Grifter cons $850,000 from Howard Beach man

One week after a 20-year-old Flushing woman was arrested and charged for grifting an elderly man out of nearly $1 million, Queens District Attorney Richard A. Brown said that the &#8220sweetheart swindler” has been charged with a hate crime for specifically targeting older men.
Under the 2000 New York Hate Crimes Act, charges can be bumped up when the victim is picked because they are 60 plus, so Natasha &#8220Munchkin” Marks of Flushing now faces life in prison if convicted.
After allegedly swindling Louis Bruno, 85, a 46-year resident of Howard Beach, Marks was nabbed after attempting to grift another elderly man out of $5,000 to pay for her fake cancer treatments.
&#8220In typical sweetheart swindler fashion, the defendant is accused of befriending elderly men and preying on their loneliness and vulnerability to scam them out of their life savings,” said DA Brown.
In Bruno’s case, the fraud cost him nearly $850,000, which Marks – who he only knew as &#8220Sandy” – had told him would go towards medical bills and investments. After meeting the mark at a grocery store, Marks, who was 18, began visiting him at home and calling him regularly and soon afterward started asking for money.
With checks written out to one of Marks’ several aliases – &#8220Crystal Smith” – and to a company allegedly owned by a friend of her deceased mother, Bruno handed over $250,000 to Marks to pay for hospital bills, doctor bills, start-up money for a business and investments.
After a two-year courtship, Bruno noticed that the money in his bank accounts had dwindled down from $400,000 to $12,000. According to the criminal complaint charges, Marks also applied for power-of-attorney over Bruno’s finances, refinanced the mortgage on his Howard Beach home, and then took out a $560,000 loan from the home’s equity.
Bruno brought his bankbooks to his next-door neighbor Anthony Stabile, who then called Adult Protective Services (APS). The next day Bruno showed Stabile the letter from the City’s Department of Finance about the mortgage and shook in disbelief.
&#8220He gets into the twilight of his life and someone snatches $400,000 in cash from him and almost his house – it’s just not right,” Stabile said.
In the 30 years that Stabile lived next door, he had only seen his lifelong bachelor neighbor with two women and he had never even spotted Marks when she visited his neighbor on Shore Parkway.
However, the teen must have made more of an impression on Bruno, he said. According to published reports and Stabile, Bruno had planned to pop the question to his young sweetie Stabile said he thought Bruno was going to give her the ring that belonged to his mother – but the Howard Beach senior has no use for the scam artist now.
Last month, Marks allegedly approached a 79-year-old Jamaica man at a Staples store, and later called him to ask for $5,000 to pay for her cancer treatments. When she went to meet up with the man at the Staples in Bayside, Marks was arrested. She will return to court on Thursday, October 19.
&#8220Crimes involving the financial exploitation of the elderly – particularly those involving so-called sweetheart scams – are among the most devastating forms of elder abuse. Unfortunately, as America steadily grays, we are seeing such crimes occurring with more and more frequency,” Brown said.
On Thursday, October 5, an Astoria woman was sentenced to 14 years behind bars for hiring a thug to scare an elderly man into selling his home to her at a lower price. Liat Corman, 32, who allegedly sweet-talked her way into the bank accounts of lonely, older men, hired a man to intimidate a 78-year-old Astoria man who had not fallen prey to her charms – and the thug beat the elderly man to death.
In March, Sherry Kaslov pled guilty to conning two men out of $300,000, and Shirley Miller, of Bayside, served four months in prison for bilking several men out of a total of $500,000.
According to NYC Department for the Aging (DFTA) spokesperson Christopher Miller, about 50,000 sweetheart swindles are perpetrated in the city each year, but the DFTA sees only a fraction of these cases.
&#8220Anyone who has money stolen, it’s a huge issue for seniors, who are living most of the time on fixed incomes and live with a finite amount of money,” Miller said. &#8220Whether it’s $1 million or $100, that could mean the difference between paying for medications that week or buying food.”