A TL;DR post.
I have Nomorobo, I love it.
My dad is well into his 90s. He's rather active online and I had to create a dual computer system because many of his favorite programs are stuck in the early 1990s... On the more modern computer, I set up an administrator account as well as his regular use account. I did this knowing that he could be susceptible to a hack.
Because two of my older siblings have taken enough drugs in their life to be paranoid about everything, they demanded that I hand over the password to the admin account. I told them why I did not want to give it to them because of the potential for compromising the security that I had established for good ol' pops.
Well, they pressured my dad to tell me to hand it over. Within three months, my dad came across one of those pop-up warnings about a virus on his computer(I suspect that he was on a Russian porn site 😁). He tried to call me but I was in the middle of something so he had my dumb as shit 60-something sister on the computer just a few minutes later to help resolve the problem... She called the number on the screen, handed over remote access to a man with a severe accent who proceeded to copy everything on my dad's desktop. What did my dad have on his desktop? Everything from his prescription lists, his will and living trust, a list of family members' birthdates with email addresses and physical addresses, stock information, lists of his bank accounts along with their passwords and hyperlinks to log on...
Yep.
Within 3 days I was getting panicked phone calls about $84,000+ being taken from one account along with many other accounts getting small hits of $10 to $15. Since my dad kept running spreadsheet of his account balances, I'm guessing that the thieves were pretty stupid to be bothering with $15 hits while they could have just cleaned him out quickly. There is still a possibility they got a lot. Prior to the incident he was comfortably loaded.
I sent the siblings and my dad a very sternly written email. I explained that I had established security protocols to prevent this very thing from happening and that the insistence of me handing over that password facilitated the theft. I also asked that I no longer be told of any of the details of this because it is not my problem, but theirs.
The prologue is that the main proponent for me handing over the password, my asshole bro, had his portion of the estate cut by 50% (his loss is easily $650k if my dad wasn't cleaned out on the other accounts.) I also asked my father to exclude me from his will so that I could speak freely and not be obliged to ever speak to my siblings again. He refused. While he needs me to manage a few of his things, my enthusiasm has been knocked down quite a few notches.
He's a prideful guy, so I couldn't get him to do something on the news. The thing is, if it went on the news, my sister and possibly brother would have been the ones focused on and that would have been very fulfilling.
Eh... As a response to all the problems, my sister said "why do people do that?" she was incapable of processing the fact that somebody is actually evil and steals things. Her job? 20-year public school teacher. Yep.
