the Scam Guide for Adult Child: 42 Chapters on Protecting Your Parents Without Taking Over Their Lives

Warned people move money every day. Your dad can tell you exactly how these calls work. It does not matter, because the people calling him work shifts, run scripts, and have played the first twenty seconds more times than he has answered the phone in his life. Explaining the danger is not the protection. What does the work is a house set up so that one bad afternoon on the phone costs a lot less than it could, built without taking a single thing off the person who lives there. In 2025 the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center took 201,266 complaints from people aged 60 and over, and those complaints reported 7.748 billion dollars lost, an average of 38,500 dollars each. The people who never told anyone are not in it. This book is written to you, the son or daughter, in 42 chapters: seven Parts of six, then an eighth Part of six pages built to be torn out and put where the phone is, with the numbers to call and the deadlines. Part One is the ground: what the figures say, why the sharpest person you know is in them, the shape of a scam phase by phase, and where your job stops. Part Two is the conversation, which is where most families lose, before a single setting has been changed, and these chapters give you the words. Parts Three to Five are the setup: the phone, the screen and the front door; the money, and who gets told when it moves; the paperwork, done while nobody needs it. Parts Six and Seven are the bad day: the first hour after money has gone, who to call in which order, and the week after. Every move can be done in your parent's kitchen with their phone in their hand, not yours. Where a number is a deadline or a phone line, it names the agency and the date it was read. Where a thing varies by state, the chapter says so and names the office to ask. It is for the son or daughter who can feel the phone call coming, or who has already had it. Two rules run all 42 chapters. Nothing moves on the strength of a call that came in. And shrink what a bad afternoon can cost, never what your parent is allowed to do. Take the checkbook and you have built a person who decides nothing. The point is a smaller blast radius, not a smaller life.