Suicide after a scam: One family’s story

It’s my birthday today, and while that might sound like a desperate plea for attention…it is.

This week, we interviewed an adult daughter and son whose father took his own life after becoming embroiled in a crypto/romance scam.

“When he had to accept that this is a world where this happened, he was no longer able to be in this world,” his daughter told me.

Please … as a gift to me … talk to the people you love about scams. The stakes are getting higher all the time.

As I interviewed Dennis’ children, I really connected with him. He was a single dad; he encouraged his son to join multiple rock bands (even when they were terrible, I was told). Dennis even spent years photographing his son making music.  And today, he’s a successful musician. Dennis spent summers at the lake in Minnesota with his daughter and her kids.

He was a great guy who wanted one more bit of love, affection, excitement, and purpose in his life. He thought he’d found that with Jessica, and with crypto. He wasn’t looking to get rich. He was looking to leave something for his family.

Instead, every dollar he had saved to that point in his life was stolen. And when the very last dollar was gone, the criminals talked him through opening up an LLC so he could borrow more money, which they stole.  Even after the kids lovingly stepped in, and dad was persuaded he’d been defrauded, he still believed in Jessica. He figured she was a victim, too.  And whoever Jessica was, Dennis was probably right. As we’ve chronicled before, many scam callers are victims of human trafficking, forced to steal money online against their will.

And when Dennis just couldn’t wrap his head around everything that had happened, he ended his life.

“I heard a story of someone in a book, and the way it was talked about in that story was knowing that he took his own life, but also feeling like he was killed by a crime,” his daughter told me.

(This story and accompanying podcast include extensive discussion of suicide. If you or someone you love is in crisis, call 9-8-8, a free hotline staffed by professionals who can provide immediate help.)

Readers of my newsletter know this is not the first time I’ve talked about the scam/suicide connection. Last year we told the story of Kathy Book, who survived a suicide attempt and bravely talked with me about her experience. The stakes for scams have risen so much in the past couple of years, even since I started working on The Perfect Scam. I’m hardly the only one who thinks so. 

Also, please don’t be fooled into thinking this malady impacts only the elderly. Everyone can be a victim under the right circumstances. The pain, fear and shame of being a victim have driven many to contemplate self-harm, often with tragic results. Teenagers.  Women.  Anyone. 

Look, nobody wants to have this conversation.  I will be eternally grateful to Laura and Matt for speaking to me about their father — all because they want to help others. I can’t imagine how difficult that was for them, and what a gift it is to the rest of us. I can assure you I don’t want to talk with any more family members about their loved ones’ pain, suffering, and suicide.  And I know I sound like a broken record when I talk about scams being more sophisticated, more prevalent, and more dangerous.  Sorry. It’s my birthday.  As a gift to me, talk with one person you love about the dangers posed by crypto, and online dating, and online job hunting, and even online games. Tell them the Internet is full of liars who know how to say something to stir their our and make us click on something we’d “never” click on, or do something we’d “never” do.  It’s ok to repeat yourself.

But most of all, be a person that can be talked to under any circumstances. Cultivate a non-judgemental, open spirit so they know you can be trusted. Tell them that no matter how bad things might suddenly seem — an IRS audit, an arrest warrant, accusations of child pornography — they can always talk with you, there’s always another way.

If you’d like,  listen to this week’s episode, Suicide After a Scam: One Family’s Story.  Especially if you still have that nagging feeling like, “This could never happen to me.” A partial transcript is below.

And thank you.

———  PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT ————-

[00:08:15] Bob: And family is very much on Dennis’s mind when an opportunity seems to present itself, and in fact, Dennis can’t wait to talk about it with his son.

[00:08:26] Matt Jones: Well, at first he was very excited, so at first he was constantly wanting to get together because he wanted to talk about you know this new opportunity that he had discovered. He was always into like alternate ways of making money. You know he, he always looked at the internet as this, this wide open resource that you could make your fortune there if you’d, if you played your cards right and were smart about it, and you know, like I said before, he was kind of, he was kind of always anti-establishment corporate job. He was really big on trying to make your own success. So he got very excited about this and you know at first he was calling me quite often to try to get together.

[00:09:05] Bob: What is the opportunity that Dennis is so excited about?

[00:09:09] Matt Jones: He would describe it as crypto mining or this, you know cryptocurrency investment that and, and a lot of people are doing that and you know so I, you know I kind of just told him, like, “Hey, you’ve got to be careful. Just make sure it’s credible and,” you know just I’m, I’m no financial wizard myself, but you know I’m, I’m pretty careful when it comes to things online, and you know, he spoke from time to time about you know a woman that he had met online that was, he was getting along with very well. And you know and I also tried to caution him there, like you know just, it, “Hopefully it’s a real person, but you know if they ask you for any money, just, you know, don’t hesitate to just turn and run, you know, just be really careful. If they ask for money or tell you where to put your money, just,” and um, so he was, he was very excited about this, this person that he had met online.

[00:10:00] Bob: This person calls herself Jessica. And Dennis is very excited to talk about her and about the world of cryptocurrency that she has introduced him to. Matt has some worries, but he doesn’t want to pop his father’s balloon for no reason. But that summer, things seemed to change.

