Inheritance impatience: ‘Our family has been wrecked by this experience’

Those vulnerable to financial elder abuse are often let down by the legal system and people they should be able to trust most.

When Anne* discovered that her older brother had spirited their elderly mother away, it was the dramatic climax of months of financial elder abuse that ended only with her mother’s death.
Talking about it on the phone from her home, she describes how her brother falsely claimed a carer’s allowance and other benefits before she became aware of the extent of the problem.

“I believe he had forged my mother’s signature and changed her will,” Anne says, explaining how she struggled through the courts and the New South Wales civil and administrative tribunal in the hope of protecting her mother and the mother’s assets.
Anne says that just before her brother took their mother back to her unit, she told Anne she was frightened of him.
“The police declined to intervene, saying it was a civil matter, and did not put an urgent intercept on his car. When I got the NCAT ruling, which determined that my mother still had the capacity to manage her own affairs, he had spent most of her money on gambling and alcohol. He then left her to die of neglect. The doctors told me she had not had her medication in over two weeks and was suffering from malnutrition,” Anne says, her voice breaking.

Read more https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/sep/12/inheritance-impatience-our-family-has-been-wrecked-by-this-experience

Source: The Guardian, by Caroline Baum. Financial elder abuse is so distressing because it’s generally perpetrated by their nearest and dearest – a partner, children, relatives or friends. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP