Tools to help me monitor my elderly parent's online activity

August 22, 2024 7:19 AM

My mother is older and has some minor mental impairment from a stroke. She lives alone in a different city from me, and does not drive. For the second time, she has gotten into a 'relationship' with a person that initiated contact online; the first time it was through LinkedIn and I caught wind of it before it got too bad. This time, she hid her 'new friend' from me and has sent thousands of dollars of gift cards to them. I need to be able to more closely monitor her activity online to a) make sure we stamp out any further damage from this scam and b) keep it from happening again. Where should I start?

First, I have access to her bank account online because I help her pay bills. That's how I caught this scam - I noticed the large even-numbered charges at places like Wal-Mart and Walgreens. I think this started on Facebook and moved over to text messaging, but I'm not sure. Ideally I'd like to be able to almost "parent" her facebook, email, and text messages, but I need to be able to do it remotely. I pay for her phone plan through GoogleFi but I don't think that gives me access to her actual text history. I plan to ask her for passwords but I feel like there are probably things out there to help me with this.

FYI I've been trying to get her into a senior living place in my city since the stroke but she's stubborn. If this continues I'll have to consider other options to get more authority over her care. That is definitely on my mind but in the short term I'm focused on keeping her safe from a distance.

posted by tryniti to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Best answer: I'm so sorry this is happening to your family. I can't think of ways to monitor all the various ways that someone could be trying to start a scamming relationship with her, but I do have a few ideas about how to limit the possibilities.

1. Set her phone to put texts from unknown numbers in a spam folder of sorts. I know you can do this on iOS and that has kept my dad from having to deal with all the random text message spam.

2. Facebook already shuttles random messages off to another "message requests" folder. You can change this setting to "Don't receive requests". This won't prevent people from sending her friend requests. They have a feature for teens to let parents monitor their friends, but it seems like it looks at birthdays to enable this feature. You could try to figure out when mom has a new friend and then try to vet them...

3. A larger intervention is to lower her credit limits on all the cards she has ready access to. If she needs access to a lot of money quickly, she could go to the bank branch, and many are training tellers to recognize scams like this and help warn seniors about these scams.
posted by advicepig at 7:34 AM on August 22 [7 favorites]

Not to downplay how incredibly frustrated and concerned you are for your mother, but as long as she's a functional adult capable of making her own decisions--even if some of those decisions are not to her benefit--you can't just police her online activity without her consent. You can ask her for her passwords, but if she refuses to give them to you, that's all you can do.

The failure mode for secretly intercepting all of your mom's online communications for her own good is elder abuse. Tread carefully.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:40 AM on August 22 [7 favorites]

Are you named as a co-signer on her bank accounts, or do you just have the password? If she's already agreed to let you manage her finances, you could use the power of the purse to put a crimp on her activities. Assuming all other expenses (food, rent, medicine, etc) area taken care of, you could keep her on a strict, weekly discretionary spending allowance that would limit how much she could spend on gift cards. But this assumes she's already consented to give you control over that aspect of her life, which is sounds like she hasn't.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:51 AM on August 22 [1 favorite]

I suspect there's something in this list from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau that will help guide you to the right resources to help you keep your mother's finances safe.
posted by yellowcandy at 8:01 AM on August 22 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: To head off any concerns, I would not do any of this without her consent. I have many of her passwords now because I help her pay bills, refill meds, etc. and I am a cosigner on her bank account and primary credit card.
posted by tryniti at 8:20 AM on August 22 [4 favorites]

This is an indirect answer to your question, but I think something that would also help is to get her going to more social activities. She's probably making these online "friends" because she is lonely. If she had more structured social time with people in real life, she might turn less to random scammer strangers for companionship (and have less time for that too).

And I'm always going on about this in response to questions about elders, but if you haven't done power of attorney arrangements already, make sure that is sorted out - particularly since this kind of scamming could turn more insidious and seek access to her other financial and personal information and need some legal unravelling.
posted by urbanlenny at 8:35 AM on August 22 [5 favorites]

When you talk to your mother about power of attorney, make sure that she knows that giving you POA does not prevent her from doing whatever she wants on her own behalf, it just lets you act for her in situations where that makes sense. (And for you - POA does not prevent her from spending money foolishly, it just gives you better visibility and the ability to act on her behalf.)
posted by metahawk at 8:42 AM on August 22 [1 favorite]

I have my parents' computers set up with Anydesk, which allows me to easily log onto their computer and basically do anything I could do in person.

