Hi there, Bridget MacKay at MacKay Dressler Law Firm. And I want to give you what we used to call, or have called, if you go way back in our archives, a Tale of Caution. Recently, I had someone come to me whose brother is older. He’s still competent, but he lives on his own and relies heavily on taxi rides to get places where he lives. And one of these taxicab drivers went farther than just bringing her fare from their house to the doctor’s appointment and started to befriend this older brother.
And the brother then started to rely on this person who put themselves out as someone who was a friend of his and could help him. Sadly, he ended up giving her his bank card and two of his credit cards. Before he knew it, she was having her mortgage paid on his auto pay in his checking account, and she was gambling at a nearby casino with his credit card.
None of this was discovered until the bank got suspicious when the mortgage account, her mortgage account, was getting paid by his account. Banks are mandatory reporters. So they thought that was suspicious, good on the bank. And called the brother who was the brother who was my client, who was on the older brother’s account, as another, you know, reference person to call if something’s going wrong, basically, a trusted person.
This came to light, this whole fraud that this woman had done to the older brother, who was alone, not married, no kids, and they uncovered she had taken over $50,000 from him in a matter of three months. So, my tale of caution is this. He did have a trust. He had a power of attorney, healthcare directive. And at the time that the younger brother stepped in, who was his successor trustee, she was also trying to pressure him to change his trust. So even though he had a trust, there was no monitoring of this brother. And even though there were phone calls, there was not a lot of visits. So now we are taking him, the older brother, off as trustee of his trust.
And the tale of caution is this. Number one, this is not something I can solve as your attorney, but if you have someone vulnerable out there, an older relative, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, parent, who you haven’t had much contact with or you feel might be isolated because they don’t have, they’re not married or they don’t have children that are checking in on them. Check in on them, give them a call, see how they’re doing, because this woman would have gotten away with a lot.
Two, make sure they have a trusted contact on all of their accounts: their investment accounts, their IRAs, and their bank accounts. Because financial institutions are mandatory reporters of suspected elder abuse fraud. And so if something is going on, presumably they would make that call.
And then finally, the fact that he did have a trust didn’t necessarily impact a bad actor or stave off a bad actor. But I can tell you it is smoothing the way for this brother to get control of the assets, so this does not happen again to his brother. And finally, make sure that your loved ones are protected in that way. Especially as they grow older, because incapacity isn’t always a diagnosis of dementia or a stroke or something obvious.
Sometimes there’s something called “undue influence”, and that happens with older folks who are isolated. They’re willing to befriend people that maybe their red flags are going off, but they’re lonely, and they’re isolated, and so they’re going to agree to the help that they probably feel they’ve needed for a while. And that is also another form of incapacity, or being unable to manage your financial affairs. So be aware of that too.
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