The length to which some people have gone to fleece their elderly relatives out of their money has been truly disgusting.
And, as a recent story unfortunately revealed, those relatives don't even have to be alive for such schemes to move forward.
According to The Washington Post, a video has gone viral of a Brazilian woman wheeling a man she identified as her uncle into a local bank on Tuesday, attempting to get him to sign for a loan worth about $3,250.
The woman, identified as Érika de Souza Vieira Nunes, 42, explained that her Uncle Paulo Roberto Braga's closed eyes and overall limpness was common. "He's like that," she said when asked about his pale skin.
In the rather disturbing video, Nunes, who said she was her uncle's caregiver, kept propping up her uncle's head, tapping his face, and speaking to him as if nothing were evidently amiss with his bizarre behavior (or lack thereof).
But, as reported in Marca News, the employees of Itau Unibanco in Bangu, Brazil, were immediately suspicious.
Especially since her uncle's clear lack of consciousness and responsiveness didn't stop her from trying to manipulate his hands to sign for the loan she wanted.
Noting the lack of color in the man's face, the suspicious employees began recording her and called an ambulance.
Upon arriving, the paramedics ultimately found that Braga had been dead for several hours, per the Post, despite Nunes' lawyer arguing that her uncle died while they were in the bank.
Now, while Nunes has yet to be officially convicted, the evidence contained in the video and various witness statements seems pretty damning for her.
Indeed, Nunes, upon her arrest, faces charges of embezzling and abuse of a corpse, so her future, to say the least, does not look rosy.
Unfortunately, while not nearly as gruesome as this situation, elder abuse has become increasingly more common in Western societies, as respect for the elderly has been on the decline.
Even the current first lady has been accused of elder abuse for allowing the arguably mentally-declining Joe Biden to run for and remain president despite his clear inability to function at the required level.
As Marca News shared, financial elder abuse in particular has grown in recent years, with the World Health Organization saying that 1 in 6 older adults experience some kind of abuse, including financial.
Every year, every day even, the elderly have been tricked, abused, and left to die by the callous people who were supposed to take care of them.
Western society seems to have nothing but indifference, if not contempt, for the most vulnerable in society, from the unborn to the elderly.
And whenever a society has lacked respect for the most vulnerable, they ultimately lacked respect for everyone in that society.
