Riches to Rags Through Cybercrime

By Brandon M. Cipriano

This is a nonfiction story about a normal, everyday family living the American dream. They lived in a home filled with love and laughter until it all changed in the blink of an eye due to cybercriminals. Their situation got so intense and dangerous that they lost everything, becoming homeless and penniless. They had to beg strangers on the streets for money just to eat.
This was no game that the cybercriminals were playing. They were out to destroy this once-happy family. The familys cat died due to a lethal dose of rat poisoning.
The stress they experienced caused illness for the entire family. The parents ended up in the hospital with major problems, such as heart attacks and cancer. This was a petrifying experience for everyone, but most of all for the young son. He didnt know or understand how to cope with this horrifying ordeal that was transpiring around him; the only recourse that he could think of was to use self-harm to numb the painthe irony of using pain to deal with pain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: May 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9781524608637

Brandon M. Cipriano

Brandon M. Cipriano grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida, and went to school in Nevada. He started writing this book at the age of seventeen in Cancun, Mexico, and he now resides in the United States.

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© 2016 Brandon M. Cipriano. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 05/19/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0864-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0865-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5246-0863-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016907729

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book first of all to my parents as they were my support system. Without them and our faith in God, I don't think I would have made it through this horrendous act of cybercrime. I would also like to dedicate this to all the families who have suffered from the hands of cybercriminals and somehow found the will to survive and keep fighting.

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W e lived the American dream. Our lives were full of delectation and love. My parents worked hard to attain their money, which they used to purchase their homes and the various vehicles they drove, to send me to private school, and to take us on the memorable family vacations we took every year. They worked hard to develop the love, laughter, and fun we shared together as a family. We had what some would say were alluring lives until suddenly it changed. Where did our lives go? And who was deliberately tearing our family apart? These were the questions we silently asked ourselves many times a day.

Everything went downhill extremely quickly; we went from riches to rags because of cybercrime, and my parents had no control over this. Our computers were compromised by cybercriminals with snide intentions. All our private family conversations we had at home, along with anything else we did in our home or in our vehicles, ended up written in my parents' personal emails that the hackers forwarded. It made absolutely no sense, but the severity of the situation escalated fast.

Once cybercriminals have control over your computer, they often attempt to steal your identity and make money any way they can. They don't care who they hurt, and they will go as far as they need to in order to make the money they are intent on making. They were in our emails and accessing whatever they wanted to.

The emails my parents were receiving devastated them and went against all their beliefs. There were emails advertising male and female escorts and places to meet to purchase drugs. Some emails contained data about purchases that my parents didn't make, and some emails made no sense whatsoever because they were replies to emails that my parents never wrote.

Our lives were in complete disarray. The most dangerous and scariest thing was that our entire lives were divulged on the Internet. As hard as we tried to stop this, we had no cavalry behind us to help. Our names, home address, Social Security numbers, credit card numbers and information, and confidential banking information and where our safe was located in our home were all exposed in these horrific cybercrimes.

How fast our lives went from being idyllic to being surrounded by doom astonished us. Our private information was plastered all over the web, and our emails were disseminated in the form of other emails. That meant all our private information could be exploited across the Internet, which explained how my parents' finances dissipated quickly by no fault of their own. The scale of the damage caused by these sadistic criminals was mind-boggling.

For every email account that we had, we would frequently change our passwords. Most people maintain a consistent password because, that way, it's easier to remember, but we completely changed our passwords. The passwords had capital letters, lowercase letters, and numbers, but even with that, somehow, whoever was doing all of this to our family stayed able and determined to hack into our emails. It was as if our lives were a game and we were just pawns in it. This devastated our family. Who we were no longer existed.

My parents had acquired everything they had through more than twenty-five years of hard work and long hours in the time-share real-estate industry. They were both in upper management with a combined income of at least half a million dollars per year. Their checking account, as well as their savings and my college fund, had built up quickly. Their goal in life was to spend quality time with me and my siblings, work hard to be able to go on fun yet educational vacations, and retire by the age of forty-five so they could enjoy life.

