My father recently passed away. My mother has dementia. When I took to the Social Security office. We discovered someone changed her account number. The SS office gave me the fraud number but when I called the bank it is linked to, no number exist? We also pulled her credit report and discovered fraud there as well. I made a police report, Report to the fFederal Trade Commission. Has anyone ever had this happen to a loved one? I also need to file emergency conservatorship .
If your her DPOA and all this paperwork is correct and if mom is still pretty competent and can "show-dog" for a visit to the bank, what I'd suggest is that mom gets a new bank account at whatever bank you have an existing relationship and account at. You & her go in and get it opened with a small deposit and have it so that you are a signature on the account and with the account as POD (pay on death) to you or whomever will be doing her funeral & burial. So now mom has a totally new bank account and what I'd suggest you do is try to go-online to SSA with your mom to get this new account as her new direct deposit for her SS check.
It will take between 3 - 5 weeks to get her monthly income going into the new account, so make sure you all are good on $ during this "bridge" period of time for her finances. Doing things on-line with SSA will be easier……I've found that dealing with SSA employees in real time at a SSA is fraught with issues and they tend to want to make everybody be a representative payee and have all sorts of compliance and reporting required…...
Also mom probably needs an email address, doing this through gmail as a subset of your own gmail account is probably the simplest way. Really even if you have a regular email account, you want to also have a gmail as another one. You can keep tabs on all things financially "mom" if you use this her gmail address for strictly for her bank accounts, retirement, insurance stuff. If don't use her gmail to surf the net or shop, there should be no issues with being hacked.
All this will be a bit of work, but will make life easier down the road. good luck.
The bank should also have data on how, when and who changed the account number, w/o authority (which makes me wonder if impersonation was involved as well). Who were the signatories on the legitimate account? Was it both your parents, and was the new account opened coincident with your father's death?
If you haven't already added the fraud alert with the credit reporting companies, do that ASAP. There's a 90 day alert that can be added as well as a longer alert (5 or 7 years, I don't recall which) when actual fraud has occurred.
It wouldn't hurt to get new credit/debit cards as well, just to be on the safe side, as you don't know how someone actually accessed her SS account and changed the number.
We've had some experience with fraud but it's been credit card theft. The provider refused to reveal any information on the fraudster, as the police had advised us would be the case with that particular company. Since we couldn't get any info, including the jurisdiction or where the fraud initiated, we couldn't file a police report. So every 3 months I renew the 90 day fraud alerts.
Sorry this happened - it's so unsettling to realize that someone has been dipping dirty hands into anyone's account.
As to the original post, I just remembered that some years ago I did research on ID fraud after a credit card was fraudulently used. I learned that the Michigan State Police was participating in an ID fraud task force.
Anyone suffering from ID fraud might want to contact their local PD, State Police post or Sheriff's office and get information on their knowledge of and/or participation in ID task forces, and whether or not those task forces can be of help to you.