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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?
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.
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