[00:10:17] Laura Jones: I would say that when we, a turning point for me was when we get together every summer. I live in Minnesota, but we would get all the grandkids and kids and dad together. So last summer we were all together at a lake house with, with everyone and he was talking about this big investment, big opportunity that he was just on the brink of figuring out and very excited about the possibility of leaving an inheritance. He worked his whole life. He, as Matt said, was kind of really had bought into this kind of self-made independent man, you know, I think it was generational, but also just how he thought about success, and so he was really excited about this. And over the course of the weekend or I guess it was like a long week, but we tried to understand more what was happening, and um, we even had rented a pontoon boat which you know he loves water, he loves boats. And he couldn’t make the time to join us with the grandkids and everyone on it, because he felt like he had to you know be monitoring and engaged in whatever he was up to.

[00:11:42] Bob: It is strange. Dad is stuck behind a computer instead of out on the lake with the grandkids. Very unlike him. Matt tries to pry out of him what’s going on.

[00:11:53] Matt Jones: As Laura said, he was spending all of his time on the phone and his laptop with this, you know, new opportunity. And he took me out to breakfast away from the rest of the family and wanted to fill me in on what he was doing. And he, he was a bit secretive and kind of closed off, but I was able to get, well certain things were red flags, he, he said that he had made $40,000 in a week on, on an investment. And I was, whoa, that’s a huge return, like how much, how much money did you put in, like what is this investment? And then he started talking about bit mining, kind of discussed a little bit about what his impression of bit mining was and what I understood it to be. It, it didn’t line up.

[00:12:39] Bob: Matt can’t get the whole story out of his father that morning, but he gets enough to follow-up and do some research on his own.

[00:12:46] Matt Jones: So I was able to ascertain the name of the website where he was doing his investing. And I have a friend that works in cybersecurity and some of these cybercrimes and was able to send him the web address and just be like, “Hey, can you just, you know, do a shallow dive into like whether this is a real site or not.” And he did and you know within 24 hours he came back, yeah, this is a, a very well-known scam. So like stay away from it.

[00:13:15] Bob: Matt’s father thought he was investing in crypto, thought he was mining crypto, but he was just sending his money to a scam website. When Matt talks to his dad, he resists this new information. So…

[00:13:29] Matt Jones: So I put him in touch with, with my contact, and they began to go back and forth because my father at that point through probably just disbelief, not wanting to think that he had just sunk his entire nest egg into something that wasn’t real, and also the ro–, romantic side of things, the friendship side of things with this person who got him involved, was reluctant to share more with me once I started kind of trying to address it with him. My contact was able to convince him like hey, this is, this is probably not what you think it is.

[00:13:59] Bob: Matt and his sister start doing more work to figure out what their father has actually done. It’s not easy. The best they can tell, he’s already sent most of his life savings, his retirement money to this scam website. And they gently try to persuade their father of the reality of the situation.

[00:14:19] Laura Jones: We over a series of, you know, I don’t know, Matt, like a couple of months probably were trying to work with him on accepting what had happened, and it was really difficult for him to, I think one, the, you know the, the loss, the financial loss was devastating for him. I mean he was not someone with considerable wealth. So you know he had hoped that this would kind of turn into inheritance, and also be something that would set him up for his aging years, but that was one piece of it.

[00:14:59] Bob: Matt and Laura aren’t sure all the steps that happened next, but one thing they are sure of, their dad cares about Jessica.

[00:15:07] Matt Jones: My father being loyal to the people that he cares about went directly to this, this person that had gotten him involved and told him, like, “Hey, this is what I’m, I’m hearing from somebody that’s a trusted source. You should start getting your money out,” you know, trying to protect them. And then his account was then immediately locked. He wasn’t able to get any more money out.

[00:15:29] Bob: Dennis tries to warn Jessica. And his account on the scam website is locked. Now it’s clear he can’t access the investments he sent in. But Dennis is still worried about Jessica.

[00:15:43] Bob: And so when it came time to, for you guys to talk to him about helping come to terms with what had been stolen, he was still defending this woman, right? He was still defending her?

[00:15:52] Laura Jones: Yes. Yep. He felt like she was possibly at risk too. So in his mind, he felt like he was trying to protect this person and then later, he, I think, thought maybe that she had been somewhat coerced into it, or there was some, or there was some, you know, unlawfulness to her involvement that he didn’t want her to face any kind of legal consequences for. And at the time I think, you know, we were so frustrated because it felt so clear to us that this was a scam, but what we didn’t know is that he was, you know, probably right in some ways that whoever he was communicating with was probably under duress. And part of, we had no idea that this was an international, you know, scam run in kind of industrial level off of the backs of human trafficking.

[00:16:56] Bob: We talked on The Perfect Scam before about the human trafficking side of scams. Many people on the other end of the phone are also victims, trapped in work houses and forced to spend hours on the phone committing crimes against their will. So Dennis isn’t necessarily wrong in his sympathy for Jessica. But Matt and Laura now know their dad is in a lot more trouble because he stays in touch with Jessica.

