Something Was Wrong - S13 E16: [Sadie + Levi] A Dream Come True

Episode Date: August 25, 2022

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Thank you so much for listening. We don't know anybody until you turn to someone. Hi, this is Levi and my mom is caring, hard working, super business oriented, her job is for life. She's always there when you need her. She cares about other people, always wants to help. Hi, my name is Sadie. I live in the Midwest. I was a realtor in 2006 till just recently. I met Beth through some mutual friends. My middle son was looking for a place to go to church. He finally met this boy in his grade that was into the same things as him and went to a church just down the street from us. When I was growing up, Beth's son and I met through baseball.

His father was the janitor at my school and my dad started talking to him through practices and eventually him and I became best friends. Like the first friend that I hung out with spent the night at his house. We hang out every single day. Basically lived in our backyard like a street behind us and a couple of houses down. So they started going to church together and I was finally introduced to my son's friends' parents. Beth was a divorced mother of two living with her parents and they were trying to decide where they wanted to move to after the divorce, who she was going to be with, where she was going gonna live, those kind of things. We met for the first time at the Christmas pageant, so it would have been right around Christmas of 2009.

We sat together, watched our kids perform after the Christmas pageant. We started talking and she seemed like such a great person. She volunteered at the church, she was very kind. My son was a middle skiller at the time and he was a having a hard time finding his place and being at the church with them, he just felt like he found his own community. And speaking with Beth, I really thought that she would be a good role model for him and that she was somebody that I'd be happy to let him spend more time with. He lived a couple houses down.

Usually it was his grandparents home. After a while I met Beth. She was nice. One of those parents who is always ready to feed us some snacks. They had a snack drawer over there. I remember going over to his house one day to spend the night. We were going to go to church the next day. That's usually when I spent the night was like Saturday before church.

And his mom, Beth, he asked if my mom did real estate. She was like, I heard your mom does real estate. Is this that true? I'm a blah. And I was like, yeah. So she used to like, could you get me in contact with her maybe? And I don't know if I actually said anything

or if she ended up calling my mom, or I gave her a phone number, whatever, I do remember her asking, but it's kind of felt a little bad about that. With him spending more time with her, it naturally meant that I got to know her better. We started spending more time together talking, having lunches, doing whatever.

She had told me that she had just gone through some really bad things in her own life. She had just gotten divorced. She had to move back in with her parents because the divorce was so bad and she didn't get anything in the divorce. She had also recently had a surgery at a pretty prominent hospital in our state and she was in the middle of a lawsuit against the hospital and the doctor, a malpractice suit, trying to get some kind of compensation. I really liked Beth. She seemed so bubbly and

upbeat. This was 2009. It's like the end of the, well, it's not the end of the recession. It's like the end of the worst of the recession and people are starting to get back to normal. There's a realtor. I was really struggling to make money. We went from making four and five thousand dollars in commission to four or five hundred dollars in commission per house. I had four different jobs at the time. I was a realtor. I did mortgage field inspections. I bartended part time.

And I deejied karaoke because my husband got permanently laid off during the recession and we didn't have the extra money. So I was doing everything I could to make a dime. When we were talking about it, she said, as soon as my settlement goes through, I'm going to be looking for a home. I'd love if you could help me look for this home. I was really excited for a few reasons, the extra money, but also, I really didn't have time to make friends with people. So with the kindness that she showed to my son I thought this would be a good way to meet somebody new, have a friend myself. So I agreed. A few months later in about February, she called me and said that she had gotten her settlement and she was interested in looking at houses.

She'd gotten her settlement and she was interested in looking at houses. In February of 2009, real estate in our area, the average sale price was around $110,000 $120,000 home. We started looking at homes around that price range, but she didn't seem to like any of them, and then she told me, I can really afford more. I'd like to look for something a little bit higher end. So she started looking in like the $300,000 range at the time'd like to look for something a little bit higher end. So she started looking in like the $300,000 range. At the time, in order to look at houses up in that price range, you really have to have proof of funds or a bank statement or something to show that you're

eligible to buy these before you're allowed to go in these houses. You don't want just any Joe Schmoe walking through your house, whatever you have in there. So she sends me a letter from her bank that shows proof of funds. We're from a really small town. There's only about 2500 people in that town. So if you're going to stay in that area, it was only around, you know, 60 to 80,000. The average for the county was around 112,000. That was the average sale price. So we got the pre-qual letter that she needed from her bank

