LOL no, and trust me I’m not at all sympathetic to the scammers. I do however feel for someone in a position where talking to a scammer is the highlight of their day so much they are willing to throw money to them, so to prevent that we’ll them get them declared incompetent and put in a nursing home where they will be properly isolated. 
And I am not blaming their children either, the whole thing just sucks.
I’m pretty sure that the promise of millions of dollars if they can just get yet another payment for taxes/fees/etc is what’s driving the OP’s mom, not loneliness, but that’s just my guess. Hundreds or thousands of people every year are taken in by the Nigerian/419 e-mail scammers using similar means, and I’d wager none of them are paying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars for an e-mail penpal who has a terrible grasp of English.
Yes, you are. You came into this thread saying that if you were their parents you would take all your money and give it to some stranger so you wouldn’t be able to give it to them. You can’t “blame the children” more than that.
And seeing as you have nothing to contribute to how to make the thread better, why don’t you find another thread that doesn’t make you so sad you feel like attacking people?
The OPs mother is of sound mind according to a medical doctor, yet all people can contribute it how to get control of her affairs.
No, there have been two types of answers. Ones that respond to her being scammed, and ones that respond to her being mentally unsound. Both are possibilities.
She’s giving money to an obvious scammer. There is something wrong here. No child who loves their parents are going to just stand by and let it happen. All your protests do is make people feel bad for doing what they have to do. People who are dealing with a real problem don’t need someone who is going to shit upon all the proposed solutions.
If you have an alternative solution, offer it. Otherwise the sum total of your participation in this thread is negative, hence my suggestion that you leave.
This will be my last post in this thread as well, as I am not going to continue this hijack you started, and let this thread actually be about dealing with the problem in the OP. I hope you will as well.
Oh, for pete’s sake. Scammers prey on the gullible, no matter what age. WTF are you going on about “properly isolating” them anyway?
Spend more time with your parents, if you can’t do it in person and you both have PCs and internet access you can talk for no cost at all, if your parent has a landline well there are cheap VOIP services. They won’t be as lonely and they might trust your opinion more.
The doctor is offering a medical opinion, and you’re looking for something LEGAL.
If you live in the US, look up “Public Guardian” in your county directory. If that office cannot help you, you will be directed to an agency which can.
A senior being scammed is ELDER ABUSE, and whether by family or stranger, it’s still abuse. Mom may be able to present a coherent persona for the doctor visit, but if she’s spending her housing/food/utility money on some crook’s hard luck story, she needs to be protected.
~VOW
I feel for you. Mother gave over $30K to a man that worked at her retirement community who was 30 yrs. younger than her, and who she considered to be her boyfriend. APS (Adult Protective Services) visited her, and found her to be competent. But she was “in love.” We took it up with the facility, and finally, FINALLY, they got her to admit she had given him “gifts”-strictly prohibited, and he was fired. But she continued to see him–she would walk out to the edge of the facility, and he would pick her up, they would have dinner, and she would hand him, oh, $800 or $1000 in cash each time. Legally, since she gave it to him because she wanted to, there was nothing we could do.
Except…we discovered where he lived. In a maneuver worthy of, oh, I dunno, some private eye story, we did some watching, and confronted him when he got home from one of their “dates.”
No bodily harm ensued, but we got that nite’s cash back, and maybe it was the 2 armed men, that convinced him to just GO AWAY.
She’s now, just 18 mos. later, been Dx with ALZ.
So damn hard.
You need to pick up a phone book and look for Weston, M. Or if you’re not in the Miami area, you can try and find Team, A., but that can be a big ‘if’.
Don’t you live thousands of miles from your parents?
Yep, and although I talk to them on the phone often they still do things that scare the shit out of me(like being hospitalized multiple times for dehydration) and while I made a thread about it people were telling me to let my father pass 
LOL When he wasn’t terminal.
I know for sure they are wasting hundreds of dollars too, but I can’t force them to do anything so I spend time with them and forget the rest.
Well. Thanks for all the responses! This is a common problem with the elderly I’ve found out. They get ideas in their heads and simply aren’t able to think clearly, they are sitting ducks for this kind of thing, which is why it’s so successful. And once they get on the ‘sucker list’ and involved with Jamaican scam artists who are VERY clever-watch out!
I will tell you this, yesterday I got my brother in Florida on the phone, and he and my sister in law made some phone calls to the bank and the telephone company while I drove over to my mother’s to see what exactly was going on. When I got there, there was a neighbor there, and a police officer on his cell phone talking to the phone company trying to get Mom’s phone number changed to a new, unlisted number.
