MIL says she gave bank/card details to a stranger who knocked on the door.

[Cat27]

Can you seal up her letterbox & put one of the lockable ones on the wall? If you keep the key then you control what she sees.

 

[fizzie]

Excellent idea to fix a locked letterbox to the outside but in addition I would go through the bank account and cancel all direct debits to charities - and remove her card and leave her cash each week - she can't spend 2/3rds of her income on scroungers if that is not what she would have done before her memory loss.

To be honest my Mum didn't need her bank card once i sorted out a bit of cash and she forgot she had ever had one and then she didn't need cash either. She wrote her own cheques with help right until the end

Can she stay with you whilst you get the POA sorted out?

 

[JayGun]

Sorry to hear about all your problems. Do you mind explaining what you mean by this? If it is fairly straight forward you can do it yourselves on line.

http://forum.alzheimers.org.uk/show...LPAs-Online-is-EASY-now&p=1176281#post1176281

I meant register it with the bank lovely. Sorry for being vague. We set it up years ago, (thank goodness) but we haven't made any use of it until now.

 

[JayGun]

To stop the constant charity requests coming through the post why not get her post redirected to you so you can keep an eye on it. She may notice it's not being delivered for a while but she will not notice it eventually.

Thank you for this suggestion. We've set this up and it started this week. Only four charity envelopes so far. (One a day)

Mil is absolutely ragey about it because she doesn't understand that she's sending so much money to these things that there's no money for bills - but we're all singing from the same hymn sheet and she's just going to have to put up with our interference now.

 

[JayGun]

Excellent idea to fix a locked letterbox to the outside but in addition I would go through the bank account and cancel all direct debits to charities - and remove her card and leave her cash each week - she can't spend 2/3rds of her income on scroungers if that is not what she would have done before her memory loss.

To be honest my Mum didn't need her bank card once i sorted out a bit of cash and she forgot she had ever had one and then she didn't need cash either. She wrote her own cheques with help right until the end

Can she stay with you whilst you get the POA sorted out?

She can't stay with us because she can't manage our stairs. This might be a good thing though because all she wants to do at the moment is shout at us for interfering. She rings early every morning at the moment to rant and demand her bank card back but my husband is very calm with her. He's giving her £70 in cash every week which seems more than enough considering that she barely leaves the house and we do her shopping and sort out the bills. She says it needs to be £150 because when she drew out £100 a week it was never enough and she never had any money.

She would definitely not have done this a few years ago. She used to be able to save a little out of her meagre pension whereas now she gives away so much that she's living way above her means.

 

[JayGun]

It's wrong, very very wrong.
Thinking about it, how often do we read on TP of people with dementia losings hundreds, sometimes thousands of pounds to these scammers, and sadly, also to charities.
And let's face it, the membership of TP who post about it are a mere fraction of the problem.
There needs to be a differentiation between what someone did before dementia (say £200 pa to charities) and what they are doing since diagnosis. This grey area of so-called 'capacity' is allowing theft on a huge scale, stealing from the vulnerable, and causing untold worry to their families.
The stories on here say it all -- people with dementia may agree to something one day, but bitterly
regret it and feel afraid of what they've done the next day. And are unable to deal with the problem, or stop it happening again.
It is awful.

I hope you can eventually resolve all this, JayGun, and I sympathise with you and your OH over the stress it has caused you all.

Thank you Sleepless.
This is my MIL to a T. One moment she's defiantly insisting that she knows what she's doing, and the next she's shredding tissues compulsively and so frightened of what she's done.

It is awful. Tge social worker suggested that perhaps she had a UTI because of this sudden deterioration - but there hasn't been a sudden deterioration at all. She 's been doing this for at least a year - and she just lied to him when he came to assess her. I don't know how she knew to do that, but some self protection mechanism kicked in.