The son of an elderly Florida man says he was shocked to discover an $8,500 charge on his father’s credit card from a matchmaking service – given that his father has dementia and couldn’t get a date if he wanted to.
To add insult to injury, the Oklahoma company — called The Matchmaking Company — only issued a partial refund after a Florida news station began snooping, according to News 6 in Orlando .
The 80-year-old’s son, Blake Mooney, said that at first he tried to collect the money on his own. But he was blocked by the company’s byzantine calling system, he said.
“There’s no one to talk to,” the North Carolina man told the station. “There is no one who can help you in any other way than [asking]’Do you want to register? Would you like us to do some matching for you?’ »
The family’s saga began in June, when Mooney’s father took a carpool from a Lake County assisted living facility to The Matchmaking Company’s Winter Park office, News 6 reported.
Half an hour later, the old man signed a contract entitling him to 12 dates for the modest sum of $8,495.
Her father’s mental state isn’t always obvious, Mooney said. But it would surface fairly quickly during an in-depth conversation, the son said.
“Once [the conversation] starts to involve financial situations and numbers and dates, he would have no idea,” Mooney said. “You could call him now and ask him what the date is, and he wouldn’t be able to remember it for you.”
For example, his father listed his birth year as 1922 on application materials, which would make the octogenarian about 102 years old, the station said.
Mooney doesn’t even know how her widowed father founded the company, which claims to “create lasting, authentic, loving relationships” for customers.
“He can’t get a date,” said Mooney, who added that his father barely remembers signing the contract. “He suffers from dementia.”
This created a big problem for his son, who had to figure out how to clean up the mess.
“For family members, you have to understand that absent a court order, they will have this freedom to enter into contracts,” Raymond Traendly, an attorney with TK Law in Altamonte Springs, told the station. in Florida.
“There will be that freedom to swipe that credit card and make those purchases. And the onus is then on you to prove that your family member did not have capacity at that time.
Mooney said he called the company dozens of times, to no avail, to try to resolve things.
On the rare occasion he spoke to a live representative, he got nowhere: They weren’t interested in hearing about his father’s dilemma or getting him a refund, he said.
News 6 eventually began asking questions about the incident and a reporter visited the Winter Park office, the station said.
Afterward, the company’s lawyer called Mooney and told him they had spoken to his father, who denied having dementia.
But Mooney – who has power of attorney over his elderly father – sent the company a doctor’s letter stating that his father had in fact been diagnosed and was “suffering from significant cognitive impairment that affects memory, reasoning and judgment.”
“After a comprehensive evaluation and clinical evaluations, my professional medical opinion is that he does not have the capacity to make informed decisions regarding the use of [The Matchmaking Company’s] services,” the letter states.
The company reluctantly canceled the contract and refunded $6,000, News 6 reported.
The company would not explain why it kept the $2,500 — or comment on anything else, despite repeated requests from the station.
For his part, Mooney is just happy to get most of the money back.
“It would have killed him financially,” Mooney said of his father and the situation. “It would have been bad if we hadn’t caught him. That would have been very bad.
