My grandmother had $94,000 in her savings account on a Tuesday. By Friday it was GONE.
I found out because she called me crying, and she never cries – not when Grandpa died, not when the cancer came back, not once in seventy-eight years of hard things.
The man’s name was Derek Paulson, and he ran a “senior investment advisory” out of a strip mall in Clearwater. He’d been calling her every week for four months. I didn’t know. She didn’t want to worry me.
I took two days off work and drove down.
Her phone showed 61 calls from his number.
Sixty-one.
The lawyer she’d hired before I arrived – a guy named Brent Kolb whose office smelled like carpet cleaner – told her across a big oak desk that the transfers were “voluntary and documented” and her case was “extremely difficult.”
She had her hands folded in her lap. The knuckles were swollen the way they always are now.
“He told me it was for the grandchildren,” she said.
Kolb looked at his watch.
I started recording on my phone under the table.
He said the firm couldn’t take the case on contingency. Said she should “consider what a realistic outcome looks like.” Said it like she was being unreasonable for wanting her money back.
She said, “Okay,” and started to stand up.
I said, “Sit down, Grandma.”
Kolb looked at me for the first time.
I’d spent the drive down on the phone with a fraud attorney in Tampa, a real one, who told me that Paulson had two prior FTC complaints and a SUSPENDED license in Georgia that Kolb’s firm had somehow missed – or hadn’t bothered to find.
I also knew that Kolb’s firm had referred three other seniors to Paulson’s fund in the last eighteen months.
THREE.
I put my phone on the desk, screen up, still recording.
“I want to know,” I said, “how your firm is going to explain the referrals.”
Kolb’s hand stopped moving toward his pen.
My phone buzzed. The Tampa attorney, calling back.
“Tell him,” she said, “that we filed twenty minutes ago.”
What Kolb Did Next
He didn’t say anything for a full four seconds. I counted.
Then he picked up his own phone, turned his chair forty-five degrees away from us, and had a conversation in something just above a whisper. I caught “Barbara” and “the Hendricks file” and “get me Dennis.”
Dennis, I’d later find out, was the firm’s managing partner.
My grandmother sat with her hands still folded. She was looking at the window. There was a parking lot out there, a dry cleaner, a Subway. She wasn’t looking at any of it.
She said, quietly, to no one: “He had pictures of his grandkids on the website.”
Paulson did. I’d seen them. Three kids, gap-toothed, posed on a dock somewhere. Stock photos, it turned out. Lifted from a site called FamilyPhotoBank.com. The Tampa attorney had found that in about eleven minutes.
Kolb turned back around.
“I’m going to need to reschedule,” he said.
“We’re not leaving,” I said.
He looked at me the way men like him look at people like me when they realize the meeting has stopped going the way it was supposed to go. Like he was recalculating something.
“Your grandmother retained this firm,” he said. “Not you.”
“She retained you to help her get her money back. So far you’ve told her it’s impossible and looked at your watch twice. I’m just here for moral support.”
He did not like that. His jaw did a thing.
But he sat back down.
The Four Months I Didn’t Know About
Here’s the part that kept me up the whole drive down, somewhere around Gainesville, two in the morning, gas station coffee going cold in the cupholder.
She didn’t tell me because she thought she was doing something good.
Paulson had called the first time in March. Said he’d gotten her number through a “senior financial wellness referral network,” which is the kind of phrase that sounds like it means something. He was warm. Patient. Asked about her health, her family, whether she was sleeping okay. Called back the next week just to check in. Didn’t pitch anything for the first three calls.
By the fourth call she knew his wife’s name. Karen. Two daughters. One in nursing school.
All of it invented. All of it practiced.
He told her the fund was specifically designed for grandparents who wanted to leave something behind. A legacy account, he called it. Returns of eight to twelve percent, guaranteed, with a five-year lock. He sent her a prospectus that looked real. Letterhead, charts, a regulatory disclosure page in small print that referenced an SEC registration number that belonged to a completely different company in Delaware.
She wired the money in three transfers. Didn’t want to bother me. Wanted it to be a surprise.
The surprise was going to be a check. One for each grandchild. She’d already written the notes to go with them. I found them in an envelope on her kitchen table, sealed, with our names on the front in her handwriting.
I didn’t open mine until I got home, two weeks later.
It said: I know you always worried about getting a start. I wanted to help with that. Don’t argue with me about it. Love, Grandma.
I sat in my car in my own driveway for about fifteen minutes after I read that.
What a Real Attorney Looks Like
Her name was Gail Morrow. The Tampa attorney. She’d been doing elder fraud cases for eleven years, and she had the kind of voice that sounds like she’s been in a deposition every day of those eleven years, which she basically had.