My mother was educated with a philosophy that her parents and grandparents passed down to her---whatever income you make, you must always put 50 percent of it into savings, which my parents did and put in their safe. The other 50 percent is what they had allocated to live on. They also passed this philosophy down to me. This rule was meant to teach me that in case of a rainy day, I would always have money in savings to carry me through until the sun shined on me again. But after these cybercrimes, we felt vulnerable, and nothing was protected.

These cybercriminals and stalkers hit the jackpot when they found us. They were so vindictive. They had no problem stealing everything that my parents had, including their identities, pictures of all of us, money, jewelry, family heirlooms, and electronics and computers. We were positive this was all transpiring, but we had no idea how. This devastated our family to the point of bringing on illness due to stress.

Every year, our family took two big vacations, and we also went on many shorter getaways throughout the year. We usually spent one of our two big vacations on a cruise, and for the second vacation, we usually visited countries that were poorer, developing countries. My parents enjoyed taking time off from work to travel and educate me in how people with different cultures lived so I would appreciate all the benefits and freedoms we had in the United States. Some countries were so depressing because of seeing such very young children who could hardly speak begging for money. Despite all of that, on these travels, we were able to build wonderful memories that I will cherish forever.

When we didn't vacation, we enjoyed the sanctuary of our home. We had a large and alluring aboveground pool in our backyard, and we would have friends and family come over almost every weekend to have barbeques. My mother would make all the barbeque fixings, like potato salad, macaroni salad, coleslaw, and a generous-sized green salad with everything in it and homemade salad dressing on the side. We also had homemade baked beans and some kind of pasta dish, which were magnificently delicious. All the side dishes she prepared complemented the other food we had---homemade sausage patties, hot dogs, hamburgers, and rib-eye steaks that my dad barbecued on our gas grill in the backyard. Everyone in attendance fancied the fine taste of all the food.

Our backyard was enormous, and my parents designed it to be elaborately elegant as well as very functional for multipurpose use. The large cement patio that stretched the entire length of the house had a spectacular awning that kept us nice and cool, preventing the hot sun from beating down on our heads. Not only was the grill under the awning, but we had an outside table-and-chairs set that sat twelve people under it as well. We also had four wicker rocking chairs, four lounge chairs, and a double-seated porch swing built on a metal frame with its own awning over it.

After we all ate and enjoyed our food, we would proceed to do my favorite thing---sit around the fire pit my parents had built, roasting marshmallows and making s'mores. That's when we'd tell stories, especially scary stories, which my dad enjoyed telling. He had quite the imagination, always inspiring me to think up my own stories that I could tell. They used to say with a mind like mine, I would be the next Stephen King.

Playing in the pool was another enjoyment we shared. My dad would throw me up in the air so high that I felt as if I were flying. But the flop back down into the pool was a painful reminder that the far-fetched thought of flying wasn't possible. My mother enjoyed the pool also. We all enjoyed playing pool volleyball, pool basketball, and Marco Polo. Sometimes, we got into the pool late at night and just lay on our rafts, looking up at the stars. That was so relaxing. We really enjoyed our backyard; it was like an oasis.

Another fun thing we had the pleasure of doing was playing horseshoes in our horseshoe pit. It was fun to watch and play because my mom and dad were so competitive at this game, though my mom usually won. My father would always say that he let my mother win, but we knew that wasn't the case. My mother was just better at it, and she always teased my father about this.

My favorite game to play was basketball with my father. We played on our basketball court almost every day when my dad got home from work, provided that all my homework was complete. I might have been short, but I loved the game. We would play the game H-O-R-S-E, and I did win about a quarter of the time with my father. My mother would also play H-O-R-S-E with me, which was much fairer because she is only five foot two. I beat her most of the time, but she didn't mind. She just enjoyed playing the game with me. Unfortunately, all our past pleasure fell into disarray; everything now felt as if we were sinking in quicksand very fast.

I jolted awake in my bed one night, breathing hard, my vision blurry from a vivid, horrifying nightmare. It was the same dream I dreamed night after night---the dream of our family shattering into pieces. I knew it was a dream---or rather a nightmare---but unfortunately, it not only felt real, it was real. I winced in pain.

After the fuzziness dissipated, I realized it was a school day. I tried to get out of bed quickly, but my legs got trapped in the blankets, and I found myself twisted up on the floor. After freeing myself from my bedding, I rushed to get dressed. My mother always had my school uniform perfectly pressed and hanging on the hook in my room; she also had my shoes polished so well that I could see my reflection in them---a reflection of a sad face---as they sat on the floor beneath my uniform. Instead of being excited to go to school, as I used to be, now I felt nauseated.

