My mother is 86 and in the early stages of dementia. My sisters and I each have a role in caring for him. Mine is handling the money. Sunday afternoon, I opened her bank statement and noticed a strange withdrawal. I called my sister, who does most of the day-to-day stuff, and she had no knowledge of it. Then I noticed a similar withdrawal on the previous month’s statement. Both of them had a toll-free number attached. I called them both and got very similar messages: “You’ve reached customer service. Our office hours are Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm.”
Monday morning first thing I got on the phone and tried to reach the two. No luck. One placed me on hold, and then cut me off after a few minutes. The other just gave me a the opportunity to leave a message. I called the bank, and was given the run-around until I got to a person who was able to look up the transactions and give me another set of phone numbers to call. In the process, I discovered a third item on the bank statement – an electronic check. Three transactions, in the space of less than a month. I shot an email to the AG’s office to try to get some help.
I ended up spending most of the day Monday trying to track down a human at one of the three companies (in one case, I was on hold for over two hours and never reached anyone) and going back and forth with the bank. I got a call from Corrine Zaughan, Director of Victim Notification, in the AG’s office. What she told me was downright scary. She said we likely will never know how my mother’s (and my) bank account got accessed and that the perpetrators likely also have my mother’s social security number. I was instructed to get the account closed, file a police report, put a fraud alert on both my mother’s credit report and mine (because they might come after me next, since my name is on the account) and a bunch of other things.
There is never a good time for something like this to happen, but with tax season on me, it just adds to the stress. It was fortuitous that I didn’t have any appointments Monday so that I could spend the day on this. But with appointments all day Tuesday and Wednesday, it will be Thursday before I can do much else. I’ve got to pick up my mother, who lives in Hampton and rarely leaves her apartment, to go to the bank, get the account closed and new one opened, and talk to the Hampton police. All because some greedy jerk wants to steal my mother’s Social Security money.
You never know how or when such madness can strike. Had I not looked at the bank statements, I wouldn’t have noticed the transactions. As it turns out, in my last phone call to the bank, a fourth transaction had posted to her account, just after the cutoff of the last bank statement.
So look at your statements, people. And reconcile your accounts. Don’t just rely on checking the balance.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Good advice. Apply it to your credit card statements, too.
Ditto the comment above. Luckily one of my credit cards lets me check my credit score for free so I check up on it at least once a month.
This also points to some advice that may be harder to take/act on: it’s important to pay attention to your elderly parents finances. And you should probably start before you (or they) think you should. It’s a really tough thing to do (in my experience, at least), but it can save everyone from having to deal with *much* tougher things down the line.
Today I get to take my mother to the bank, close one account, open another, go to the police station to file a report, contact the credit reporting agencies, contact all of the vendors we have set up for automatic drafts on her bank accounts and a whole lot of other stuff.
I have no idea how long this saga will go on.