Preventing access to social media

[spottygymbag]

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.

This is so hard.

I have a situation that while not nearly as difficult is worrying anyway.

My 84 year old mother was widowed 4 years ago. She misses her husband very much. She’s active and busy during the day but she finds nights when she’s at home alone lonely.

We’ve found out recently she’s messaging strangers that have made contact through Facebook and other platforms. She swears she knows they’re not real people but she enjoys the interaction with them. Also swears she’d never give them money.

We could never go down the route of restricting her access to the internet or her own money. She’s got all of her faculties except for memory issues.

So we just have to hope for the best and that none of them manage to convince her they are real because she’d probably fall for it. She’s quite vain and loves attention so she’s susceptible to flattery.

She’s secretive about some things that she knows my sister and I won’t approve of, so we might not know until it’s too late.

I know someone who changed character and became obsessed when elderly. Not scammers but it ended their marriage after 60 years.

She died of a brain tumour very shortly after.

Has she had any scans?

Apple phones have a setting called assisted access where you can chose the apps ect that are allowed, even emails ect that can be used and need a code to exit it. I just set it up for my grandma just to simplify the phone use.

Absolutely this and kittens/pets can be hard work and really not fair on the animals. I have to say OP, for someone with cognitive decline, MIL is amazingly resourceful!

Yes, nothing of concern.

I didn’t know this, thanks. I’ve passed it on to DH who does the tech side but we are both still hoping they have just gone down the dumb phone route.