Walking down the stairs of our four-thousand-square-foot contemporary home, I felt saddened by the malicious events going on in our home. And, day after day, seeing worry written all over my parents' faces, even though they tried to smile and pretend the situation at hand was under control, hurt me immensely. Seeing my parents riddled with worry was hard to digest, as well as comprehend, at such a young age. I didn't know the extent of our problems because my parents tried to shield me from it, but I felt the tension throughout the house.

I presumed that they shielded me from the truth because they didn't want me to go to school with intense worry, but I knew something was critically wrong, especially when I heard my mom crying in the shower in the morning. My mother was a strong woman who hardly ever cried. The only other time I remember my mother crying was following the deaths of her parents. I never let her know that I overheard her, nor did I let her know my heart was breaking into pieces because I felt the stress in our home even though my parents tried their best to conceal the seriousness of whatever was happening to our family.

Although I didn't understand much of what was going on, I was able to decipher that this was a serious and harsh time in our lives. After every night will come a brighter morning---I thought and prayed for this, but I never mentioned any of this to my parents. Maybe I should have. It possibly would've helped them and filled them with some hope.

Mom! Dad! I yelled to break the deafening silence. They looked at me with big smiles and said, Good morning, sunshine, in harmony and asked if I wanted breakfast. They always said breakfast is the most important meal of the day. They teased me in fun and called it brain food for school. The way I enjoyed and devoured every bit of my breakfast, I was sure I had the best brain anyone could possibly have in school!

Me want breakfast? No, never, I teased back. I'm the one in this family with the bottomless pit.

What would you like, sweetie? my mom asked with a forced smile, even though she assumed I thought it was genuine.

I smugly answered, Food, while laughing. I wasn't fussy when it came to food. My mother was a great cook, and I ate anything she made and enjoyed doing so. I enjoyed her cooking so much that I always hummed while I ate. I never realized I was doing this until I was older. My parents heard me but never said anything.

After breakfast, my mom asked me to put my shoes on, or else I would be late for school. As a ten-year-old in the fifth grade, I wasn't concerned about being late for school. I hesitated as much as possible, but I knew my mom would get perturbed because punctuality was one of her pet peeves. I didn't want to add to the stress she was experiencing, so I did as I was told and then went outside through the garage door to get into our vehicle.

The school I attended wasn't too far from our house, but that day, the drive was unusually silent. Normally, my mother would give me encouraging words of wisdom, but not anymore. Now, she seemed glum, which was not my mother's personality. She was normally very positive and bubbly.

When we arrived at my school, my mom put on a sweet smile as she told me how much she loved me and how proud she was of me. I love you too, I reassured her as I kissed her good-bye on the cheek. I knew that smile was for me, but my heart was breaking for her. What was going on with our family? Why did everyone seem to be in a state of confusion, as well as grief?

I was raised Catholic, so my parents enrolled me in a private religious school from kindergarten. For as long as I can remember, together as a family, we knelt down and said our prayers in my room before I went to sleep at night. We also said a prayer of thanks for the blessings we were about to receive before we ate each meal. In our family, God came first.

I much preferred private school because there were fewer students and more teachers in each classroom than there were in a public school. I was a good student and was blessed to be in the gifted program, which I was proud of, as were my parents. My mom teased me and said I was so intelligent because of all the brain food she cooked for me every morning, and being so young and impressionable, I truly believed this!

With everything that was going on, my once-strong faith in God began to waver. I felt as if I was praying to a deaf God. I didn't feel comfortable at school anymore, especially on Fridays. That was the day we attended the school church for confession and Mass. My mother made sure she was there with me every Friday.

I prayed continuously for sunshine and laughter to enter our home again and for all the negativity to disappear, but it didn't. God wasn't listening to my prayers, and I didn't know why. Was it something I did? Did I turn our family home into a mortuary? It felt as though we lived in one. There was no more life in our home, just sadness and tears.

The barbeques became less frequent, the fun in the pool grew almost nonexistent, and the daily basketball games with my father disappeared. His mind was always consumed with something other