S/o List of signs of financial scams I can flag for older relatuves

[Anonymous]

Door to door sales. My elderly aunt has hired several because they came to the door and told her that the inside of her house was infested with something specific because they were all over the neighborhood. She’s purchased one time extermination packages multiple times to get rid of rats, termites, bedbugs….

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My dad got a message on his computer that it was infected with a virus and that he had to call a number from Microsoft to fix it. He called them and was on the phone with them for about 20 minutes before I came in and asked him to hand the phone to me. They had him enter some code and they got access to his computer. Even moving the curser remotely and asking him to plug in the computer because it was running low on power. I asked “Microsoft” to call back and hung up on them. Looked up the call back number and it was a known scam number. We had to wipe his whole hard drive to avoid any key detection software they may have installed.

This happened to my dad, except no one was there to intervene. He's a retired investment banker who gave his info to "Microsoft" tech support.

Thankfully, all the financial institutions were quick to lock things down. We basically bricked his computer and the phone company did something where only calls from a couple of numbers would go through to my parents' house.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:magazine subscriptions! my mom subscribes to the new yorker and foreign affairs. Well, she got these calls tellig her the subscription was ending soon and giving her a 'great rate" and she gave her card out over the phone, several times. Once I had access to her account I saw she was charged more than 5k over 2 years by various fly by night outfits (and only one copy of the magazines ever came) for bogus subscriptions. I told her never to give her credit card #over the phone. Sadly she was not reviewing her statements, so most of these are too long gone to dispute, although I filed complaints with FTC and bureau of consumer affairs and attorneygeneral in her state.

This is what happened with my mother in law, she agreed to small charges, less than a dollar and then this set of a chain of recurrent charges for amounts up to $5000. This went on for years with multiple scanners passing around her details. She did see the charges and didn’t know how to stop them. By the time we find out she has remortgaged her house to pay for it. The amount was well into six figures and involved multiple credit cards. It was incredibly difficult but we did get tens of thousands reimbursed from the credit card companies even years later. This was no where near the amount stolen but it did help.

[Anonymous]

Immediate PP again, I should add that this was the first sign of my mother in laws dementia. Five years later it’s obvious, but apparently an inability to spot a scam is one of the first signs. She was completely unable to tell us how this has happened although completely fine in all other ways at the time.