Get this: the scammers had blocked all incoming calls to her phone except calls from them, and they were calling continuously trying to talk to my mother. The cop said her phone rang 50 times in an hour - he’d answer and they’d hear his voice and hang up! And he said technically there was nothing really illegal about it! I talked to my brother on neighbor’s cell phone in the meantime. So after half an hour the cop got mom’s old phone number cancelled and a new unlisted phone number. and her phone stopped ringing, blessed blessed silence from heavily accented scam artist.
My brother had called her bank and managed to talk them into putting a hold on her (and my - we have joint) checking account until we went there, got our account cancelled, and a new checking account established (which we did later that day). I didn’t know for sure if the scammers ever got any check from her, but didn’t want to take the chance. Mom does know how to write checks and withdraw cash with no problem.
After patient questioning, Mom admitted yesterday she spent $400 on a pack of scratchoffs of some type at a drugstore, went home, and ‘read off the numbers on the back’ over the phone to these scammers. (I do not know what that was about, but apparently there was nothing illegal according to the cop - so somehow they got the use of $400 worth of scratchoffs.) In mom’s purse I found a check made out to cash for $1,500 she planned to withdraw, with a list of instructions she jotted down, - where to get more scratchoffs to buy, for the same purpose. $1,500! . Plus notes about how “a Brinks truck would come by to deliver the Million Dollar Check”, they were going to deliver a car she had won to her house and she should have $500 cash on hand for a delivery fee. Instructions on how to wire funds through Western Union and a list of Western Union offices, and how much to send and where…oh, it just turned my stomach! What BASTARDS - and technically the were not doing anything illegal!
All this time Mom was rather irked at first, grumbling that we were going to regret not getting that car she won and insisting the cop have a piece of cake! (he did! he was a nice young guy and they kind of knew each other previously, it being a very small town).
So - the bank account was closed and a new one opened. Old phone number of 50 years cancelled, new unlisted phone number established. … Now I have to call everyone I can think of to tell them the new phone number. Call Social Security, health insurance company, and the pension office to tell them about the checking account (for direct deposit). A bunch of checks she recently wrote to stores, etc. are probably going to be bouncing for months to come. I’m probably going to get phone calls wondering why they can’t contact my mom.
And get this! While we were at the bank, mom’s neighbor said he a cab pulled up in her driveway and the driver went to the door. He went over to investigate and the cab driver had, in his hand, his cell phone. And emanating from that cell phone was the heavily accented, loud voice of the scammer demanding my mother talk to him! Neighbor said he could hear the guy barking on the cell phone: “Sali’s Mom! Sali’s Mom! It is VERY VERY important you talk to me! It is VITAL you speak to me on this phone, Sali’s Mom! I MUST SPEAK WITH YOU!” (cab driver was sniggering, probably did this kind of thing a lot.)
I called the cop and he said, technically, nothing illegal was done. The scammer is not actually in the area, he is in Jamaica which is where any money wired would end up. (oh, and he has one of those 876 area codes on the dozen different phone numbers he has left with mom over the last couple of months, which means the phone company can attach a $1,000 charge to a phone call made to him, or so I’ve heard. Will be waiting to see if THAT charge shows up on her next phone bill).
So I went through mom’s desk and drawers and tried to find every scrap of paper with any phone numbers from this scammer so she wouldn’t be moved to call him back! There is no one name, no one number, no name of a company, just a daily barrage of calls from that asshole demanding $100, $200, $300 from Mom that “she will get back” once she receives the $1 million, $3 million, $35 million dollar Grand Prize.
And every day, every day, she gets in her mail a fucking STACK of charity letters, you-may-be-a-winner letters from all over the country, all over the world! - save the children, save the veterans, save the animals/ocean/horses/pigs/donkeys/rain forest, plus contests, sweepstakes, lotteries, raffles for her to fill out and mail in with a small fee. So then her name will be ‘put on a list’ and she will have to send in another fee so her name will be higher UP on the list, to win The Grand Prize of a car or $5 million.
All this started from an entry in Publisher’s Clearinghouse, where they are going to bring a gigantic check to the winner’s door, with a TV crew filming it. I hope Ed McMahon, deceased Face of Publisher’s Clearinghouse, is roasting in a nice hot corner of hell.
I don’t think this is over yet, our Jamaican scammer got a $400 taste of pigeon. I will just have to be more vigilant about her mail, keep on top of her regular finances, and try smuggle out those stacks of mail. (I have removed over a dozen brown paper grocery bags jam packed with this crap from her house, under vehement protest, in the last couple of months. As fast as I remove it, there’s more to take its place.)
