How to Stop or Prevent Financial Abuse
A Guide for Support Workers & Caregivers of Persons With Cognitive Disabilities
© 2025 Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility
About This Guide
Who should read this guide?
People who support or care for those with cognitive or intellectual disabilities should read this guide.
How this guide can help you.
Financial abuse can take many forms. This guide will explain what financial abuse is.
This guide will help you spot the signs that someone you care for is being financially abused.
It will also teach you what you can do to help someone avoid financial abuse, or what they can do to stop being financially abused.
This guide will show you where to watch videos online to learn more about financial abuse.
What is financial abuse?
Watch these videos to learn about financial abuse. Click or tap the pictures below to watch the videos.
Financial Abuse Explained
What is financial abuse? Is someone you support or care for being financially abused? What are their legal rights?
What You Should Know About Financial Abuse
Don’t let someone you support or care for become a victim of financial abuse. Learn to spot the signs and help them protect their rights to their money.
Help Stop Financial Abuse
Financial abuse happens often to people with cognitive disabilities. Learn to avoid or stop it.
All Canadians have a legal right to make decisions about their money.
Even people with cognitive disabilities.
Financial abuse happens when someone violates another person’s rights to make their own decisions about their money and finances.
Financial abuse can take many forms, including:
- Stealing money from a person
- Making a person spend their money against their will
- Stopping a person from spending their money the way they want
- Forcing or convincing a person to get a credit card to buy expensive items
- Stealing a person’s social assistance money
- Forcing a person to sign a document against their will
- Borrowing money from a person and not paying it back
What caregivers should know about financial abuse
You may be helping care for a person with a cognitive disability.
This guide will help you recognize what financial abuse looks like so that you can help stop or prevent financial abuse from happening to someone with a cognitive disability.
Many people with cognitive and intellectual disabilities face financial abuse. Their disabilities can put them at a higher risk of being financially abused.
Financial abuse can make people with these disabilities feel helpless, hopeless and many other feelings. It can also cause trauma and mental illnesses like depression and anxiety.
When someone with a cognitive or intellectual disability is being financially abused, it is often not obvious to caregivers.
Everyone has the right to make decisions about their money and finances. Learning about financial abuse lets you help people with cognitive or intellectual disabilities protect their rights and stay in control of decisions about their finances and money.
How a caregiver can stop or prevent financial abuse
Learn about different kinds of financial abuse. Watch the videos in this guide.
Here are some signs that someone with a cognitive disability is being financially abused:
- They lose money but can’t explain why
- They are unable to pay bills, pay rent or buy things
- They have unusual or unexplained activity in their bank account
- Unexpected withdrawals, transfers or debit purchases
- Withdrawals from unusual bank branch locations or bank machine locations
- Or someone has taken money from their account without their permission
They have given another person their Power of Attorney
Other people are signing or cashing their cheques
They buy things they don’t want or need, or things that create problems
They have been forced to stop seeing friends and family by someone who is seeking to control their finances
Be aware that financial abuse can also happen online.
A person can be a victim of fraud or extortion through the internet.
A person should not reply to suspicious e-mail or text messages asking for their banking information.
A person should avoid revealing their bank account number, debit or credit card number, or
Personal Identification Number (PIN) to anyone by phone, by email or even in-person.
If you support or care for a person with a cognitive disability, tell them to review their bank and credit card statements each month.
Ask them to tell you if they see something unexpected on their statements.
Learn about the rights people have to their finances, and teach others about those rights.
Learn to see and understand the signs of financial abuse.
If you are unsure, talk to the people you are supporting.
Understand if the person is at risk of financial abuse
Keep an open conversation with the person.
Read the information in this guide under More help and resources on financial abuse.
Call the police, if needed.
Help others make decisions about their money without forcing them.
If you support a person, they should be able to use their money as they want.
This person can spend their money on anything they need.
Talk to them if you have concerns about their finances.
You can teach them to make good decisions about how to spend their money.
Think about your opinion on cognitive disabilities.
Include intellectual and developmental disabilities in your thoughts.
Some people—maybe even you—regard persons with cognitive disabilities as easily taken advantage of.
This attitude toward people with cognitive disabilities can make caregivers over-protective of them.
An over-protective attitude often leads to financial abuse.
It also keeps people with cognitive disabilities from making decisions about their finances.
As a caregiver to someone with a cognitive or intellectual disability, ask yourself if you may be financially abusing that person, even if you don’t mean to.
More help and resources on financial abuse
Call your lawyer.
You can contact the ARCH Disability Law Centre. ARCH provides legal services to persons with disabilities. Their phone number is (416) 482-8255 and their website is located at http://www.archdisabilitylaw.ca
You can also contact the Law Society Referral Service. They offer 30 minutes of free legal advice, and you can request a referral from their website at http://www.findlegalhelp.ca
And you can call the office of the Public Guardian and Trustee. Their investigation phone number is (416) 327-6348. Their toll-free phone number is 1-844-640-3515.
For questions about this guide, email Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility at info@openaccessibility.ca
About the authors.
Dr. Virginie Cobigo
Virginie is the founder and Executive Director of Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility. She is committed to promoting the social inclusion of people with cognitive disabilities and enhancing the cognitive accessibility of our environment. As a professor at the University of Ottawa, she leads research that supports evidence-based practice in sectors that support people with cognitive disabilities.
Golnaz Ghaderi
Golnaz is a PhD student in Clinical Psychology at the University of Ottawa. Her research aims to improve strategies to prevent financial abuse among persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She works under Professor Virginie Cobigo’s supervision.
About Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility.
Open provides custom cognitive accessibility solutions, inclusive research and development, and education and training to researchers, and to public and private sector organizations including construction and trades, and banking and finance. Led by experienced Canadian researchers and world-leading authorities in cognitive disabilities and neuroinclusive research, our inclusive design team of neurodiverse experts leverage their lived experiences to deliver innovative solutions that help our clients assure greater accessibility and inclusion for people of all cognitive abilities.
This guide was produced with support from the Sinneave Family Foundation.
The Sinneave Family Foundation is an operating foundation dedicated to collaborating with individuals, communities, and organizations across Canada with a vision that people live, learn, work, and thrive in their communities, and realize their desired futures.