That said, “absolutely,” one of the first signs of cognitive decline is a change in financial behavior, notes Sarah Lock, AARP’s senior vice president for policy and brain health. “You may notice that the person who’s been meticulous in their financial affairs suddenly becomes less so.”
An analysis of more than 81,000 Medicare beneficiaries’ health data found that people who were later diagnosed with dementia were more likely to experience drops in their credit scores and miss bill payments than those who weren’t. Problems began as early as 6 years before the diagnosis, according to a 2020 Johns Hopkins University study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.
And a 2016 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease found that older adults with mild cognitive impairment are more susceptible to scams, particularly when they displayed slower processing speed and lower short-term memory. Co-author Duke Han, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and family medicine at the University of Southern California, explains in an email that if an older adult is cognitively slower, they “may have difficulty keeping track in a high time-pressure situation.” With memory issues, they “may be more easily led to misremember events or facts. These cognitive difficulties can reflect brain changes that make it more difficult for an older adult to discern a scam from a legitimate situation.”
Ian Bednowitz, general manager for identity and privacy at Gen Digital, maker of Norton and LifeLock identity theft protection, among other products, also saw his late mother become a fraud victim when she had cognitive decline. In 2015, her paid caregiver stole her personal information, including her Social Security number, as well as balance transfer checks from her mail. The caregiver wrote the checks to herself, which meant she took out a fraudulent loan for thousands of dollars against his mother’s credit card limit. The unusual charges led him to check her credit report, and “my heart just sank, because there were all kinds of loans and credit cards and things in her name that she had nothing to do with, with high balances on them. It was tens of thousands of dollars.” (Authorities did eventually catch the criminal, whom he says was part of a crime syndicate that preyed on vulnerable older people.)
Bednowitz says he wishes he’d been aware of the different steps he could have taken that may have helped prevent the crime.
Where to begin
If you’re concerned, it’s crucial to “start to talk about money, start to talk about scams,” says Darius Kingsley, head of consumer banking practices at Chase. “That sounds obvious, but a lot of older Americans — that’s a generational thing — don’t want to talk about money. So you’ve got to explain the threat [of scams] and tell them you want to help keep them safe. You’re not trying to be intrusive. You’re not trying to be condescending.” (See below for the scam-prevention basics that you can emphasize.)
Some older adults who are accustomed to independence may resist their adult child becoming involved in their financial affairs. “My mom was very stubborn,” says Bednowitz. “She hated me taking care of anything for her.” But if he approached her carefully — suggesting he pay her bills without having control of her account, for example — “she was OK being helped. I think it has to feel like help and not control.”
How intrusive you need to be will depend on your parents’ level of cognitive decline. In an ideal world, they would have designated someone they trust — maybe their child — to serve as their financial advocate under a power of attorney before they become unable to make financial decisions. For that to happen, though, “the parent has to really trust you as the individual,” says Bednowitz, who notes the sad fact that when elder theft is perpetrated by someone the victim knows, it’s most often a family member.
More ways to protect a loved one with (or without) cognitive decline from fraud
“We hear from our customers all the time where [they] were on the road to being scammed, and they caught it within the family,” says Kingsley. “Very often that’s because the adult child has been proactive.”
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