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Lost and overwhelmed.
My wife (20 years) and and have been having marital difficulties, I believe she's depressed and has become involved in some online extremist communities. Her online 'persona' had been bleeding through in real life more and more.
Yesterday being the netadmin for my own network I undertook a block of many of the apps and sites.
Today while she was collecting our 4 children from vacation bible school, I saw she had left her laptop open. She'd been very secretive with it recently. I snooped.
She's been sending bitcoin to someone in control of an @aol.com address apparently believing she's arranging an in person meeting with Elon Musk, who she says in her email she has been in contact with for a while. They're expecting 10k for a meeting with Elon.
She's refusing to see a therapist alone or with me, she's refused to see a psychiatrist.
Anyone encountered anything like this?
Any suggestions?
Prepare your divorce, both legally and in the practical sense of how you'll take care of your kids when she's not around anymore etc. Maybe you'll get lucky and manage to drag her out of this for good, but if not, or if she relapses, you'll sleep better knowing that Plan B is in place and you needn't stick out a detereorating situation out of uncertainty regarding the alternative.
How is her parenting in these times? How is yours? How old are the kids?
I spoke to an attorney last week. It was sad and depressing. I completed the documention exercises he recommended before I blocked the the extremist content from the network. This is a non-perfered option.
There are areas for improvement. 2 years ago, she insisted on homeschooling. I'm reenrolling the children for the start of school in the fall. It's challenging, I work full-time, I've not been to the office in several weeks. I may switch to a full remote work plan. 12, 10, 8, 6
That's rough. I wish you good luck.
At least fall isn't far, and your kids are grown out of the most care-intensive ages and (mostly, I suppose?) not into teenage rebellion yet.
Do you have any nearby relatives or friends who might help you out when needed?
No relatives really. I am only child, both my parents have passed. I'm the youngest of my cousins, and they're all 3000 miles away. Only one of my cousins would really be able / competent to help. My wife's mother and brother are in Germany. Their relationship is odd / tense.
The mother and brother are in the same Regierungsbezirk and don't see eachother that often. We traveled to Germany late last fall. We were there for 3 weeks. It was the first time she met 3 of her grandchildren and her only granddaughter and the first time she'd seen our oldest in 10 years. We saw her twice. The brother and his family we saw 4 or 5 times though 2 of those were with their mother and 2 were activity outings with the children.
We're active in our local church. I've shared all of this with the pastor and his wife. They've been incredibly supportive. I shared this yesterday with my 'work wife' he was shocked but very supportive. I've a good group of friends in my men's bible study group. I've not shared any of this with them. I feel if I were to they would be supportive but I also feel it would make church uncomfortable for my wife.
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If you have the capacity, you might consider talking to a therapist for yourself, partially because this is a lot to deal with, and partially because they may be more familiar with resources and ideas that may be helpful to her.
It probably isn't much, but you have my sympathies and prayers, anonymous internet friend.
I've been meeting with our pastor weekly for several weeks now.
Today during the crisis intervention counseling she agreed to both individual therapy / psychiatric care beginning tomorrow, and couples / marital counseling at a TBD date.
Amazing news. I will pray for your marriage.
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Oh, dear lord. You have my deep sympathies.
I've helped out from the tech side with some elder fraud victims that had a similarish pathway, though the marital relationship and legal side is going to be wildly different. That said, while the FBI really only categorizes 'elder fraud', there's a pretty wide variety of both subclinical mental health episodes and simple unfamiliarity that gets abused pretty heavily by the same scammers.
From the tech side, the most urgent thing is to figure out your security environment. Even if there ends up being no organic problem, people in this sort of mode are incredibly vulnerable to scams and grifters, and I would not be surprised to find that bitcoin bit is not the first of its kind, several types of attack make 10k USD liability the low end of risk (who wants to get banned by Chexsystems!), and some scam victims react to the perceived time pressure of a helper pulling them away from their scammers by going full-in. Keep and take a very good look at your recent transaction history. If either of you are using debit cards routinely, change that as soon as you can. Some banks or credit card processors will have options to reduce the credit limit on your cards, and most will have it for other transaction types. You may be able to request international transaction blocks, and some banks will have a Trusted Contact Designation (though this is intended for elder care situations, so may not be viable even if present). Check that your credit score is frozen. If possible, implement an ACH debit block and only whitelist services you absolutely need. Make and keep good records of financial transactions that is not dependent on continual access to the financial services in question. Ideally you'd want to separate finances, with automated transfers, but that's... a hard pull even for elder fraud cases; I wouldn't expect it to be possible here.
While rare, I have seen scammer trick people into installing keyloggers and/or RATs -- ideally you'd want to get her a clean machine, but checking running services, monitoring outbound network traffic, and the normal security checks are probably going to be more doable here. If you're willing (and your router supports it), it's a good time to move away from a default any any outbound firewall rule, but that's more to make you the more annoying target than to actually block attackers. If you're not doing a ton of LAN traffic, consider switching your wifi to a guest network and turning on guest network isolation, or implementing strict VLAN limits, for similar reasons. Keep an eye out for 'free' VPNs, if you've blocked websites; they can be amazingly sketchy.
Social side is harder, in a lot of ways.
If you can't get her to a therapist or a psychiatrist, at least try to evaluate what she's looking for. You're not going to be able to make an evaluation of depression vs bipolar disorder versus impulse control versus a thousand other options, so try to resist the urge to think in DSM terms. But you can probably find out if she's looking for a big payout, or political power, or recognition by the powerful, or something more esoteric (I've seen two cases where the victim had a One Weird Trick they really wanted to apply to bigger scales).
