“One of us has to go to North Carolina,” Joe told me. “Like, as soon as possible.”
I sighed, my anger and anxiety rising. We were in the thick of the pandemic, and COVID vaccines weren’t yet available to the public, so it seemed wildly unsafe to travel to a 78-year-old man’s home, particularly around the holidays. But we urgently needed to know how much debt Dad was dealing with.
So, just after Christmas, I climbed into my car for the 10-hour drive to Dad’s home in Hendersonville. I stopped only for gas and brought masks to wear inside the sprawling ranch home that my parents had designed for their retirement 20 years earlier.
Assessing the damage
What I found in Dad’s stack of unopened mail was worse than I’d imagined.
Bobbie had been living in California and, briefly, New York City with her grown daughter on my dad’s dime for several years.
He’d taken out a reverse mortgage on his previously paid-off home to buy these women a mobile home in California and pay their rent on the lot. (The women eventually sold the mobile home. Did Dad get any of the money back? Probably very little, if any.) There was now almost zero equity left in Dad’s house.
He also had taken out loans at several banks and hadn’t made any payments, so the interest had ballooned.
That’s not all: He had maxed out the balances on several credit cards (some of which the women had used), was in danger of having his utilities and phone service cut off, and received daily calls from collectors, whom he ignored.
All told, Dad was in the hole for nearly half a million dollars.
I have struggled emotionally to reconcile the penny-pinching, highly educated, rational man who raised me with this compassion-filled patron of women he hardly knew. (“I just felt so sorry for them,” he kept saying, claiming his “girlfriend” couldn’t work due to her rheumatoid arthritis.)
In the moment, of course, I couldn’t pause to process Dad’s contradictions. There was way too much to do to get him out of the giant hole he was in.
Recovering from the scam
Helping my dad became a full-time job that cost us no small amount of money.
Our work included hiring a lawyer and helping Dad file for bankruptcy, adding my name to each of his bank accounts, moving him to a small apartment near my home in Michigan (and finding a new fleet of doctors for him there), and preparing his property and house for sale (a task made harder by the fact that the reverse mortgage company declared it “abandoned” and put locks on the doors).
We also policed his contact with Bobbie, whom he still reached out to now and then despite our efforts to block her calls, texts and emails. (Meanwhile, she made him feel guilty for stopping payments and listed him on yet another apartment lease, with his permission, after he’d submitted bankruptcy documents. We had to fight to get his name removed.)
I realized that Dad was addicted to the relationship.
Left: McKee with her father at her graduation from Pennsylvania State University in 2001. Right: McKee’s father in 2017, before she learned that he was a scam victim.
Courtesy Jenn McKee
When a loved one won’t cut ties with a scammer
Reluctance to accept one’s situation is common among romance scam victims, says Regina Koepp, a clinical geropsychologist and founder of the Center for Mental Health and Aging. “For many older adults, especially those living with grief, isolation, or transitions like retirement or widowhood, the scam relationship may become a vital emotional lifeline,” she explains. “So it’s not just about cutting off a scam. It’s about grieving a relationship that felt real, while simultaneously processing betrayal, shame and loss of trust in oneself. It’s incredibly destabilizing.”
On several occasions, I looked my dad in the eye and said, “I know this is hard for you to hear, but when the chips are down, you find out who really cares about you. We’re here, helping you through all this. She’s not.”
He would nod and say he understood, but it never felt like my messages landed.
I was absolutely exhausted.
As Koepp explains, “When you’re supporting a parent through the fallout of a romance scam, you’re not just managing logistics like debt or bankruptcy. You’re also tending to your own heartbreak — navigating grief, anger … and often resentment.”
One of my biggest challenges during the recovery process was making space for all I needed to do to help my dad while also staying as engaged and present as possible with my husband and kids. I found some strategies that helped me get through the experience. They might help you, too, if you find yourself in similar circumstances.
Click Here For The Original Source.