I second this as well. As someone who works in the financial services industry, elder abuse, fraud prevention and knowing your client are all so important. There are so many safeguards in place to prevent these types of things, but obviously it still happens. We are starting to ask clients to provide a "trusted contact person" that we can contact in the case that we feel that they may be a victim of fraud, or if they ask us to do something that is out of the ordinary. To me, this sounds exactly like an unusual transaction for your mother and someone should have asked her what she would be using the funds for and at least tried to delay it.