The parents were wrong to ignore the victim's letters. That's a lot of money to force your kids give back, and I know it would be tempting to keep it if my kids

The parents were wrong to ignore the victim's letters. That's a lot of money to force your kids give back, and I know it would be tempting to keep it if my kids did a similar thing, but the morally courageous thing would have been to return it then and there. It seems they took the greedy path. However, aggressively defending one's legal rights is also morally justified, esp. in Common Law jurisdictions with adversarial procedure. In fact, we'd likely have a more just (and thus more moral) system if more people asserted their legal rights in criminal trials, and took matters before juries rather than prisoner's dilemma plea agreements. (I understand why they don't, which is why plea agreements are so pernicious.)