Active discussions

Please or to access all these features

Talk
Elderly parents
Original poster

Preventing access to social media

56 replies

spottygymbag · 14/01/2026 03:27

Elderly DM in law has become the victim of an ongoing cyber love scam. Over 18 months she has lost significant amounts of her and DF in law’s money.
She was showing cognitive impairment a year ago and the GP has recently issued a letter we have taken to the bank to stop her access. Further testing and medical management is now in process.

The issue we have now is how to deal with the social media and messaging side. The scammers are incessant, pressuring and threatening her to the point she called emergency services earlier this week. Part of her impairment is that she cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality so no amount of education or reasoning helps, believe me we have tried! The scammers also transfer her from one platform to another and she will blindly follow their instructions to create new accounts and she is now starting to fall for other scams on top of the ongoing original one.

So from a place of absolute desperation, any ideas on how we can deal with this messaging and contact side of things? Also to note that in the past when we have limited access to messaging and social media on the phone and laptop she has disappeared to the local library to email the scammer that way.

OP posts:
gamerchick · 14/01/2026 07:49

stayathomegardener · 14/01/2026 07:34

I would activate power of attorney and move the majority of her money to a different account only transferring pocket money by direct debit to an account she can access, so for example with my mum she had £50 a week for bits but if that small account exceeded £1k we swiped some back.
Online banking on our phones and Ring doorbells to monitor.
New phone number might deter any existing scammers.
Horrible being her gatekeeper but better than her continuing to lose money at the unsustainable rate she was.

This first definitely and hen focus on her getting a social life. She sounds prerry active so there must be something she would be interested in

MikeRafone · 14/01/2026 07:45

Ask the library to put her on an under 16 restriction on the pc ?
they might be able to do this on her library card but worth asking first if they can do it as part of safeguarding

contact your council MASH team or equivalent as this woman has suffered financial abuse from people online and you’re trying to prevent this from happening in her local library

also as an aside is the gp has given letter for cognitive decline, get onto council tax for SMI reduction and they’ll send a firm out. Get go to enter date on this form of their diagnosis

that way in-laws should get 25% discount on council tax

ShawnaMacallister · 14/01/2026 07:35

If she's just doing it at the library and isn't able to send anyone any money is that able to do much damage? If you could limit her social media at home by putting parental controls on her devices then her trips to the library would be the worst that could happen right? She can't sit there all day? Or does she?

stayathomegardener · 14/01/2026 07:34

I would activate power of attorney and move the majority of her money to a different account only transferring pocket money by direct debit to an account she can access, so for example with my mum she had £50 a week for bits but if that small account exceeded £1k we swiped some back.
Online banking on our phones and Ring doorbells to monitor.
New phone number might deter any existing scammers.
Horrible being her gatekeeper but better than her continuing to lose money at the unsustainable rate she was.

Original poster
spottygymbag · 14/01/2026 07:32

Yes, we’ve tried this approach too. She had a new phone number and we changed the passwords to her existing social media. She had written down one of the email addresses used to contact her so she then set up new accounts and provided the link/new user name to them again. Honestly we are at our wits end and at the point of either locking her phone and internet down completely or giving her a dumb phone. Which works until she goes to the local library…
And yes you’re right, it’s meeting some kind of need. She did have quite a full life until all of this kicked off though- very socially active, kids and grandkids with pretty frequent visits both ways amongst all of them, physically in quite good shape.
its hard to know at this point how much is the declining cognition, and how much is her, and to what extent do we try and protect her before we are overstepping.

OP posts:
NeedingCoffee · 14/01/2026 07:14

If you changed her phone number, and then changed all her passwords (so phone based reset wouldn't work), would they have any way of still contacting her?
I know that's rather radical, but I guess you could keep the old phone (with old number) so that you could pass on genuine messages and calls.
Would possibly only work for a bit as the scam messages are obviously filling an "attention"/ loneliness hole for her which is a much harder issue long term.