[00:17:20] Laura Jones: And then the other piece of it was even as he began to kind of come to terms with the financial loss, there was always this protectiveness over this relationship that he thought he had, this person that he, you know, thought he had connected with. And that was always much, much harder for him to wrap his mind around, I think. You know, he said at a certain point that he just would not, he, it didn’t make sense to him that someone would do this. Why would someone have personal conversations and talk to him and share things and spend so much time with him? It, it didn’t, it didn’t make sense that that could be real to him. And so it was after that I think that, you know, as kids, we really started to try to figure out a way to intervene more assertively with him and help, you know, see if we could, if we could interrupt this.

[00:18:23] Bob: But being more assertive, that backfires a little. At times, their father seems to understand he’s the victim of a scam, but at other times, there’s still a sliver of hope that his money might not really have been stolen, and that Jessica is real.

[00:18:37] Matt Jones: That’s when he kind of really withdrew substantially, where it was difficult to get him on the phone or keep him on the phone. It was difficult to, to get him out, and, you know, there was, there was definitely this kind of gray period where he really didn’t want to talk about, about his investment and where the money was and how it was going with trying to get it back. And he definitely withdrew a lot near the, the last, uh, four or five months. That was kind of, that was kind of the series of event–, events that led up to him kind of withdrawing from us a bit as well, because then it became this, it was a frustrating thing. And that’s, that a very difficult thing as a family that we discovered is that as you’re trying to help this person and they wholeheartedly believe that this thing is real. So it’s, it’s trying to convince them, not only that it’s not real, but this relationship isn’t real, and you can become an enemy to that person, not you know he, we never felt like we were his enemy, but he definitely started withdrawing from us, stopped coming to us for advice, stopped reaching to just get the, he, he became very uh secluded from us. And we, we had to make a much larger effort to, to get involved with him.

[00:19:56] Bob: And as Dennis withdraws from his children, their concern about him only grows.

[00:20:02] Laura Jones: As we tried to check on him, I do remember calling him and, and, and talking to him and he did express at one point frustration that he felt like everyone thought he was dumb, but we were, didn’t, you know, think that he knew how to take care of himself and that, you know, he, it was really, really painful for him. The wounding to his, his pride and his sense of, you know, um, he’s lived independently his whole life and, you know, been very self-reliant and he felt like when we tried to talk to him about it, that it was kind of, you know, an unspoken criticism of his judgment and his intelligence. And I do remember one conversation with him where, you know, I said, “Dad, it’s, I’m concerned about you. If you’ve been the victim of a crime and that must be really hard. You must feel betrayed.” And he said, “Yes, yes, I do.” So I think when we were able to approach him slightly differently, he was able to, you know, connect more, but yeah, he felt, he felt defensive and, you know, and embarrassed and ashamed, I think.

[00:21:25] Bob: Hmm.

[00:21:26] Matt Jones: And I think he was also panicking a bit, you know, he just, he, he had everything that he had had, he put into this and, he, he was trying to get himself comfortably to the finish line and maybe leave something for his, his kids and grandchildren. And that was what he was excited about. And then that completely got flipped upside down. And I think there was, you know, as anybody would be, they would feel a little panicked, of like, what am I going to do now? Like, how do, how do I get to the end of the line you know without, he, he, you know, he was in his 80s. But he couldn’t just go down the street and get himself a job and be like, well, I’ll bounce back from this.

[00:22:06] Laura Jones: And so then we moved into trying to help him figure out what next, you know, and so, he’d been living on his own in this apartment for 35 years and was suddenly feeling, you know, on his fixed income that he couldn’t fully afford it. And we started looking at alternative living options and, and, and he didn’t like aging, you know, he did not think of himself as old. He was in very good health. He spent a lot of effort and energy on being active and eating well and taking care of himself. And, and so, um, he really struggled with the idea of moving into some kind of space for, for older people. And so that was part of it too. And, um, we’d started helping him look at kind of housing that would be, he’d be eligible for based on his income and kind of working with him on that and working through some, you know, resistance that he had around being around who he thought of as, as old people. He didn’t think of himself as one, but there was that, there was the idea of like not wanting to be put out to pasture. You know, he really felt like if he weren’t, if he wasn’t earning money, if he wasn’t kind of somehow like working in some way, he felt like he was being put out to pasture in his mind. So there was that. And so we were kind of in the process of, of thinking these things through.

[00:23:37] Bob: About six months have now passed since the family discovered the crime and Matt and Laura feel like they’ve at least moved closer to dealing with the reality of the situation that their dad has just about no money left.

[00:23:50] Laura Jones: Yeah, I think that is what I believe that we were dealing with the aftermath of it, you know? I think we thought this, okay, you know, he’s lost everything. Now, now we’re just figuring stuff out as a family. You know, we’re looking at housing, we’re looking at how to support him. We were thinking through things. We had successfully encouraged him to apply to get on some waitlists, and you know we started that process, and I think we sort of thought naively, well, you know it’s done, he’s out of money. Like this is, what else can happen? You know now we just thought we were dealing with the consequences of it. And what we didn’t know is that it could happen again and it’s common to happen again.