'I thought my husband's hobby was harmless. Then $120,000 vanished from our account.'

When *Rihannon's husband began dabbling in crypto trading a few years ago, she thought it was a harmless interest, spurred on by the podcasts and YouTube content he'd been consuming.

"I used to tease him about becoming a 'crypto bro'", she laughs, "but it didn't bother me. He was transferring a small amount each week into an online crypto wallet, and he'd often come and show me how much it was growing, or how much some specific coin had jumped or fallen."

Over the following months, crypto began to form a bigger part of the couple's investment strategy.

"We're not rich by any measure, but the financial strains of young kids have started to let up," she explains. 

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"Our kids are in high school, and I wanted to buy an investment property. Marius* told me that if I gave him a year, he could probably grow the crypto investment to a point where we could use some as a downpayment."

And so she did. Marius, who was working hard to educate himself on the market, began making more calculated risks that started to pay off — or so Rihannon thought.

"It's not like he was clueless, in fact quite the opposite," she recalls.

Unfortunately, Rihannon was unaware that his new hobby would eventually end up driving a dark wedge into their marriage: financial infidelity.