scamvictim
Member
What is the name of your state? New York
I am in the process of writing a presentation to deliver to the bureau of financial crimes at the DA's office. I've been procrastinating with it because I'm afraid they will turn me down and never arrest this guy. My lawyer once told me in her office that fraud was difficult to prove and that usually there needs to be several victims who were duped using the same MO. She is helping me with this presentation and fortunately a former employee of hers that she had mentored is now working in the financial fraud office.
I was hoping to get a second opinion about my case because I think this is a prosecutor's wet dream, and if anyone here agreed with me it would help give me the motivation and drive to finish this memo. I will try to keep this as short as possible.
A man conned me out of nearly 200K by entering into a business partnership with me for an art dealing type of business. There was an artist that he had partnered with to sell high end prints of his work. I met this artist eventually and he was legit. This man told me a million stories of his life working in the art world and convinced me of his talent for sales. He told a story about having made and lost millions. Due to a lawsuit and a divorce, he had found himself cash-poor despite owning real estate and artwork that was worth a lot of money.
In exchange for a 2K loan, he said he would give me 50% of the profits from the sale of the prints. I agreed and then found myself week after week being asked for more and more money. Once I had gotten fed up with this (he didn't seem to be doing any of the work he said he would do) he met me and was jumping up and down, talking about how his former client had given him the exclusive right to sell a mural by a famous artist worth ten million dollars. A ten percent commission would net a million dollars and I was entitled to half.
The client and the mural were both real, but the exclusive right was a lie. It turns out that this was an extremely difficult sale and the owner of the mural had been looking far and wide for a buyer using every art dealer he could find. Also, it turns out that the mural was really worth maybe two million. I learned this after the fact by speaking to some experts in an attempt to sell it by myself.
Anyway, a few weeks later he tells me that the owner had introduced him to executives at a large bank that were interested in the mural. He said he gave them a presentation and that they agreed to buy it for 7.5 million to use as an installation for a new office building that was in the process of being built. They would not pay the money until the building was almost finished, which could take as long as a year. At this point the conman's credibility was fairly high so I didn't doubt his story.
What followed from there was more and more loans, more and more lies which continued for another 18 months. By the end I was out nearly 200K because I was expecting my 5% commission of 375K. He had promised to return all the money he had borrowed from me in addition to my cut of the commission. So, for over a year he was dangling a ~500K check in front of me, convincing me to continue believing him and helping him with money.
It was all a lie. There were more lies - one involving an heir to a billion dollar fortune who wanted to spend 100K on prints. After telling me the deal fell through with the bank and the mural, he invented 3 more stories about interested buyers and continued these lies for weeks or months, bleeding me dry.
At any given time over this two year period, I was always no further than a week away of getting my money back. He always claimed to have one or more "deals" that he was working on so that the delivery of a big check was always imminent. He even took me luxury apartment hunting with his girlfriend when a check was supposed to be delivered a few days later. He was scamming the girlfriend too, so he wanted her to think he was interested in moving to a nice building to convince her that she was getting her money back too. He knew I wanted to move, so he wasted our day meeting brokers showing us apartments. Unreal.
At the end of it, I finally called the owner of the mural, who I had met once because I demanded to meet him in person after the bank deal fell through. Turns out that the con artist was so afraid I would call the owner and figure out the scam that he told the owner the same stories about the various interested buyers. He wanted to keep his story straight so he wouldn't get caught. So now I have a very credible witness.
After speaking to him, we agreed that I would investigate. He told me that he was a big client of the bank and had spoken to some higher up executives there who looked into it and told him that no new office buildings were being built in my city or anywhere else for that matter.
I wound up contacting all the people this crook claimed to have been negotiating deals with and two of them told me that they had never expressed any interest in the mural or anything else. I even managed to contact the heir to the billion dollar fortune through a media company he owns and after a month of trying was able to get an answer. Turns out that the heir did not know who the con artist was, had never met him, had never dealt with him. He made the whole thing up.
There are lot more details I can give but I want to keep this as short as possible. Here's the thing. I have over 200 screenshots of text messages that support all the facts. My cellphone provider keeps text messages for 5 years, so I have nothing to worry about there. This happened in 2016-2017. For the first six months he was careful not to talk about business over text. But then he got lazy so I now have a ton of evidence. Everything is there in the text messages, the whole story. This man doesn't own any artwork. The apartment he showed me that he claimed to own belongs to his sister. The artwork I saw in the other apartment he claimed to own (turned out to be a rental paid for by the girlfriend) belonged to the artist and the client who owned the mural. Neither one has been able to get the artwork back. He must have pawned them or sold them.
