The Florida Vulnerable Adult Injunction: Freezing the Money Before It’s Gone

What the Injunction Can Do

Florida law creates a dedicated court order for one situation: a vulnerable adult (an adult whose ability to care for or protect themselves is impaired by age, illness, or disability) who is being exploited, or is about to be. The court can:

• Freeze the money. Any of your parent’s assets at any bank or financial institution can be frozen, even if the account is titled jointly with the exploiter, held in a trust, or set up to pay on death. Money the exploiter already moved into an account in their own name can be frozen too, on an emergency basis, if you show probable cause it is traceable to the exploitation.
• Freeze the credit. Lines of credit can be frozen so the exploiter cannot borrow against your parent’s home equity or run up cards.
• Stop the contact. The order can bar the exploiter from any direct or indirect contact with your parent, and can give your parent exclusive use of a shared home, putting a live-in exploiter out.
• Keep life running. When the court freezes accounts, it can order that your parent’s rent, utilities, caregivers, and other critical expenses keep getting paid through the freeze.
• Direct law enforcement. The order can include directives to law enforcement, including having an officer accompany your parent to retake a home.

The hard category is money the exploiter has already spent or moved beyond tracing, and real estate: the injunction cannot change title to land. Those need the recovery track in the financial exploitation guide.

Who Can File

The statute opens the courthouse wide. The petition can be filed by:

• The vulnerable adult themselves;
• Their guardian;
• Any person or organization acting on their behalf, with the consent of the vulnerable adult or their guardian;
• An agent under a durable power of attorney, if the document specifically grants that authority; or
• A person who simultaneously files for a determination of incapacity and an emergency temporary guardian. This is the route when your parent cannot consent and no POA exists: the two filings go in together, and the injunction petition rides with them.

Neither side is required to have an attorney. There is no minimum residency. And the exploitation does not need to have already happened; imminent danger is enough. The petition is filed in the circuit court where the vulnerable adult lives (or in the guardianship case, if one is already open).

How Fast It Moves

Speed is the point. The court can issue a temporary injunction ex parte (before the exploiter is told or heard) when the sworn petition shows an immediate and present danger of exploitation, a likelihood of irreparable harm with no adequate remedy at law, a substantial likelihood of success, that the threatened injury to your parent outweighs the harm to the respondent, that the order serves the public interest, and that it provides for your parent’s physical or financial safety.

The ex parte order lasts up to 15 days, extendable once for up to 30 more days on good cause, and a full hearing with both sides must be set before it expires. After that hearing the court can enter a final injunction that continues the freeze, keeps the no-contact terms, orders frozen assets returned to your parent, and stays in effect until modified or dissolved. The sheriff serves the order, and every filed petition also goes to Adult Protective Services, which must report back to the court within 72 hours on any related investigation.

What It Costs to File

Nothing. The law forbids the clerk from charging any initial filing fee or service charge for these petitions. The clerk must help you file, must provide simplified forms with instructions, and gives you two certified copies of the petition free, plus free certified copies of any injunction to serve on banks. If the court finds exploitation, the respondent gets taxed with the costs.

The counterweight: if a court finds the petition lacked substantial factual or legal support, it can award actual damages against the petitioner. Free to file is not the same as safe to file thin. The freeze provisions are technical (joint accounts, trust accounts, and respondent-name accounts each have different requirements), and this is where having a litigator draft the petition earns its keep. We quote injunction and exploitation matters at the free consult.

Report to the Hotline First

The sworn petition contains a bold-type acknowledgment that you have already reported the allegations to Florida’s central abuse hotline, 1-800-962-2873 (1-800-96-ABUSE). That is not optional boilerplate; Florida law requires any person who suspects exploitation of a vulnerable adult to report it, and the petition makes you certify you did. Make the call before you file, note the date, and see our hotline and resources guide for what to have ready and what happens next.

When the Exploiter Is an Anonymous Scammer

The classic objection used to be that you cannot get an injunction against someone you cannot serve: the romance scammer on WhatsApp, the fake broker, the "grandchild" who needs bail money wired today. Florida rewrote the statute for that world. When the exploiter’s identity cannot be traced, you can serve them by the same channel they used to reach your parent, on a sworn affidavit describing the contact, the identifying details you do have, and your attempts to trace them. The freeze still works, because the freeze lands on your parent’s own accounts and the pending transfer, not on the scammer’s. For adults 65 and older, the statute also expressly reaches exploitation of "specified adults" through fraudulent wire and transfer requests, the same conduct Florida law lets a broker or bank flag and delay. If a transfer is disputed under this process, the money is held before it can leave.

What It Cannot Do

The injunction is the tourniquet, not the surgery. It stops the bleeding, but it does not by itself return money already taken, undo a deed or beneficiary change, or punish the exploiter. Those run on parallel tracks, and the injunction is usually step one of three:

• Recovery. A civil suit can recover up to three times the amount taken plus attorney fees, void transfers obtained by undue influence, and compel an accounting. How the money comes back →
• The estate. An abuser can forfeit their entire inheritance from the victim. The injunction file becomes evidence.
• Protection going forward. Revoking the compromised power of attorney and holding the agent accountable (how POA abuse gets stopped →), re-papering accounts, and, where capacity is failing, a guardianship or its alternatives.

The injunction also cannot change title to real property. If a deed was signed under pressure, that is a separate suit we bring alongside it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The live-in "caregiver." A widower’s new companion controls his phone, his mail, and now his checkbook, and his daughter finds $40,000 gone. The petition freezes the joint account she added herself to, bars contact, and awards him exclusive use of his own house, all before she knows the case exists. The recovery suit follows.

The romance scam mid-wire. A retired teacher is about to wire $150,000 to a "fiancé" she has never met. Her son reports to the hotline, files the same week using the substitute-service rules for untraceable respondents, and the court freezes the transfer before it clears. No name, no address, order granted.

The POA agent gone bad. A son holding his mother’s power of attorney starts moving brokerage funds into his own account. Her other child files with the incapacity petition and emergency temporary guardianship, the court freezes the destination account as traceable proceeds, and the accounting and treble-damages claims follow.

Sources of Law

• Fla. Stat. §825.1035 (injunction for protection against exploitation of a vulnerable adult: standing, no filing fee, ex parte temporary injunction up to 15 days with one 30-day extension, asset and credit freezes including jointly titled and trust assets, exclusive use of the dwelling, living-expense carve-outs, substitute service on unascertainable respondents added by ch. 2025-158 effective July 1, 2025, damages for unsupported petitions, no effect on real-property title); §825.1036 (violation: first-degree misdemeanor, third-degree felony after two prior violation convictions, economic damages plus attorney fees and costs for enforcing the injunction, financial-institution safe harbor); §415.1034 (duty to report to the central abuse hotline, certified in the petition); §825.101 and §415.102(28) (vulnerable adult and related definitions); §817.5695 (exploitation of specified adults 65+, incorporated by §825.1035(1)). Fla. Prob. R. 5.920 (the Supreme Court approved petition and injunction forms; every clerk of court must provide simplified forms and help completing them). Verified against the 2025 Florida Statutes at flsenate.gov (retrieved 2026-08-03). Report: Florida Abuse Hotline, 1-800-962-2873.

Updated on August 3, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate planning and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. General information about Florida law, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Whether an injunction issues depends on the facts and evidence; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Do not send confidential information until we have agreed to represent you.