Soon after, I looked through her phone and found that they had been communicating quite a bit[3][4][5][6]. He built a relationship with her and she was/is in love with him. I decided to tell my family about her deeds and we had an intervention with her. Long story short, we thought this was the end of her dealings with “Elon.”
Turns out, it wasn’t over. I saw my mom over Thanksgiving and noticed that she was using her phone a lot. When she went to the bathroom I was able to get into her phone and noticed that she was still talking to “Elon” on Telegram. The website had also changed to https://megatradepro.com/ archived here at https://archive.vn/uHa8s and included image[2] and her invite through tidio.com[7]. She had promised him another $5k. At this point, I’ve tried everything to get through to her to no avail. Has anyone been through this before and can provide some guidance?
Tldr; My mom has been sending “Elon Musk” bitcoin, through crypto.com and coinbase, to fund his Mars missions. She is depleting her life savings quickly.
1.) https://asglobalassets.com 2.) https://i.imgur.com/jd7iTOi.png 3.) https://i.imgur.com/dvup0qb.jpg 4.) https://i.imgur.com/cGnEjbj.jpg 5.) https://i.imgur.com/HVsi2TT.jpg 6.) https://i.imgur.com/4CNBkv4.jpg 7.) https://i.imgur.com/jTlptQL.png
For me, it was a very straightforward process. We met with her lawyer, he asked her some questions, she gave some incorrect answers (like "How is your daughter doing?" My grandmother said fine, even though my mom was on a walker with RA; she called me by my uncle's name in the meeting.) The lawyer agreed she was not able to fully take care of herself, I met him in court in front of a judge, the judge asked me a few questions about accepting responsibility for my grandma, and a temporary guardianship was granted. That was automatically changed to permanent after 60 days. My grandma didn't have to go to court, I guess because of the lawyer's statement that he agreed she was incompetent.
It's a big responsibility to "takeover" a person like this, but it's also sometimes necessary to protect them. IANAL, but my understanding is a Power of Attorney grants you privileges of the other person, but they still have them too. Whereas guardianship gives you the rights and removes them from the person. Guardianship doesn't have to be permanent, though maybe in this case, that's warranted.
You may need to present evidence and give her ways to tell that this is in fact not Elon, because she currently does not have the tools to recognize a situation where she is being scammed. Methods might include explaining that the situation of "a media famous billionaire is personally interacting with her" is too good to be true, especially without extremely good evidence that it's true which she has not received, that intuitively, someone with a net worth of 181 billion dollars would not be asking her for 5k, and that the site she was using just got closed down for scamming its customers out of their money.
Use any rhetorical tools in your argument toolbox to give her the intuition that she's been had, how she was had, and explain that these kind of scams happen thousands of times a day and explicitly target the elderly, so she's not to blame for what happened.
Once you're on the same page, help cut the scammer out. Block their email, block their social media, block their phone number, virus scan her computer and add an ongoing scanner on her machine, update her phone, install an ad-blocker on her browser, and if you have the savvy to do it, go into her router and block that scam site at the DNS level so she can't get back.
I had a grandmother do exactly the same thing in the 1980s and 1990s via phone scams. She died penniless, having dithered away $X00,000s in cash and retirement assets.
This behavior was extremely compulsive on her part and quite outside her ability to examine rationally or control - think gambling addiction rather than "stupid decisions."
I think it is extrememly unlikely that any intervention by you and your family will help. Your mom is not able to stop and will not stop.
I don't know, maybe talk to her more, therapist, something?