He spent all the money on transsexual prostitutes and crack cocaine.
Fortunately I was able to persuade him to sign a confession of judgement for most of the money. So now I have a judgement against him. If possible, I would like to sell my judgement to some Italians or Albanians, or Russians who might offer him a deal he can't refuse. I've been thinking of contacting the lawyers that represent these types of people and seeing if I can unload this judgement on one of their clients.
He "borrowed" 50K from the "girlfriend" (he used to tell me they were just friends) and once she stopped helping him, he stopped speaking to her. Apparently he liked to tell her that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
I bet there are other victims, but how do I find them? Would the prosecutors decide to arrest him and get his phone and check all his contacts? This guy is a textbook psychopath and I'm sure every person in his phone is a past, present, or future victim. He constantly deletes all this text conversations. Now I know why - because he knows it's evidence and thinks deleting it is a good idea.
After he found out that I had been talking to people (the mural owner plus a friend of his sister who is a witness - he told her the story about the bank), he called me up 3 sheets to the wind and threatened to murder my entire family and then kill himself if I ever said one word about him to anyone he knows. I reported it to the police but decided not to go through with a he said/he said case. I thought that next time I would record the conversation if it happened again. I did text his sister, wife, GF, and AA sponsor to tell them about it though. Yeah he was married too but lied and said it was his ex-wife who he had to give 150K in the divorce settlement.
I think I have a great case. This man has ruined my life and deserves at least a decade in prison. He stole two years of my life where I could have been seeking other employment and opportunities. The money would be worth a ton more given how well the stock market performed in that time. I just can't get out of my head what my lawyer said about how difficult fraud is and the multiple victims using the same MO. On the positive side, she has a former employee that will hear my case. Surely it's good to have a contact at that office.
Anyway, all the important stuff is here. I'm sure there are some curious questions about the whys and hows, but it's not important. I've decided that if I don't get justice, I'm going to create a website where I lay out the whole crime with all the text message evidence so no one else will get conned like I did.
I am in the process of writing a presentation to deliver to the bureau of financial crimes at the DA's office. I've been procrastinating with it because I'm afraid they will turn me down and never arrest this guy. My lawyer once told me in her office that fraud was difficult to prove and that usually there needs to be several victims who were duped using the same MO. She is helping me with this presentation and fortunately a former employee of hers that she had mentored is now working in the financial fraud office.
I was hoping to get a second opinion about my case because I think this is a prosecutor's wet dream, and if anyone here agreed with me it would help give me the motivation and drive to finish this memo. I will try to keep this as short as possible.
A man conned me out of nearly 200K by entering into a business partnership with me for an art dealing type of business. There was an artist that he had partnered with to sell high end prints of his work. I met this artist eventually and he was legit. This man told me a million stories of his life working in the art world and convinced me of his talent for sales. He told a story about having made and lost millions. Due to a lawsuit and a divorce, he had found himself cash-poor despite owning real estate and artwork that was worth a lot of money.
In exchange for a 2K loan, he said he would give me 50% of the profits from the sale of the prints. I agreed and then found myself week after week being asked for more and more money. Once I had gotten fed up with this (he didn't seem to be doing any of the work he said he would do) he met me and was jumping up and down, talking about how his former client had given him the exclusive right to sell a mural by a famous artist worth ten million dollars. A ten percent commission would net a million dollars and I was entitled to half.
The client and the mural were both real, but the exclusive right was a lie. It turns out that this was an extremely difficult sale and the owner of the mural had been looking far and wide for a buyer using every art dealer he could find. Also, it turns out that the mural was really worth maybe two million. I learned this after the fact by speaking to some experts in an attempt to sell it by myself.
Anyway, a few weeks later he tells me that the owner had introduced him to executives at a large bank that were interested in the mural. He said he gave them a presentation and that they agreed to buy it for 7.5 million to use as an installation for a new office building that was in the process of being built. They would not pay the money until the building was almost finished, which could take as long as a year. At this point the conman's credibility was fairly high so I didn't doubt his story.
