Mr. Liar Liar Pants on Fire:Financial Lessons Learned

Navigating the financial side of an arrangement for me can be quite daunting.  It takes an element of trust to turn over banking information to a potential SD.  If one person learns from my mistake, it will be a lesson well learned.

Disclaimer: This story is true and factual ...the names and locations have been changed to protect the other person ... as there are two sides to every story and often three.

I spent close to a month with endless emails, text and phone calls with a potential SD.. due to the distance between us and his need to have me fly to him at what ever location he was at the time.. I felt getting to know him better before the meet was crucial.  It went against the sage advice I had been given for the initial meeting to be on my own territory.  Mr. Liar Liar Pants on fire.. which from this point on will be referred to as Mr. LLPOF.. was very charming.. well groomed.. appeared to be who he said he was.  He arranged  a flight for me for the first meeting.. and then contacted me three days later stated something had suddenly come up in business and he needed to cancel but we would get together when he got back.  At night I still heard from him and felt pretty comfortable with the fact that he was making the effort to let me know that he was sincere.

A week later he notified me he was going to be in a big city close to me and would like to meet and take me out to dinner.  When he arrived it was in a rental car.. of course he is from a state 7 states away from me so I thought nothing of it. I was giddy with excitement and I thought he was so perfect... we spent some time together and he headed back.  The next day he called me to discuss the arrangement and told me had a couple overseas trips coming up but would stay in touch.. however, he wanted to go ahead and provide me with financial security on our arrangement and he would wire the money to my bank.  I was very naive with the thoughts of what information to give so I simply answered his questions honestly and gave my social security number, birth date, birth name, routing and account number of bank.. He asked me if I did online banking and I told him know I just got to the bank.  He asked me which was my home branch and I told him.  Never give out that much personal information to someone right away... this was a huge mistake.  

A couple days later I had not heard from him.. so I sent him a text message and went on about my business.. that evening I went to the bank machine to pull out a hundred bucks.. and the machine kept my card.. I was shocked as the money left from my student loans was still in my account and knew I had enough money to get me through a few months.  The next morning I went to my bank and was told I had closed my account.. transferred it via wire transfer to a state on the West Coast.  I argued that this was not so.. and learned through the process that I had signed up for online banking.. of course the IP address is logged.. through the bank and they had many ways through their fraud department to track all this down.. but the time it took hurt me and I struggled for quite some time.  When you give such detailed information to someone you give them the ability to pull off many things.  What amazed me was that when this guy was caught he had a female accomplice and they had quite a scam going.  I met him through CL last year and have never been back to that site after what happened.  

When you give away such information you set your self up for identity theft.. there are some ways to avoid this.. cash.. or my favorite an American express gift card which can be for thousands of dollars.. you can take it to the bank machine and draw money off it.. use it as you would a credit card as well.  I have learned through others that it also can be unwise to accept personal checks.  Trust is essential in an arrangement but never give away your trust so easily as I did.  Learn from my mistakes.. build that trust before you give away such personal financial information.

Mr. LLPOF is the perfect example of how women succumb to charm and trust to easily or at least this woman did.  After the fact I learned of over 47 other women who had reported the same thing.. but what is funny about this is that they were all in my state.. and he did not even use his real name to any of us.. and in reality only lived an hours drive from me.  Know the person you meet... take the time to ask the questions that will help you to type his name into a few search engines and be able to verify at least some of what he says.