Oh God, your poor mother. That is bullshit! The ideas people come up with to take money from or hurt other people is just deplorable. If you're that clever, surely you can put it to legitimate use.

Luckily, we stopped my dad before it got too bad. I totally understand how he found himself in the midst of it, but I had a bad feeling about it and when he came for his credit card, I went 'nope' and made him hang up. Unfortunately, he'd given remote access to his computer to the person, but only for a few minutes, so we just had to reinstall the OS and change any passwords he might have had stored on it in case the person could see it. So far, no damage done. It's good to change passwords every once in a while, anyway, and his computer was running like a turtle, so it's much faster now he's reset it all.