What?

I held on to the desk; my legs were giving out. I felt my heart banging through me, beating out a dirge of horror.

From somewhere came Shelly’s voice. “Send me that email.”

Fumbling, I sent it, but after several minutes she still hadn’t received it.

I tried again and again, then just forwarded it to an alternative address she gave me. This time she received it right away.

On the other end of the line, the lawyer gasped.

“Yona, this is obviously the work of a hacker. They sent you that second email and redirected the funds. They also blocked my email address from receiving anything back from you. You’ve been hacked and robbed. Go straight to the police. Also, if you don’t pay up quickly, you’ll lose the house.”

I felt utterly nauseous, like I was going to be sick. If I had discovered this earlier, I could’ve frozen the account. Could’ve….

I’d sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to criminals.

And it was five weeks too late.

Back at the police station, the young, bored officer turned to me after a while.

“I’ve spoken to my superiors,” he said languidly. “They say to fill out this fraud report and bring it back in the next couple of days. That’s all we can do now. The top brass will deal with it in time. You can go now.”

“But I can’t go,” I said, oozing desperation. “I need to recover the funds.”

This time he looked me in the eye. “Sir, in all likelihood, I’m afraid the funds are gone by now.”

I couldn’t speak. My eyes were welling up, tears clogging my throat. I walked to my car in a daze.

The house. The miracle house. The one that had materialized just for us. We were living just outside the frum community in Sydney, where prices were that bit lower, and my kids so badly wanted to be part of things. They wanted to go to the main shul on Shabbos, they wanted to live near their friends. Then we heard about this place… a family we knew was relocating to America and were looking to sell their big, two-story place. We saw it and loved it. A completely detached home, a backyard, a front yard. The train goes by the back, something the kids were looking forward to. And at a price we could just about handle….

And now?

Down payment flushed. Dream house a mirage. I felt the pressure in my chest, like I was being squeezed, like I couldn’t breathe. I walked into the house and there was one of my daughters. I held her close and hugged her without letting go.

“I love you,” I whispered into her hair.

I needed to tell myself that I still had the main things, the real things: my family.

My son came flying toward me with a reminder note — PTA tonight.

I tried to pull myself together and I went, but standing in line in a corridor full of other fathers, I felt utterly alone. Victim, I thought.

I was the victim of a cybercrime, a sophisticated payment redirection scam. I’d lost an amount of money so huge it was difficult to process. In boy-talk, it was the equivalent of a brand new Porsche Macan. I never dreamed of owning a Porsche, let alone losing one.

Stupid victim. There were no guns, no balaclava, no getaway car — just an email from “my” lawyer and a bank teller asleep at the wheel to complete the heist.

I stumbled into the classroom to speak to the teacher, barely heard him, and stumbled back into my car.

I called a friend on the way home.

“I read about that scam. It was in the newspapers. Didn’t you see it?”

I hadn’t. I felt like an idiot, helpless and vulnerable. I’d failed to provide for my family.

At home, I waited for my wife to say something. Anything. To blame me. To say just once if only or you should’ve….

“Keep calm, Yona,” is all she said.

She was my anchor while more bad news came in.

The bank called, unapologetic. They maintained that they were instructed to transfer an amount and merely followed those instructions. I remember that they’d asked me to double-check the spelling of the account name, but despite the $35 transfer fee, they evidently didn’t check to see if the recipient account was indeed a lawyer’s trust account.

They even pointed out that I’d signed a form that released them from any liability. I looked at the paper on my desk. The small print stood out this time.

The police called a few days later. “We’ve traced the bank account. The funds were transferred to Kenya shortly after you deposited the money.” The voice sounded numb and businesslike.

But this was our home, our life.

“What now?” I asked in a small voice.

“I’m sorry, but that concludes our case. The money’s out of the country. There’s nothing more we can do now.”

“What about Interpol?” I tried.

“I don’t mean to be insensitive about your loss,” the officer responded, “but Interpol investigates millions. Yours is small fry.”

“So that’s it?” I asked despairingly.

“That’s it.”

The line clicked off. I thought about the inanity of the justice system. During the Covid lockdowns in Sydney, you could get prosecuted for not complying with the regulations, but there were seemingly no consequences for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Days passed. People heard about the story and their reactions touched me to the core. Someone came into my office and put his head on the desk; another put his hand on his face and just sat there near me, helping me to absorb the loss. A friend of mine cried, and another friend told me he’d struggled to sleep after hearing my story.