What followed from there was more and more loans, more and more lies which continued for another 18 months. By the end I was out nearly 200K because I was expecting my 5% commission of 375K. He had promised to return all the money he had borrowed from me in addition to my cut of the commission. So, for over a year he was dangling a ~500K check in front of me, convincing me to continue believing him and helping him with money.
It was all a lie. There were more lies - one involving an heir to a billion dollar fortune who wanted to spend 100K on prints. After telling me the deal fell through with the bank and the mural, he invented 3 more stories about interested buyers and continued these lies for weeks or months, bleeding me dry.
At any given time over this two year period, I was always no further than a week away of getting my money back. He always claimed to have one or more "deals" that he was working on so that the delivery of a big check was always imminent. He even took me luxury apartment hunting with his girlfriend when a check was supposed to be delivered a few days later. He was scamming the girlfriend too, so he wanted her to think he was interested in moving to a nice building to convince her that she was getting her money back too. He knew I wanted to move, so he wasted our day meeting brokers showing us apartments. Unreal.
At the end of it, I finally called the owner of the mural, who I had met once because I demanded to meet him in person after the bank deal fell through. Turns out that the con artist was so afraid I would call the owner and figure out the scam that he told the owner the same stories about the various interested buyers. He wanted to keep his story straight so he wouldn't get caught. So now I have a very credible witness.
After speaking to him, we agreed that I would investigate. He told me that he was a big client of the bank and had spoken to some higher up executives there who looked into it and told him that no new office buildings were being built in my city or anywhere else for that matter.
I wound up contacting all the people this crook claimed to have been negotiating deals with and two of them told me that they had never expressed any interest in the mural or anything else. I even managed to contact the heir to the billion dollar fortune through a media company he owns and after a month of trying was able to get an answer. Turns out that the heir did not know who the con artist was, had never met him, had never dealt with him. He made the whole thing up.
There are lot more details I can give but I want to keep this as short as possible. Here's the thing. I have over 200 screenshots of text messages that support all the facts. My cellphone provider keeps text messages for 5 years, so I have nothing to worry about there. This happened in 2016-2017. For the first six months he was careful not to talk about business over text. But then he got lazy so I now have a ton of evidence. Everything is there in the text messages, the whole story. This man doesn't own any artwork. The apartment he showed me that he claimed to own belongs to his sister. The artwork I saw in the other apartment he claimed to own (turned out to be a rental paid for by the girlfriend) belonged to the artist and the client who owned the mural. Neither one has been able to get the artwork back. He must have pawned them or sold them.
He spent all the money on transsexual prostitutes and crack cocaine.
Fortunately I was able to persuade him to sign a confession of judgement for most of the money. So now I have a judgement against him. If possible, I would like to sell my judgement to some Italians or Albanians, or Russians who might offer him a deal he can't refuse. I've been thinking of contacting the lawyers that represent these types of people and seeing if I can unload this judgement on one of their clients.
He "borrowed" 50K from the "girlfriend" (he used to tell me they were just friends) and once she stopped helping him, he stopped speaking to her. Apparently he liked to tell her that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
I bet there are other victims, but how do I find them? Would the prosecutors decide to arrest him and get his phone and check all his contacts? This guy is a textbook psychopath and I'm sure every person in his phone is a past, present, or future victim. He constantly deletes all this text conversations. Now I know why - because he knows it's evidence and thinks deleting it is a good idea.
After he found out that I had been talking to people (the mural owner plus a friend of his sister who is a witness - he told her the story about the bank), he called me up 3 sheets to the wind and threatened to murder my entire family and then kill himself if I ever said one word about him to anyone he knows. I reported it to the police but decided not to go through with a he said/he said case. I thought that next time I would record the conversation if it happened again. I did text his sister, wife, GF, and AA sponsor to tell them about it though. Yeah he was married too but lied and said it was his ex-wife who he had to give 150K in the divorce settlement.
I think I have a great case. This man has ruined my life and deserves at least a decade in prison. He stole two years of my life where I could have been seeking other employment and opportunities. The money would be worth a ton more given how well the stock market performed in that time. I just can't get out of my head what my lawyer said about how difficult fraud is and the multiple victims using the same MO. On the positive side, she has a former employee that will hear my case. Surely it's good to have a contact at that office.
Anyway, all the important stuff is here. I'm sure there are some curious questions about the whys and hows, but it's not important. I've decided that if I don't get justice, I'm going to create a website where I lay out the whole crime with all the text message evidence so no one else will get conned like I did.
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