whether a trust is right for you. Licensed attorneys are subject to the discipline authority of the California State Bar as found in the California Rules of Professional Conduct. For more, David Goldman of the Florida Estate Planning Lawyer Blog maintains an updated list of the current scams and measures taken to fight the rising tide.
Filed under: San Diego Estate Planning, Trusts
Where can one obtain access to the details of the suits against: American Family Legal Plan, Heritage Marketing and Insurance Services, Inc. as well as Family First (with HQ in Woodland Hills with several regional offices)? I am especially interested in lists of names of individual representatives/insurance agents, even at the “boiler-plate’ level, who worked for these companies in California, and how/where they were prosecuted.
The best place to start would probably be with the Office of Attorney General in the states where they were prosecuted. I believe many of the cases were settled out of court before going to trial - which leaves a very small public paper trail. You might be able to request a copy of the settlement agreement from those offices which contains that information.