Unable to break her mum away from the scam, Helen turned to her bank. <\/p>\n
She had a lasting power of attorney, meaning she could act on behalf of her mum and set up safeguards for her accounts.<\/p>\n
Jim Winters, head of economic crime at Nationwide, says anyone who believes a family member is being scammed should contact their bank.<\/p>\n
“They might be limited in what they can share with you for data privacy reasons, but they can take steps to safeguard that account,” he says.<\/p>\n
“Once we know that a customer is being defrauded we can spot the hallmarks very quickly and take steps to break that spell.”<\/p>\n
To date, the bank that Helen’s mum uses has returned \u00a345,000 to her account.<\/p>\n
Though Helen changed her mum’s phone number three times, she continued to give the new one to the scammers. <\/p>\n
Helen eventually replaced her mum’s smartphone with one that could only do calls and texts. <\/p>\n
Winters also advises “completely resetting” a loved ones digital footprint by changing telephone numbers, email address and social media accounts.<\/p>\n
“That’s what makes you visible, that’s what puts you out there. So taking steps to reset all of that is so important,” he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unable to break her mum away from the scam, Helen turned to her bank. She had a lasting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":788235,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[59,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-788234","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-gb","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788234","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=788234"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/788234\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=788234"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=788234"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=788234"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}