“I’ll lend you a third of the loss,” said a relative.

“I’m giving you $10,000 to help you stay afloat,” said a friend.

A man from the community spoke to the Treasurer of Australia about my situation. He wasn’t able to help, but the fact that he’d tried was a hug in itself.

I was moved by their reactions, how my trouble consumed other people, and it made me wonder. Did I do that for other people? Did I feel another’s anguish in the deep way I felt loved and supported now?

My rabbi called me one day and asked me to come over. I didn’t know then that my wife was behind the meeting.

He started talking to me about the ordeal. I shared my pain — how we’d lost the house we so needed, how I had to somehow come up with a massive lump sum all over again — and he broke down and started crying.

“What am I meant to do now?” I said.

“Just keep doing what you were doing before,” he said.

“That’s it?” I asked.

He nodded. “And we’ll all daven.”

Turns out it wasn’t so easy to just keep doing what I had been. I was struggling with anxiety. I’d lost my trust. If I couldn’t trust an email that was a reply on a thread from a lawyer, could I trust anyone?

I started questioning myself. Which emails were from the people they purported to be? I’d wake up in a panic in the middle of the night. Sometimes it would be a few minutes until I’d remember how I’d been duped, but as soon as I did, there went my night. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t relax. Every time I thought of my situation, I felt faint. The sleeplessness, this bile-in-throat anxiety went on for a good few weeks.

At the same time, I was thrust into the cutthroat world of lawyers. Some attorneys said I could bring Shelly to court and sue her for negligence. She hadn’t advised me of a rife scam when first taking me on, and also didn’t have sufficient cybersecurity. Others said I should cut my losses, it would never fly, I should just let it go.

Should I go to court? Should I not?

It would cost AUS$80,000 to take the case to court, but that could be recouped if I won.

If you win… If….

There were many questions. No clear answers. I kept replaying that day, the early-morning email, the naive transfer of funds…. If only I hadn’t… if only I had…. But there was no if only — there couldn’t be. My wife knew not to go there — and she didn’t, not even once. This was His Will; to her, it was clear.

And it was His Will. I spent enough time obsessing over the blow-by-blow of what happened — the hacking, the bank’s carelessness, the timing — to know that only He could cause all these events to align. But I wasn’t yet ready to accept it.

It was a grueling few months, lawyers and naysayers and paperwork and just a general daze, but slowly I started to open my eyes, to see the full picture around me. When I could finally bear to look, I saw so much unbelievable chesed and caring.

“We’re thinking of selling our property to help you,” my parents said one day.

And I just cried because they cared so much. Because this hole I was in was carpeted with so much care and love.

They didn’t have to sell in the end, but it was that moment that I could start to hear that it was Him. All Him. The hacker, the mistake, and also the drops of honey in the hard time. It was still slow going, knowledge behind a cloud. I kept knowing and forgetting — and then the self-recrimination would start, the fear, the regret — but then the clouds would part again, and I’d know. It’s You, Hashem.

I davened for acceptance. I let myself be embraced by the care of family and friends, by my wife’s unshakeable faith. I faced reality, that it was so unlikely that I’d recoup the loss, and in time, I was able to start swallowing that, to accept it. To see this debacle as a kapparah.

At the same time, I took on a small kabbalah, not even as a zechus to recover the money, just because I knew that what He wanted from me was not to become broken, but to strengthen myself. I took on a tiny thing, to put my tzitzis on as soon as I woke up. But to me it was big.

A couple days later, Shelly herself called.

“I had an idea,” she said tentatively, starting to describe a legality.

It was simple, an insight, something we’d completely overlooked.

“That’s genius,” I croaked.

And just like that, a couple of weeks later, we recovered the money via her insurers.

There was no court, no protracted battle, just a loophole that saved us. Hashem led me through the needle’s eye, through that flash of brainwave to salvation.

Today, I watch my children out in the yard, in the big yard of the house that was almost not ours, right here in the community. The train passes and the swingset shudders and my children laugh. And I look on and finger my tzitzis and know that He helps.

He tests, He challenges, He stretches, and sometimes you think you’re not made for this stuff, you’re just losing. You learn the depth of your own fear. But you also learn to confront it, to listen to a rabbi, a wife, to the voice in you that is really Him.

Because really, it’s all Him. A scoundrel in Kenya taught me that. And no one can take that away.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 984)