Friends who had just begun to notice changes in Deven’s behavior wondered whether they had been caused by his accident. But Jill knew they had begun before his fall, and she was getting fed up. She began thinking of ending the marriage. Still, she worried that she might be abandoning a sick man. When she and a close girlfriend went away for a weekend, Jill asked for advice: “What does it say about me if I think he’s really ill and I’m divesting myself of him?” Her friend replied: “You can still take care of him and not be married to him.”

In February 2014, Jill told Deven she wanted to separate and asked him to move out by September 1. She urged him to get counseling and a neurological workup, and he did eventually see a therapist. But Jill discovered that the therapist knew little about Deven’s internet friends or money transfers. Instead, the sessions were all about the stress caused by the impending divorce. “For somebody who’s a mental health professional,” Jill says now of the therapist, “he clearly had no bull---- detector whatsoever.”

Meanwhile, Deven devoted ever more allegiance to his online friends, most of whom were women — or claimed to be. One night in the summer of 2014, after he had fallen asleep on the sofa with his laptop open, Jill peeked at what he had been typing — an email, as it happened, in which he was providing detailed information to someone about their home equity line of credit. She found other messages that provided access to his credit card accounts. “You can’t even say he was a victim of identity theft,” Jill says. “He was a victim of identity gift.” When Jill confronted him about it, he didn’t seem to understand why she would object. “Look, it’s my life to f--- up,” he said. Any time Jill grew emotional, Deven withdrew, she recalls: “He just sat there, sort of glazed over. I felt like I could rant and scream all I wanted, but it wasn’t really sinking in.”

Around the same time, Mosbacher says, Deven told him he was going to retire and become the financial adviser to a woman in Africa — not that he had a pension to rely on or financial expertise to share. “The really scary part is that he didn’t acknowledge he was putting himself at risk or that his money transfers were out-and-out fraud,” Mosbacher says. Deven was opening accounts in his name to deposit checks from online girlfriends, who then directed him to withdraw money and deposit it in another account specifically for them. But the girlfriends’ checks were fake — a basic scam. “He wasn’t in it for the money,” Mosbacher says. “In his mind, he was helping these women who adored him.”