This is mostly so I can do things like computer maintenance and updates . . . but you can also do anything you could do if you were there in person, such as checking internet history or taking a gander at their FB page or email to see what they've been up to. Or I suppose you could just keep it open on their computer on a second monitor or something and just watch things out of the corner of your eye. I actually keep a few computers open pretty much all the time in just this way (not because I'm keeping an eye on anyone's activity but because they are other computers scattered around here & there that are servers or whatever and that I'm in charge of).

It's not really set up for monitoring per se, and I suppose you could call it creepy to just spy on people all day long. But you could also look at it as more like, it gives you the opportunity to keep an eye on someone's computer usage in the same way you would if you lived in the same house with them. You just notice what they're doing a little bit and then you can talk with them about it.

You can log onto other computers a bunch of ways, including built in ones like Windows Remote Desktop, but Anydesk is particularly smooth in the sense that it you just pop in on the same screen the other user can see, and they can control the computer while you watch or you can control the computer while they watch, or a little bit of both. We use it all the time for tech support type stuff and it works really well. Also free for personal use.
posted by flug at 8:57 AM on August 22 [3 favorites]

In a similar vein as my parents have gotten older I'll typically set up some way that I can log in to their email, Facebook, and so on. This could be via Anydesk as described above, and/or on my own home computer, and/or on my phone. Mostly (again) this is for tech support purposes, much the same as you might for say a tween kid. Similarly for bank accounts and such, as you are already doing. You can help or answer questions as needed much better this way, and you're also set up to easily transition to completely handling things if for example someone spends a few days or a week in the hospital, or a month in rehab.

If the time does come the person needs to go into a care center and can't handle their own finances, communication, bills, etc, then you're all set to just take up the slack without a complicated transition period where you don't have access to anything.

We've been through each and every one of those situations in the past couple of years, so it definitely is worth working out some procedures for making all these things happen ahead of time. It's no fun for anyone when you are trying to help from long distance and just locked out of everything.

And just for example I set up Bitwarden for my Dad and helped/made him enter all his passwords and such there, and showed him how to use it to copy/paste and autofill usernames, passwords, etc. And we set it up in such a way that Mom, Dad, Sister, and I all had access to it.

When the time came that Dad couldn't do all that stuff any more, we had all the info we needed for access instead of being locked out. You can also start to figure out ways to deal with issues like 2nd factor authentication & such (often you can download & save a list of emergency access codes and save them in your password manager, for example).
posted by flug at 9:09 AM on August 22 [1 favorite]

This is just the beginning of what became practically a part-time job for me, keeping my father from being scammed/defrauded even though he is supposedly a functional adult capable of making his own decisions. So do everything you can do. Scammers are great at their job and know exactly what to do, say, and write in an email or text. My father was "fired" from multiple banks in his small town because of it. The gift card thing is very popular and they literally tell them "go to Walgreens and buy XYZ."

Things that have helped us: Limiting the amount of money that he can access / can be lost. He has a low limit on a credit card ($500). Get a True Link Debit Prepaid card. This allows you to put money on it as often as you want and in a denomination of your choice. The best thing about it is the ability to click on/off the types of places/things he can use it. We have the basics like grocery/liquor stores, restaurants, gas stations and ATM enabled. Turned off are things like charity (big issue with donations to "fake" charities), online purchases, tickets, and various other things. It is set to text me each time it is used. This has worked well. If he needs something greater than the limit/balance, I can just add more money online (needs to pay the vet a big bill, have the furnace fixed).

It is hard seeing someone who was extremely smart and well educated be duped over and over. There can be a reduction in this level of rational thinking with aging even if other aspects of their life are going well and they are living independently. Especially as technology advances faster than they can keep up with. Best wishes.
posted by maxg94 at 9:11 AM on August 22 [10 favorites]

I've used TeamViewer -- similar to Flug's AnyDesk recommendation -- to remote to my father's desktop at any time and help him out of binds. I've found it easy, reliable and free. I think it also supports remote access to phones but I'm not certain. I also setup my dad with a password manager where I also have access and can notice when he's going into scam territory. He appreciates the password manager because he could never recall passwords, he always lost his written passwords, and he likes how the manager automatically logs into applications for him.
posted by Hermanos at 11:08 AM on August 22

Use Messages for web with Google Fi. Messages for web shows what’s on your Messages mobile app.
posted by Iris Gambol at 12:40 PM on August 22

minor mental impairment from a stroke I'm not a lawyer, but conservator or other legal status seems indicated.

Loneliness is a plague on many seniors; get in touch with the area Agency on Aging, and find stuff she can do. ideally a service that matches lonely people with kind people who will connect. Thank you for caring for her when she needs you.
posted by theora55 at 9:14 PM on August 22 [1 favorite]