This week on the perfect scam.

We had visited him at his house and he had his email pulled up and there were all sorts of these solicitations for, you know, I guess we call it like the Nigerian Prince scam and things like that.

And I recall you just kind of, you know, very gently like taking him aside and say, hey, you're not really responding to these, are you?

And your dad was like very cavalier about it. He said, oh, yeah, well, you know, I'm the one who's stringing them along and I'm outsmarting them.

Yeah, outskam the scammer he used to say.

It just makes me wonder if there was some point where he started to get into deep with stuff

and it got away from him welcome back to the perfect scam i'm your host bob sullivan sometimes in life

you can do everything right and things still go wrong.

Today, you're going to hear from a son who knew his dad was sending money to online criminals

and tried everything to help, but...

Well, Dad thought he was paying hospital bills, rescuing friends in need, And his need to help was a force too powerful

to stop. The story takes so many twists and turns. At one point, there's a love affair with

WWE wrestler Alexa Bliss. And eventually, things get so bad that dad sues the son who is trying to

protect him. It feels like the years of tension

might kill one or both of them. And I think you could say, well, it does in the end. But I want to

start this story during happier times, during a father, son, daughter-in-law road trip. Here's

Chris Manzanelli.

It was for my dad's 70th birthday.

I guess as I got older, you know, I kind of wanted, you know, like you grow up and then you go away to college sometimes and you spend time away.

And then now you come back, maybe have a job and get settled

somewhere and so now like as an adult I kind of wanted to have start to develop a more adult-like

relationship with my dad and so I was trying to spend more time with him and so we thought let's take

...