A 95-year-old great gran was left with just 6p in her bank after one of her daughters transferred the other £100,000 in life savings to her own accounts.
Pat Kavanagh, 65, said ‘it feels like a grenade has been thrown in the middle of our family’ after seeing her retirement plans go up in smoke.
Her mum Frances Connolly went to live with middle daughter Sheila for several months in 2021.
In April that year, Sheila took Frances to the Yorkshire Building Society where the ‘vulnerable’ great-gran, who is blind, hard of hearing and suffers from dementia, signed a document allowing Sheila to access her funds.
Over the following three months, Frances’ £100,000 life savings were siphoned off.
Bank statements show 32 withdrawals between April and July, including an £80,000 transfer within a week of a new account being set up by her daughter.
There was another transfer of £10,000, followed by several totalling hundreds of pounds at a time.
Pat said: ‘It feels like a grenade has been thrown in the middle of our family, and none of us saw it coming, and it just broke everything up. Me and my husband have had no retirement.
‘All our plans came to a halt.
‘My mother lost her home, access to finances, her jewellery went missing. She was left with just 6p in her purse on July 22, the day she returned to my home.’
Pat, from Woolton, said she reported the missing money to Merseyside Police.
But Sheila died in October 2024, putting an end to any potential investigation.
The family was hit with a further blow when an investigation by the Financial Ombudsman Service found Halifax had done nothing wrong, as Frances had given permission for her middle daughter to access her account.
Pat maintains that Halifax should never have allowed her ‘confused’ mum – ‘someone in a wheelchair, who can’t even see, who can’t hear’ – to ‘sign her life away’.
She said the bank should have questioned the repeated large amounts of money being taken out of her account.
But Halifax says it acted appropriately in handling Frances’ accounts, and that the matter is a civil dispute within the family.
A spokesman said: ‘We found that our staff conducted the right due diligence to ensure Mrs Connolly’s withdrawals were not made without her authorisation.
‘When Mrs Connolly came into branch, our staff did not have any concerns about her ability to authorise the payments on her account.
‘Our procedures include the use of a “high value checklist” at the time of relevant transactions – such as Mrs Connolly’s initial withdrawal of £80,000.
‘The checklist requires staff to review recent transactions on an account (to identify relevant patterns, or other recent high value withdrawals which might indicate increased risk); advise the customer of fraud and scam risks; and ask the customer a series of questions related to the purpose of a payment, whose responses our staff member will record.’
John Mather, of The Brain Charity, supporting the family, said Frances had been ‘badly let down’.
He said: ‘Elderly people are vulnerable to exploitation, but you trust the bank. If you’ve been defrauded, they deal with it. But in this case, because it was done by a family member, she loses out.
‘This is not the first case we have had, especially working with people with neurological problems, dementia or other mental disabilities.
‘Everybody recognises that an injustice has been done. She’s lost money, she’s been exploited. But nobody seems to be willing to take the blame for it.’
In a statement, a Halifax spokesman said: ‘This is a complex case and we have a great deal of sympathy for Mrs Connolly and her family.
‘We have thoroughly investigated the concerns raised by Mrs Kavanagh on a number of occasions, relating to events which took place in 2021, and believe we acted appropriately in handling Mrs Connolly’s accounts.
‘The independent Financial Ombudsman Service also reviewed the case and reached the same conclusion.’
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