She called me back while I was still in Kolb’s office.
She had already filed complaints with the Florida Office of Financial Regulation and the FTC. She’d located Paulson’s LLC, which had been registered six months ago in Wyoming under a different name, and she’d found the registered agent, and she’d flagged the account the wire transfers had gone into, which had already moved money twice.
She’d also found the three referrals from Kolb’s firm.
That was the part that mattered most in that room. Kolb’s firm had sent three clients to Paulson’s fund. Whether that was negligence or something worse, Gail said, was what the filing was going to figure out.
“Ask him,” she said, “if the firm received any compensation for those referrals.”
I asked him.
The jaw thing again.
“That’s not something I’m going to discuss without counsel present,” he said.
Gail, on the phone: “Good. Write that down.”
I wrote it down. In his office, with his pen, on a Post-it from his desk. Slid it into my pocket.
What Clearwater Looked Like That Week
I stayed four days.
My grandmother’s house is a two-bedroom off U.S. 19. She’s lived there since 1987. The gutters need work. The hibiscus she planted when my grandfather was alive has gone enormous and slightly out of control. She refuses to cut it back.
She made coffee every morning at six and we sat at her kitchen table and she talked. Mostly not about the money. About my grandfather’s sister, who’d just gone into memory care. About the tomatoes she’d been trying to grow in pots on the back patio, which were not doing well. About how the Publix on Gulf-to-Bay had rearranged everything and she couldn’t find the soup anymore.
Normal things. The things she always talked about.
Once, on the third morning, she said: “I feel very stupid.”
I said, “You’re not stupid.”
She said, “I know I’m not stupid. I said I feel it. Those are different.”
She was right. They are.
I didn’t say anything else. She sipped her coffee and looked out at the hibiscus.
Later that day Gail called to tell us that two of the other three people Kolb’s firm had referred to Paulson were also missing money. One of them was eighty-one. The other was a couple, both in their mid-seventies, who’d put in their entire retirement savings. Every dollar.
My grandmother went very quiet when I told her.
Then she said, “We have to help them.”
Not: will we get my money back. Not: what does this mean for me.
We have to help them.
I called Gail back and asked if there was a way to connect the cases.
There was.
Paulson
He was forty-three. Lived in a rental house in Dunedin. Drove a leased Audi. The Georgia suspension had come from a complaint filed by a woman named Dolores Fitch, seventy-four, who’d lost sixty thousand dollars in 2021. The FTC had investigated and found insufficient evidence for federal action. Paulson had paid a fine. Kept his Florida license. Kept calling.
I want to tell you that I confronted him. That I drove to his house and made him look at me. I thought about it. Gail told me not to. She was right.
But I did find his Yelp page. He had eleven five-star reviews. All posted within a three-week window in January. Accounts with no other activity, no photos, generic usernames.
I reported all eleven.
It’s not enough. It’s almost nothing. I know that.
But I sat in a Panera on U.S. 19 at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night and reported all eleven reviews one by one, and I want to be honest: it felt like something. The only thing I could do right then, so I did it.
Where It Stands
Gail’s filing triggered a state investigation. Paulson’s accounts were frozen within ten days. The Wyoming LLC is being dissolved. Whether any actual money comes back, and how much, and when, is a question that has a lot of lawyers between it and an answer.
Kolb’s firm settled with my grandmother separately, and quietly, and I’m not going to say the number because that’s hers. It wasn’t everything. It was something.
The couple who’d lost their retirement savings, the mid-seventies pair, their names are Norm and Judy Hatch. Norm had a stroke in 2022 and Judy handles everything now. Gail got them connected with a legal aid organization and they’re part of the consolidated action.
Dolores Fitch, from Georgia, the woman who’d filed the original complaint against Paulson in 2021 and watched it go nowhere, she called my grandmother last month. They talked for an hour and forty minutes. I know because my grandmother mentioned it, laughing a little, saying she hadn’t talked on the phone that long since the nineties.
My grandmother’s tomatoes are still not doing well. The gutters still need work. She found the soup at Publix; they moved it to aisle seven.
She hasn’t cried again. Not that she’s told me.
But she kept the notes she’d written for us. All the envelopes, still sealed, with our names on them in her handwriting. She put them somewhere she didn’t tell me about.
She said she’d figure out something else to put in them.
—
If this one got to you, send it to someone who needs to read it. There’s probably a Grandma in their life too.
If you’re looking for more wild family stories, you won’t believe what happened when my grandmother left me a key in her will, and the lawyer said he’d never seen anything like it, or when I ran a background check on the man who saved my daughter and called my Captain at 2 AM. And for another dose of unexpected legal drama, check out why I drove past the courthouse on my way to shift and had to pull over.
