How to Help Someone Who's Being Scammed

I feel really exhausted, emotionally drained, and the amount of time that it's taken and the mental bandwidth it's taken...

And I'm being lied to, continually being lied to is a very difficult thing as well as a family member to cope with.

You know you're being lied to, but you can't.

There's nothing you seem to be able to do with that knowledge, really.

But I've been blamed for quite a lot of it.

And I find that very difficult as well.

And around me, a lot of the people who were close to me initially would just say, well, what kind

of an idiot would do that? So there's the emotional side of it, trying to break the spell, as it's called.

But let's first focus on the practical steps that someone might be able to take in this situation.

Here's Helen again.

I think what I could have

benefited from was probably an outlet early on of people to talk to who'd been through the same thing.

I think also as well an ability to be able to contact a bank and be able to say, look, I'm worried about this.

Can we put a stop on it? Would have been very useful.

And did you try to do that?

I spoke to the bank, and this was back in March, but then I believed that it had stopped.

And they were quite helpful when I spoke to them.

I have power of attorney, so they were kind of, okay, yeah, this is a bit of a worry.

You can phone up and talk to us about your mum's account.

But there wasn't a discussion about... them alerting me.

It was on me to know, but I didn't know.

And I didn't know it was going on.

And after it stopped the first time, I just thought that was it until probably October when I became really aware that it was much worse than I thought.

So, Jim, clearly you can hear Helen's concern, and this is why she emailed us.

But she has lasting power of attorney for her mother, which she's had for a couple of years.