When Ceri Armit’s usually astute mother lost concept of time and began heading to pilates at 11pm, her family knew something was seriously wrong – but little did they know she had been scammed out of £2.1m.
Laura, now 62, whose name has been changed, first began displaying odd behaviour in her late fifties totally out of keeping with her razor-sharp abilities as a finance director.
“I noticed my mum was very off and couldn’t hold a conversation,” explained Ceri, a secondary school teacher who lives in Manchester. “She would speak really quickly, tell me anything and everything – but couldn’t ask a question back or organise her thoughts.”
Ceri’s mother moved in with her for a while and she realised the situation was serious. “My mum seemed to lose the ability to tell the time and know what part of the day we were in,” she recalled.
Laura, a mum of two, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia in June 2025 and Ceri was given power of attorney. Just days later, she spotted a message on her mother’s phone which alerted her to a £2.1m scam.
“I saw a WhatsApp message which said something like, ‘Have you got that loan secured yet? Can you send it through.’”
The discovery led to the unravelling of a scam that had been running for almost two years involving two separate fraudsters.
One scammer posed as an investment manager, while the other convinced Laura to take out multiple loans. The family suspects scammers shared her details between them via a dark-web database.
Ceri said: “I found emails from someone asking my mum for sums such as £100,000. He said he worked for a company called Capital Consulting and was investing her money in cryptocurrency so she could secure a good future for my grandmother in a care home.
“He built a relationship with her by saying things like, ‘It’s really rainy today, my dog’s not happy’ and sending a photo of a dog. Then, ‘By the way, did that loan come through? Can you send me that £50,000.’
“There are emails where my mum clearly states she has Alzheimer’s and the scammer says, ‘Oh gosh, that’s really sad. Then within hours, he messages saying, ‘Have you got that £80,000 to send me?’ What human can do this to another human?”
A second scammer purporting to be from another company persuaded Laura to take out loans for him. He instructed her what to say to the banks and to forward him their messages. Within a space of 10 days, Laura had attempted to take out 11 loans and five had gone through.
Ceri and her brother realised their mother had been scammed out of a shocking £2.1m. Of this, £120,000 was the loans – but the rest was Laura’s earnings and investments.
“My mum’s career was her life,” explained Ceri. “But we had no idea she had this quantity of money.”
“It was a huge shock to find out she had been scammed – and a massive shock to find out she’d had so much money in the first place.”
Ceri “naively” believed that after discovering the fraud, organisations and authorities would help her.
“I phoned the police and Report Fraud (which replaced Action Fraud) and thought they would be all over it,” she said. “I phoned all the banks and thought as it was clearly a scam, it would be fine. That’s when it all came tumbling down.
“It all came back to HSBC because all the loans had gone through it but it said [all the money] had gone international, so there were no protections on that.
“The scammer made accounts in my mum’s name and my mum had been texting him the verification codes. She had never logged into these accounts and he had changed all the details to his own.”
Ceri spent over a year calling HSBC and repeatedly going into the branch and writing letters, but it said it was still investigating. She spoke to Greater Manchester Police who told her to go to Report Fraud – who told her there was nothing they could do.
The family recently received a “gesture of goodwill” from HSBC who gave them £455,000, the maximum monetary award limit set by the Financial Ombudsman Service. The bank paid this money before any investigation without accepting liability.
Ceri said: “It was an awful lot of money to say no to rather than pushing to take the bank to court to try and get more, so we accepted it. But it is only 20 per cent of what we have lost.
“Four out of the five loans taken out in my mum’s name have now been cancelled. However, my mum paid £2,500 a month for 13 months on those loans. Only one bank has refunded that.
“We believe my mum was coached into taking out these loans by the scammers through texts, Zoom calls and scripts.”
Ceri spoke to the main scammer a few times herself in the beginning when she still hoped everything was above board. “He sounded like a southern British man and it felt very genuine and real.
“But my mum would never have fallen for this if it hadn’t been for the Alzheimer’s. It’s despicable.”
While Ceri appreciates it is the scammers who are “the bad guys”, she feels let down by the lack of support they have encountered.
She even paid for a private investigator who tracked the international bank payments to Eastern Europe. But Report Fraud and the police say they cannot investigate further. “No one wants the responsibility of chasing the criminals abroad because it costs a fortune,” said Ceri.
She added: “We don’t feel like the scammers have beaten us as we are determined not to let this destroy our lives or our time with our mum.”
Laura does not fully understand what has happened due to her Alzheimer’s diagnosis.
Jayne Sibley is CEO and co-founder of financial management app Sibstar, which empowers vulnerable people. She set it up after her own mother’s dementia diagnosis.
“Almost half of UK adults have at least one characteristic of financial vulnerability,” she said.
“Changes in judgement often happen well before a formal diagnosis, as with Ceri’s mother.
“Ceri’s experience shows how patient and calculated this kind of fraud can be. Her mother was groomed over two years, with the fraudsters building a relationship and working slowly to gain her trust. That patience is what made it so hard to spot.”
Chief Superintendent Amanda Wolf, head of Report Fraud operations, said: “We understand the devastating impact fraud can have on victims and their families, especially those who are vulnerable and are unaware that they have been a victim of fraud.
“While not every report will meet the threshold for investigation, particularly where there are limited lines of enquiry or evidence available, we use the information provided to build the national intelligence picture of fraud and support wider law enforcement activity.
“In this case, specialist victim care services contacted the victim’s daughter within three days of the report being received and the matter was escalated to the local police force the same day to ensure appropriate safeguarding and support measures were considered.”
An HSBC UK spokesperson said: “We’re sorry to hear about any reports of scams or fraud and of the customer’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis following this scam.
“We’re pleased this case has since been resolved, following discussions with our customer and the Financial Ombudsman Service.”