Genuinely believing clearly wrong things doesn't necessarily mean an organic cause and some (even some very smart!) people just get tricked, but if she can't be persuaded away from any of it or strongly resists checking or validating claims of the scammer, that does point that direction.
It's probably overly optimistic, but I think you've mentioned your wife is a full-time housemaker, and recently became a stay-at-home-mom after having a more conventional career. Rarely this sorta attraction toward scams can show up as a mirror to the typical breadwinner mid-life-crisis sorta behavior, where a housewife (or househusband) is looking for a ton of meaning in life. That's still not great, anymore than the 40-year-old in a bad toupee driving a convertible into a wall is! And sometimes it's combined with organic problems. But sometimes there's options to negotiate in this space: it's hard to get people in this sphere from wanting to do something, but you might be able to persuade on what that something is with stupid questions, or by suggesting that smaller-scale investments that require a lot of her efforts will be more renumerative.
At the other side of things... don't fixate on it, but seriously evaluate how prepared you are for a potential divorce, and evaluate if she's making preparations. I don't know enough of that class of problems from the parents side, but I do know it's one plausible motivation for very poor risk assessment for investments.
I can't speak on the radicalization side without more information, and you've got a million valid reasons to not want to go into that publicly.
I spoke to an attorney last week. It was sad and depressing. I completed the documention exercises he recommended before I blocked the the extremist content from the network. This is a non-perfered option.
Being a suspicious sysdmin I was already viewing flows in real time with ntop. I'm blocking tor, outbound VPN from the VLAN her devices are on and also run several domain block lists in DNS. I also trap and force all DNS though my DNS servers and use a block list to block all the well know DNS over https servers. Opnsense firewall.
After I confronted her with the emails and transactions she agreed to go to a crisis counseling service. She now agreed to engage with a therapist / psychiatrist. She goes back tomorrow. She says she knew it was a scam but sent the money anyway because they were nice to her. I don't understand.
White well-being / nowhiteguilt.org is the bailey I'm sure you can imagine the motte.
Forgive me for using a crude term but "pig butchering" is what this class of scam is called in the industry, if that helps you with your research. It's based on a Chinese term.
The scammers invest a lot of effort into making the victim feel good. They're often romantic in nature. For a lot of the victims the story that they're talking to a celebrity is just a foil for having an online friend. They know, on some level, that it's not really that celebrity they're talking to.
A lot of victims have some degree of mental illness but sometimes the victims are just lonely and engaging in some twisted variant of OnlyFans, paying for some kind of friendship.
The scammers can still be pretty ruthless though, switching to blackmail once the victim tries to end things. So she may be desperate not to lose contact with them.
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I'm sorry this is happening for a start. I'm sure this must be very stressful for you. I suppose the main question is whether if you explain it to her does she recognize she is being scammed? Or is this a delusion and she really believes that she is talking to Elon even when you point out it is a scam?
If she's depressed then she might fall for a scam easier, but it's still different than if it is a full blown delusion. Is there perhaps a trusted pastor or faith leader (as you mention bible school) that you might be able to call upon? If she doesn't want to engage with conventional medical/therapy perhaps that is an alternative? Either through faith-based marriage counselling or even just them coming round for a cup of tea for a chat in a more informal way?
I'll know in a bit. She's out at the moment.
She's been very resistant to any sort of help. She's refused to speak to our pastor either alone or with me and has refused all suggestions of counseling, therapy or psychiatry. I've been speaking with our pastor regularly in person in addition to frequent texts and emails.
Speaking to her nurse practitioner today, the NP recommended taking her to the walk in psychiatric service at our hospital. I anticipate she'll refuse.
If she persists in the delusion that she's been speaking to Elon Musk after being advised of the scam, I thought I'd see if our local PD would assist in having her sectioned. I've already left a message with the detective regarding the scam.
Ok, are you in the UK or the US? If the UK, you might be able to enlist the help of the local adult social care department as a halfway house between psychiatric treatment and therapy. We used to offer just chat sessions to people suffering stress et al. But disconnecting even from a trusted pastor sounds worrying, so social services may not be an option either as that will need voluntary engagement.
Is there a trusted family member of hers who might be able to get through to her? If it were my wife, I'd be going to her brother and her cousin she is very close with for example. Not quite an intervention perhaps, but a display that multiple people she trusts are worried.
Having said that, you know the situation better than me, but I have seen spouses sectioning their sick wives/husbands result in the end of the marriage multiple times, so just make sure to think through your options. This is a legitimately tough thing to go through so make sure you are also looking after your own health. If you're engaged with your pastor at least you have some kind of outlet.
Good luck seems inadequate, but I will wish it anyway.
US.
After confronting her with the email and the screenshots of the transactions she agreed to go to a crisis counseling walk in service. They saw us right away, she was much more amenable to seeing a therapist / psychiatrist after talking through things with the crisis counselor. She goes back tomorrow.
I'd reached out to her brother several weeks ago. Unfortunately they were estranged when we ment and married. Didn't really reconcile until ~14 years ago, and we've only seen him in person once in the last 12 years.
I was really very surprised how supportive and engaged the local police department was when I reached out about options, thankfully I did not need to go down that path. Small town life.
She now says she knew it was a scam and sent the money anyway because they were nice to her and it was part fantasy. Though the money and bitcoin was very real and not fantasy.
I've a friend who's a psychiatrist in the UK. He and my wife did A&E rotations together in Ireland. He and I are talking tomorrow.
I really appreciate your advice, thank you.
Well being willing to get help is at least a positive sign. And knowing it was a scam but treating it as a kind of escapist fantasy a la a new sports car seems maybe better than being delusional, hopefully. Still not great financially though of course.
I'll hope the help she is able to get is effective and this is a short term issue fueled by depression and the like. I don't think I have anything more from a technical side so just hope and good wishes.
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