and we started showing her houses closer to the $300,000 range. This is probably about a month of showing houses. And when you're a realtor, you're really trying to cater to somebody, you can show five or six houses a day, but depends on how willing they are to go look and how interested they are. During that time, there were a ton of houses on the market

because everybody was losing their houses. So there was an overabundance of properties to look at, and she still wasn't finding anything that she wanted. And then one day she sends me this listing that she saw online. When I looked this up, it actually kind of surprised me because it was listed for $1.9 million. She's like, I really want to look at this one. This is definitely an arranged way above anything that we've looked at, and way above anything that her proof of funds or pre-qualification letters would have allowed

her to look at. So, I told her before we can show these houses I have to have something from your bank, a letter from someone showing that you are qualified to buy this house. March 1st, so this is what three months afterwards, I get an email from her bank saying that she has enough funds to cover this. I sent it to my broker because I have to have him authorize everything before I show houses. And he said, well, there's no signature on this. I really need a letter with a signature on it.

Took another day and she sent me a new authorization letter from her bank. It basically stated that this letter is to inform you that Beth has enough funds to cover this listing price on this property. And it was signed by the bank. It's on bank letterhead. It's a local bank, but it's not in the city that we live in. We don't directly know the people at that bank, but everything was there that we needed.

So we set up an appointment to show this house. We were super close friends, but I really appreciated the friendship I did have with her, because I could rely on her if I needed to. She could rely on me, pick somebody up or drop somebody off. I just felt like this lady is such a nice person and she does so many things for other people that I want to help her as much as she's done for these people. If she did ask for something, I'd do it. If I couldn't do it, my husband at the time would do it. It was just like a mutual friendship, you know, you do unto others as they do to you type of thing. I knew that she is very close with her mother. Her father, I'd met a couple times, but he's very standoffish. They all went to church together every week. That's the church that my son started going with them.

Once she started looking at houses, her mom was there pretty much every single showing that we went to. So if her mom didn't like it, they wouldn't get it. Other than that, I really don't know much about them. The proof of fun's letter, the original one, was a letter from the bank, which is pretty normal. They ask you how much money you make, where you work, how much money you have in the bank, and then they call it a pre-qualification letter. So a pre-qualification letter is before they've actually

seen your proof of income and all of that. But they said, based on what you tell us, this is how much money we think that you can spend. With Beth, because she had just gotten so much money in a settlement, she didn't need to go through the proof of job, proof of tax returns, all of that. She had bank statements and money market accounts that showed the money that she actually already had and how much interest it was accruing month by month. With the original letter, they actually sent us a bank statement showing her end balance.

I had her account numbers and stuff blacked out so we couldn't see it, but the rest of it looked like a normal bank statement that you would see showing her end balance. Now I know it's absolutely ridiculous to see an end balance of $61 million in a bank account because the FDIC doesn't ensure that much, but in 2009 when I was a 20-something realtor, I had no idea that that was a thing. After we got her initial proof of funds letter, we started setting the appointment up to go look at this house. I can't say that I wasn't excited because I've never shown a house worth that much.

We get out there and it's this beautiful log home on 55 acres. It's got four little cabins. It's just like camp cabins that you can go stay in for a weekend. There's a kennel to the left of it that you can go stay in for a weekend. There's a kennel to the left of it where you can take your dogs. They have this stone shower for your dogs, which I didn't even know people did that kind of thing.

The main house was five bedrooms. I think it says six and a half baths. It was pretty big. Big stone fireplace in the middle of the living room, a wine cellar, an apartment over the three car attached garage, and this all overlooked a lake. So this is just like an amazing home. And on top of that, there's another little house down close to the lake front, but far enough away from the house that it feels pretty secluded. It was the quote unquote like maintenance man's house, where the groundskeeper would stay or whatever. She loved it so much that she wanted to

bring her parents back because she wanted to show them. She was living with them at the time. And it seemed like they had a really great relationship. She is very close to her parents. But we took them back on another showing, showed them the house. Everybody loved it. It was a dream come true for everybody, right? She decided she was going to put an offer on the property. In order to put an offer on the property,

we had to have more information for her proof of funds, which she was willing to provide. We were getting all the emails from her bank and these emails are from a person at that specific bank. It's not like it was a personal email. It was a bank email. So we got the proof of funds and we started the negotiation process. When she started talking about putting an offer on this house, she also started talking about, hey, wouldn't it be great if you guys lived in the guest house for the groundskeeper's house? At the time, my husband had been laid off because of the recession. We were struggling. I was the only income, really. He was getting unemployment, which was about a quarter of what he would have made.

