To triage scam pressure fraud identity theft and financial exploitation, stop the active loss when safe, preserve Devi's communication and immediate safety, contact the relevant financial institution or payment provider through a trusted route, protect exposed credentials and devices, retain evidence, and notify the authorized safeguarding, legal, benefit, insurer, law-enforcement, or adult-protective route that applies. Clinical data collection never delays urgent action or creates investigative authority.
Declare Devi's urgent routes
To triage scam pressure fraud identity theft and financial exploitation, distinguish an active coercive contact, exposed credential, lost device, unauthorized transaction, missing cash, account takeover, identity theft, fiduciary misuse, theft, exploitation, and immediate physical danger.
Stop contact through a trusted channel
End the suspicious interaction when safe. Contact the financial institution, payment provider, agency, or known person through an independently verified number, app, or website. Preserve screenshots, messages, receipts, call details, and transaction identifiers without forwarding harmful links.
Protect Devi's communication and dignity
Offer Devi a private, accessible way to describe what happened. Avoid blame, forced repetition, public disclosure, or taking the device and money without authority. Keep AAC and needed supports available while security actions proceed.
Separate response from investigation
Staff may preserve facts and complete mandated or policy reporting. Financial institutions, consumer-protection agencies, law enforcement, adult protective services, fiduciary programs, insurers, and counsel decide within their authority. The clinician does not determine crime, liability, incapacity, or reimbursement.
Train with inert scenarios
Use fictional messages, disabled links, fake account screens, empty gift cards, and scripted calls. Never send money, reveal a real identifier, install software, share a one-time code, contact the suspected actor, or stage an exploit.
Build Devi's financial incident triage matrix
Create one versioned record for the clinic, residence, and community purchase support. Include Devi's person-chosen goal, urgent and fraud routes, authority, account and product, benefit, access, communication, credential, transaction, teaching, supporter, restriction, custody, record, outcome, missingness, and reassessment evidence. Keep urgent information available to authorized roles and financial details role limited. Use a trigger-to-action matrix with observed fact, immediate hazard, account or device, transaction state, safe contact source, evidence, authorized owner, clock, communication, action, and follow-up.
Validate Devi's counts and evidence
Reproduce ten people times ten actions equals 100, with 82 first-pass actions, 97 after rehearsal, and three named open actions.
Connect Devi's evidence to a bounded action
The trainer repeats the three failed components and validates current contact routes without calling a scammer, moving money, exposing credentials, or conducting a shadow investigation.
Work through Devi's example
Ten team members complete a tabletop with ten critical decisions each, producing 100 scored actions. Eighty-two pass initially. After focused rehearsal, 97 pass. Three actions remain open: one bank-contact route, one device-isolation handoff, and one adult-protective-services escalation check. Preserve every planned and eligible unit, source version, person choice, asset or account, authority, price and fee, payment method, access, message, partner response, restriction, invalid record, custody, error, incident, repair, and endpoint. This fictional example demonstrates a workflow control. It supplies no legal-capacity finding, fiduciary appointment, account authorization, financial recommendation, fraud determination, behavioral function, treatment effect, regulatory conclusion, or promised outcome for Devi.
Address Devi's main interpretation risk
Ninety-seven of 100 is a training result, not evidence that a scam will be prevented, money recovered, identity restored, or exploitation substantiated. Three open critical actions keep the team unreleased for those roles. Review fraud and immediate safety, authority, account and product rules, benefit scope, access, communication, supporter response, instruction, restrictions, person priorities, custody, fees, errors, burden, missingness, and design strength separately. A correct total, completed checkout, saved receipt, lower prompt count, or shorter transaction cannot by itself establish affordability, safety, consent, capacity, lawful authority, generalization, or effectiveness.
Set Devi's ABA scope and ethics boundaries
Devi's financial incident triage matrix uses the CASP public summary only for high-level ABA behavioral-health-treatment scope for autistic people. The current BACB Ethics Code addresses competence, collaboration, consent and assent when applicable, assessment, medical variables, risk, restrictive procedures, confidentiality, documentation, and evaluation for covered people. Financial-product, legal-capacity, fiduciary, benefit, safeguarding, consumer-protection, employment, and household decisions retain their qualified owners.
Keep formal financial authority separate for Devi
The CFPB Managing Someone Else's Money page provides separate guides for agents under powers of attorney, court-appointed guardians of property or conservators, trustees, and government fiduciaries. For Devi, a supporter, clinician, employee, family member, cardholder, joint account holder, or password user is not interchangeable with any of those roles. This financial incident triage matrix stores the actual instrument, asset or benefit scope, restrictions, effective status, and qualified interpretation.
Build a fraud route around Devi's actual situation
The CFPB fraud hub routes prevention, recognition, unauthorized transactions, identity theft, financial exploitation, complaints, and adult-protective-services information. It does not authorize the clinical team to investigate, freeze an account, seize a device, or decide exploitation. Devi's record identifies the trusted institution contact, immediate safety route, evidence owner, reporter, and applicable clock before a concern occurs.
