Today I want to talk about something that has really bothered me since I started taking care of my father, and that is the amount of people and businesses who willingly and purposely seek out people like my father to take advantage of them. I want to share a few examples of the things I have seen.
My father has the tendency to purchase anything that is suggested to him and I am dealing with a horrible problem with his mail right now. He has signed up to receive so much junk it is ridiculous and the worst part is that companies are willing to invoice him so that when the junk arrives so does a bill. Many of these companies are quite skilled at getting the elderly and people with dementia to buy from them and are also quite good at scamming them. If you are a care giver please be aware of this and work to control and go through the mail of your loved one before they can to get rid of the potential scams and junk mail.
Another issue I dealt with that was near impossible to get stopped was Internet fraud. Two different “woman”, convinced my father to send them money through Western Union to a few different African nations. They did this by sending horribly created nudes with a “perfect” body with a “perfect” head photo-shopped on and sent it to him through text and email. They also told him tons of sob stories. These “women” are actually mostly computer generated and my father was unable to get that. Getting rid of “Candy” was horrible. We had to change his email and cell phone number 3 times. He still to this day believes that "she" is a beautiful woman who is in love with him.
Examples like these are all to common in our world today and it is up to us as care givers to do all we can to protect those we love. The world is very unsafe for those with dementia because they can be scammed so easy. I am working on totally taking the Internet away from my father to try to combat all types of scam that I can.
Please share anything you have found helpful to protect your loved ones from scams.
Attached are a few resources regarding how easy it is to scam someone with dementia:
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