Parental Predicament

**Sorry guys, realised this is probably better using a burner account**

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Guys, I really need some advice on how, where and who to bring this up with.

This is probably going to be long, but I’ll try to keep it as short as possible without leaving out important information.

So I am the go to child for tech support for my parents (whom are married and have been for about 35 years) whenever they have problems, which is quite often.

So a few weeks ago, my mother starts mentioning to me about needing to help my father with his emails etc as he said he is not getting any emails and she thought he may have deleted some apps he needed (I assumed the mail app). She said he won’t let her see his phone either to help as he has started not letting her take his phone, which I told her was odd behaviour. Anyway, last week, she mentioned to me in confidence that my father had drained 20k from their account in the last couple of months. She noticed this and confronted him and he confessed it was playing gaming machines, apologised etc and said it won’t happen again.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago when they came over for me to check my father’s phone to see what’s happening. Upon checking it, all looked to be in order. But oddly, all the emails in his inbox had been deleted. There were only 4 in his inbox and 3 in his trash, when he would previously get several and even more per day.

When I went into his trash folder though, he quickly diverted my attention to some other feature within the app that he was unsure of, but not before I saw and realised the nature of the 3 emails in the trash.

They were all from dating sites. One where he had made a purchase of “credits” and another asking the sites support for help using a particular feature that I assume he had paid for.

Curiosity got the better of me and I checked if I was already logged into his email on my device and I was. (I previously needed access to help with other technical support stuff for them). Over the past few days I have seen a consistent habit of emails coming in, him reading them, deleting the ones that are from dating sites (I have counted 4 different sites thus far) and keeping ones that are not incriminating. Going by the partial replies you can see in the body of the emails, he is 100% interacting with women on levels that are highly inappropriate for anyone in a relationship.

Obviously finding this info out has been pretty hard to take as it has kind of shattered the image I had of my father for many many years (I am 45) and I just feel so so sorry for my mum (she knows nothing of this as far as I know). Without giving too much away, they are well into their retirement age and both haven’t worked for several years.

So obviously I now highly doubt the story about gaming machines (he does enjoy playing them with my mother, but it has never got out of control before). I spoke to my mother recently and she informed me the transactions were around 1k per transaction (give or take a couple hundred) but have gone from their home loan redraw so all the statement says is “redraw”. I suspect the money is going into another account and is being burnt from there, but I have no way to see that.

So finally to my question…

Who do I bring this up with first? My gut says my father to give him the chance to come clean. If I do it this way, how do I explain how I found out when I only say I saw the 3 emails in his trash without clicking into them? I can’t really say I have been checking daily since to confirm my fears.

Would it be best to do this alone 1 on 1 with him?

Obviously I am terrified of ruining our relationship or theirs. But I suspect one has to give at least, and it makes me very sad.