Use the FTC scam pattern with Devi
The FTC scam guide highlights impersonation, a claimed problem or prize, pressure to act immediately, and demands for a particular payment method. It advises avoiding unexpected requests for personal or financial information, checking through a trusted contact route, resisting urgency, talking to someone trusted, and reporting scams. Devi's team rehearses those actions with fictional messages and inert payment tools.
Treat financial education as education for Devi
The FDIC Money Smart for Adults page organizes financial education into modules that include income and expenses, spending and saving plans, savings, credit, debt, financial products, identity protection, and financial recovery. It is a general curriculum, not an ABA protocol, capacity test, legal opinion, bank rule, or individualized recommendation. For Devi, the financial incident triage matrix selects only material tied to the chosen question and checks understanding and use in context.
Respect the Social Security payee boundary for Devi
The SSA beneficiary FAQ says power of attorney, authorized-representative status, or a joint account is not the same as appointment as a representative payee. SSA appoints the payee, who must use benefits for the beneficiary's needs and report required changes. For Devi, payee authority concerns the applicable Social Security or SSI benefits and cannot be inferred from a clinical plan or generalized to every asset, contract, purchase, or health decision.
Route unauthorized transactions promptly for Devi
The CFPB unauthorized-transaction guidance advises contacting the bank or credit union quickly and describes federal protections that may apply to debit-card and other electronic-fund-transfer errors, with facts and timing affecting the route. No financial incident triage matrix can promise reimbursement or apply one clock to every cash, check, card, wire, app, credit, benefit, or merchant dispute. It preserves the transaction type, discovery time, notice, evidence, institution response, and qualified follow-up for Devi.
Make complex money communication accessible for Devi
The DOJ effective-communication guidance explains that covered Title II and Title III entities consider the nature, length, complexity, context, and person's usual method of communication and provide appropriate aids and services when required. Financial interfaces and institutions have their own obligations and facts. Devi's clinical team tests its own explanations, forms, simulations, records, and handoffs while routing external-access questions to the responsible entity.
Preserve Devi's AAC and authorship
The ASHA AAC portal says AAC users should always have access to their communication tools or devices. Devi's primary and tested backup communication remain available during budgeting, comparison, authentication, checkout, error handling, record review, and fraud response. A supporter may facilitate access without supplying Devi's choice, credential, consent, assent, authorization, or report.
Use technology evidence cautiously for Devi
A systematic review of assistive technology for practical skills included 18 studies involving autistic people or people with intellectual disabilities and included shopping and household activities among varied targets. Tools, participants, settings, and outcomes differed. The evidence cannot establish that a calculator, visual budget, video prompt, payment app, alert, or adaptive device will teach Devi's skill, prevent fraud, generalize, reduce support, establish authority, or improve financial wellbeing.
Choose Devi's next review trigger
Retrain after a scam pattern, product, bank, payment app, device, credential, authority, reporting route, adult-protection rule, staff role, incident, or Devi communication change. Record the qualified owner, current source, effective date, person and goal version, asset or account scope, authority, payment and record state, fraud route, communication and access arrangement, intervention and restriction authority, implementation check, accessible explanation, complaint path, and reassessment date.
Close Devi's money and purchasing plan
Review the financial incident triage matrix with Devi, the qualified behavior analyst, chosen supporter, legally authorized or fiduciary role when applicable, direct team, and specialists named in the manifest. Confirm that urgent response, fraud and exploitation, person choice, clinical judgment, access, communication, account and transaction authority, fiduciary and benefit roles, financial-product rules, credentials, assessment, teaching, restrictive components, custody, records, and outcomes remain separate; every denominator is reproducible; AAC, privacy, essentials, refusal, withdrawal, and emergency help remain protected; concerns received authorized action; and conclusions stay bounded to sampled conditions. Keep this page draft and noindex until every required review is complete.
Related resources
- How to Coordinate an Interdisciplinary Money and Purchasing Assessment
- How to Separate Money Skills, Payment Access, Account Authority, and Fiduciary Support
- How to Assess Money and Purchasing Skills Without Real-Money Loss
- Money and Purchasing Support in ABA: A Clinical Decision Playbook
Sources
- Council of Autism Service Providers, ABA Practice Guidelines Version 3.0 public summary
- Behavior Analyst Certification Board, Ethics Code for Behavior Analysts
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Guides for Managing Someone Else's Money
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Fraud and Scams
- Federal Trade Commission, How To Avoid a Scam
- Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Money Smart for Adults
- Social Security Administration, FAQs for Beneficiaries Who Have a Representative Payee
- Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Unauthorized Transactions and Missing Money
- U.S. Department of Justice, ADA Requirements: Effective Communication
- American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Augmentative and Alternative Communication
- Desideri and colleagues, Assistive Technology to Promote Practical Skills in Autistic People and People with Intellectual Disabilities: A Systematic Review