I am not a lawyer and you can feel free to tell me I'm wrong or specifically where I'm wrong if you know more law than me, but I know there are a lot of "clever

I am not a lawyer and you can feel free to tell me I'm wrong or specifically where I'm wrong if you know more law than me, but I know there are a lot of "clever tricks" that you might think of, that you might usually be pretty much able to get away with in most circumstances ... that are technically (or blatantly) fraud and if caught, you might actually not so much be able to get away with it. For example, if your parent is past retirement age and has a sizeable nest-egg, which you've transferred into your own name with their permission, and then considered as yours, knowing that you are the executor and they are assets that are assigned to you in the will... call it a "trust" because your parent trusts you, maybe with Power of Attorney... Well, this might be legal in and of itself (I don't know specifically), but maybe it's actually not legal if you failed to document it properly. There are limits to the amount that you can gift without paying taxes. Was it a gift, or is it a trust? It might matter for tax reasons, or estate settlement reasons, or both. And one more reason that it would need to be carefully documented, even if you can legally do this is: say that your parent needs nursing care in their final days, and on paper they are flat broke. But actually this trust exists. Well, if it wasn't a crime before, to make the transfer in trust without proper documentation, it certainly becomes a crime now if they apply for medicare benefits to keep the nursing homes from "getting their hands on that money," that's medicare fraud and it's very serious. That's also pretty far from the original topic, but it's not as far as it might seem. There can be cases where something would have flown under the radar even if it was illegal, but now there is an estate involved, and those things are going to come to light as a result. If there is a major credit card debt and there are no assets in the estate that can pay for it, then it seems likely that there will be more questions after that. "Are there any hidden assets" can be one of those questions, and there's certainly a spectrum of answers that varies according to whether those assets might be in the form of a gifted sandwich / some jewelry / a car / a boat, etc. and whether those gifts were legitimate or fraudulent. It will be very hard to get the assets back, but who knows... it might be pretty easy to nail someone with a fraud charge if it was fraud and they were sloppy.