This is about all I and my long-distance brother can do. Mom is doing pretty well, with my occasional help, on her own, in her own house. She’s lived there for 65 years and is adamant she is going to die there. She doesn’t want to spend the day with me, go to a senior citizen center, or go stay with my Florida brother even in the winter - can’t leave the house, what if the icicles build up and pull down the gutter? What if her disabled son (who lives in a group home a few miles away) needs a ride to the store for a bag of potato chips? What about her car, what if the battery goes dead without it being started up regularly? Can’t leave the house for any length of time! Move into assisted living? :eek: You have got to be shitting her, srsly???
OK. So be it. Can’t force her to move, or go hang out with “old people” at the seniors center or church. I’m here to do what I can for her until something dire happens. Yesterday’s activities were the worst of it so far, but she only lost $400 this time!
You can enter the serial# on the scratch off on the website of the lottery commission and it tells you whether it is a winner or not, likely the crooks did that and if there had been a winner would have had your mom give it to an agent in the US to cash.
If you have a joint account withdraw all but living expense money into your account.
EDIT: You can have all her mail diverted to a P.O. Box or remailer who will forward it on to you.
I was thinking of doing both these things if this thing continues. 1) Could I DO that, withdraw the majority of her money and put it into my own account? 2) Mom DOES look forward to her mail and sends small sums, like $10, to some charities - she doesn’t have many expenses and is able to do that. She seems done with entering sweepstakes, but mostly because I go through her mail every week and dispose of most of the most blatant crap. I know where to look, where she hides the ‘sure things’ to be filled out and mailed.
Here’s another warning: express any interest in AARP and you will be deluged with mail from them, and have to pick out grains of wheat from a bucket of chaff (like if you get your health insurance through them). I never saw so much stuff! “Membership cards”. Life insurance offers. Surveys. Petitions. Travel stuff. Lists of places you can get 5% off by whipping out your card. Unbelievable.
Contact the Direct Mail Marketing Association and get her OFF those damnable mailing lists. You’ll probably have to do that every six months or so, since the marketing folks find new places to harvest addresses every day.
Get her off those stupid catalog mailing lists, too. I’m going to be killed someday, opening my mailbox and an avalanche of mail order catalogs will fall on me and smother me!
I beg my husband to throw out junk mail, instead of bringing every morsel to me to sort.
“I don’t know what is important and what isn’t!”
I told him, “Here’s a clue: look at the postage. If the stuff isn’t mailed using full, first-class postage, it’s CRAP.”
We have a wood stove now. Junk mail keeps us TOASTY warm!
~VOW
Oh, VOW - do you think I haven’t tried?
I’ve spent hours and hours looking up every remedy on how to stop junk mail. It just will. not. STOP.
That’s because the “don’t send me shit” registry is only valid as long as someone doesn’t respond to *anything *- the moment your mom answers ANY of those solicitations, she’s back on all the linked mailing lists, and they’re free to contact her again because she answered them so OBVIOUSLY she wants to be in contact.
It sucks.
I hate to second taking money out of her account, but I do feel like that’s a very helpful suggestion. If you could get most of the money funneled over to an alternate account for safekeeping, and leave her enough to spend on charity when she feels like it, then that would do a lot to keep her financially safe from predators (assuming you aren’t one yourself 
).
I would also highly consider getting her a PO Box, and *not *have the post office auto-forward her mail. Send forwarding addresses to only the charities she wants to continue supporting, and to people who need it. That will work very quickly to cut down the solicitations. Sadly, a lot of the charities sell their mailing lists also, so her donating to them may expose her to some solicitations, but the volume will be way down.
Sounds like you may be making some progress at least.
My Mom sent them around $40K as well as getting $11K in advances on her credit cards. The card companies had to write that off once she was declared incompetent. I was there once when she received a call from the scammer. I took the phone from her and they said that if I didn’t put her back on they were going to come over and “shoot you in the face”. I told them to come and give it a try. Then they hung up.
Best of luck.
All this week our local news station is featuring ‘how to protect yourself against scams’.
The first segment they showed yesterday? The heavily accented, super-friendly nice man with the phone number to call him in Jamaica (876 area code, which means if you call, YOU will get a huge long distance charge attached to your phone bill) for details on getting your $3.5 million dollar check! A reporter called the phone number and I heard my mom’s ‘friend’s’ voice!
The news people said if you get a call like this, to contact the BBB or FTC. :rolleyes:
Is the BBB or FTC going to do something about the 50 phone calls from this turd you will get every day???