Rodney

This is a really weird situation; your boyfriend's dad is enabling his other son, and your boyfriend is enabling his dad to be an enabler. Somebody's got to break the chain here.

I saw a TV report -- 60 Minutes, I think -- about stealing of money between family members, and it is incredibly common. And the person who does the stealing usually has some kind of self-justification and rarely stops on their own. In fact, when confronted, they'll try to put all the blame on others in the family, especially if the law is called.

Since your boyfriend's dad has been letting your boyfriend's brother get away with this, and since the brother has probably wasted all the money anyway, step 1 is to make it impossible for him to steal the way he's been stealing. this is just a matter of will. Step 2 is to lay down the law and tell son that no further such activity will be tolerated, or the law will be brought in. That, combined with cutting off account access, will probably do the trick. His family should be prepared for a lot of yelling and accusations from the brother, but should ignore them. It's usually just a tantrum of frustration and bad justifications.

Of course, if he keeps at it, or steals something else, to jail he should go or none of it means anything.

Edit -- I left off the conclusion: your boyfriend shouldn't keep making up for Dad's losses to the other son. He should tell Dad he's going to stop passing money along, but that he _will_ help Dad lay down the law. If Dad doesn't want to do it, it's on Dad. Father or not, if he keeps letting his son steal from him without doing anything, having his other son make up the money is _not helping_ fix an unhealthy situation that will eventually go 'way south. Left unchecked, eventually brother will scale his thefts up and up until stopped.