My parent has dementia and keeps giving money to scammers

If you're reading this on your third or fourth time round, you already know the part most articles won't say: repetition doesn't help. You explain, they agree, and it happens again. That's not stubbornness and it isn't your explanation failing.

Why the standard advice doesn't apply

Every scam-awareness guide, including parts of this site, rests on one assumption: that with the right information a person will make a better decision next time.

Dementia undermines exactly that assumption. The cognitive functions it affects earliest include judgment, risk assessment, and impulse control — the specific machinery that turns "I know about scams" into "I won't do this." Knowledge can remain perfectly intact while the ability to act on it under pressure is gone. Someone can describe a scam to you accurately in the morning and send money in the afternoon, and both are real.

Australian tribunals have described this precisely. In one Queensland case, an 84-year-old man with a long habit of gifting money to his son kept doing so after a dementia diagnosis. QCAT found he was "unable to resist or weigh the outcomes of providing financial assistance", and that he had a "lack of insight into the consequences of his financial decision as a direct outcome of his diagnosis of dementia." Not ignorance. Not carelessness. An inability to weigh.

What to do this week, without any legal authority

These need cooperation but not a court, and they're the highest-value hours you'll spend.

• Cap the daily transfer limit. Every Australian bank lets a customer set this in the app or internet banking. Defaults run to many thousands of dollars. Bring it down to what an ordinary week actually needs. This is the single most effective thing on the page, because it works on the days nobody notices anything.
• Remove stored cards and one-tap payments. Saved card details on a phone, tablet or computer turn a moment's impulse into a completed transaction. Take them out.
• Reduce what's reachable. Keep everyday spending money in one account, and move savings and term deposits somewhere that takes deliberate effort to access. The aim isn't restriction for its own sake — it's putting a pause between an impulse and the life savings.
• Tell their bank. The Banking Code requires member banks to take extra care with customers experiencing vulnerability, and the industry's guidance names older customers and cognitive impairment explicitly. But a bank generally only knows if someone tells them. Ask what monitoring they can add and who to speak to about suspected financial abuse.
• Take gift cards out of the house. Almost no legitimate Australian organisation asks to be paid in gift cards. Their presence is diagnostic, and they can't be recalled.

The enduring power of attorney, and why timing is everything

An enduring power of attorney (EPOA) lets your parent appoint someone to make financial decisions for them, either now or when they can no longer do it themselves. It typically costs $200–$600 through a solicitor, and forms and requirements differ by state and territory.

Here is the part that catches families out, and it's genuinely urgent:

If your parent has a diagnosis and no EPOA, this is the thing to do first — ahead of the bank calls, ahead of everything on this page. It is a conversation people put off because it feels like a conversation about decline. It is actually the last moment they get to choose who acts for them.

Related, and often easier to raise: a Centrelink nominee arrangement lets someone deal with Services Australia on their behalf, which removes a recurring source of confusion and one of the most-impersonated organisations in the country.

If capacity has already gone

Then the route is a financial administration order from your state or territory tribunal. Be realistic about what that involves:

• Cost: roughly $500 to $3,000 or more, depending on complexity and whether it's contested.
• Time: commonly 8–16 weeks. Emergency or interim orders can move faster where there is active, ongoing loss — that's worth asking about explicitly rather than waiting.
• Evidence: you'll need medical evidence about capacity and a clear record of what has happened. Keep dates, amounts, account details and screenshots as you go; reconstructing it later is much harder.
• Outcome: the tribunal appoints an administrator for financial matters — possibly a family member, possibly the Public Trustee. Personal and health decisions are separate, and need a guardianship order rather than administration.

The test has two limbs, and both must be met. In Queensland, QCAT must be satisfied the person has impaired capacity for financial matters and that there is a need for a decision, or a likelihood they will do something posing unreasonable risk to their health, welfare or property. Other states word it differently.

One nuance most guides get wrong

It's often stated that these orders require a dementia diagnosis or equivalent. That's the usual case, but not the whole test — and the difference matters if you've been told nothing can be done.

NSW's tribunal has committed the estate of an 80-year-old woman recorded as having normal cognitive competence, who had given away her life savings to an online scam and faced a risk of homelessness. The order was made on the basis that she was incapable of managing her affairs and her assets needed protecting — not on a diagnosis.

So if a parent without any cognitive diagnosis is being drained toward genuine hardship, that door isn't necessarily shut. It varies by state, the bar remains high, and this is a question for a lawyer rather than an article — but "she doesn't have dementia so nothing can be done" is not reliably true.

Getting help, and not doing it alone

• Dementia Australia — National Dementia Helpline 1800 100 500. Free, 24 hours a day, every day. For both the practical questions and the parts that aren't practical.
• National Elder Abuse phone line — 1800 ELDERHelp (1800 353 374). Redirects to your state or territory service. Hours vary and it isn't a crisis line, but it's the right call when a family member or carer may be involved.
• National Debt Helpline — 1800 007 007. Free financial counselling, weekdays. Valuable if debt has appeared, and a neutral professional is often heard where family isn't.
• Office of the Public Advocate in your state, for guidance on guardianship and administration before you commit to an application.
• Carer Gateway — 1800 422 737, for counselling and respite. Worth using; this is a genuinely heavy thing to carry.
• Lifeline — 13 11 14, 24 hours, if it's weighing on you or on them.

What a checking service can and can't do here

We should be straight about this, because the honest answer is narrower than we'd like.

A forward-and-check service works because someone pauses and asks. If dementia has progressed to the point where the pause doesn't happen, or where they don't remember they can ask, a service on their phone won't reliably catch it. It is not a substitute for the transfer limit, the EPOA, or the bank conversation — and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.

Where it does help is earlier and narrower. In mild cognitive impairment or early-stage dementia, when someone still notices something feels wrong but no longer trusts their own read on it, having one number to send anything to — and getting a plain-English answer in seconds, without having to ring a relative and admit doubt — can be the difference between checking and guessing. And because the family gets told when something is a real scam, it also does something the transfer limit can't: it tells you what is arriving, which is often the first evidence of who is targeting them.

If that's where your parent is, Is it a scam? is built for it. If they're past that point, spend your energy on the four structural things above instead. That's the more useful advice, even though it's not the one that sells anything.

Common questions