And he couldn't find another job, he's been struggling. And she basically said, You guys could live there. He could be the groundskeeper. I'll pay him a salary. You can live there for free. Bring the boys. Since our sons were great friends anyways, it would be great for everyone.

And we were just like, I don't even know how to describe it. It was such a way off of my shoulders because I had been trying so hard to provide for so many people for so long that this might actually be my chance to get a break, not have to work so hard and really enjoy things. We were all excited. We were beyond excited, Beth and her son and I were all talking about what we were going to do there like when you guys graduate you can live in the apartment above the garage all the other stuff and the fact that they were planning on giving us the house on the island in the lake. It's like I'm right down road, so I could just walk over and then we could enjoy the lake,

or the outdoors, or whatever. So we were all stoked and the place was massive. So there was so much room for activities. It is life-changing money. Not only was she offering my husband a job that he couldn't find for the last two and a half years, but the commission for this would have been over $30,000. And we lived in this tiny little 800 square foot house with my three growing boys. At the time, the middle one was best friends with her son, was 12. My oldest one would have been 14 and my youngest one would have been 10.

It was a two-bedroom, one-bath house that all five of us were living in, in town. I mean, this was amazing. We'd moved to the country, which we wanted to do forever. We could afford things that we couldn't afford before. I wouldn't have to work so hard. We were so happy. This was the happiest we had been during the recession

because we were thinking about how great things were going to be, what life was going to be like, how the kids would be able to play on 55 acres and how they could have a dog. We could go fishing every day, which is something that we love to do. Just looking forward to all of it. 30,000 doesn't sound like a lot right now to some people, but in 2010 during the recession, that would have changed our lives tenfold. My mother-in-law lived with us at the time too. So we were taking care of her, and in exchange she was helping watch the kids when we were working or doing other things, that kind of thing. My kids played sports and they did extracurricular activities

at the time. We were getting a lot of second-hand shoes or gloves or whatever for sporting events, whatever we could just to get through without spending a lot of money. I don't think that my kids would have thought that we were in a bad way, but it was a struggle. And it was a constant argument with me and my husband at the time because he couldn't find a job. And I am working for jobs.

So I'm never home and he was trying to take care of things. And this would have solved so many problems we thought. I'll be able to be home more. I'll be more present with the family. He would have a job that would help with the income issues. This was going to be a dream come true, really. I don't know the words to describe what it would have done for us as far as a family even, how it would have solved so many issues that we were having that we couldn't seem

to find our way out of. Well, when she decided that she wanted to put the offer in, and when we first started, I will have to say, as a real shirt, nobody wants to offer what they're asking for, and her original offer was so low that I thought, she's not super serious about it. Maybe this is something she's interested in, but it's really not that important to her,

as they counter offered, and we talked more about it. She would raise her counter offer and we negotiated back and forth probably a good two weeks before we came to a price agreement. And by the end, she was just excited for us as we were. It definitely felt like she wasn't just doing this for her, she was doing this for all of us. It seemed to make her genuinely happy that she was helping us.

And that was another reason why I felt so good about this too. You meet somebody who you think is genuinely good, who genuinely is there to help other people. She's done so much for her church, she's done so much for my children, and now she's doing so much for me. How could you think anything else than I want to be there for her too? That's about the time where people started saying, wait a minute, maybe you should know

a little bit more about her. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of Wondries Podcast American Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history, presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our newest series, we look at the Kids for Cash Scandal, a story about corruption inside America's system of juvenile justice. In Northeastern Pennsylvania, residents had begun noticing an alarming trend. Children were being sent away to jail in high numbers, and often for committing only minor offenses.

The FBI began looking at two local judges, and when the full picture emerged, it made national headlines. The judges were earning a fortune, carrying out a brazen criminal scheme, one that would shatter the lives of countless children and force a heated debate about punishment, an America's criminal justice system. Follow American scandal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on the Amazon Music or Wonder App. When we first got the offer accepted on the property, they were asking 1.9. It finally got negotiated for 1.75.

That was what the offer was agreed to. I'm over the moon excited, so I go into my broker's office and I'm like, I'm writing an offer today for 1.75 million. He's like, what are you talking about, what house? And I said, well, I showed this property. He had known that I was going to show it because I had to get permission to show it, but he didn't know who I was showing it for.

So he started asking me questions, well, who's the buyer? Do you have all of the information ready to go? I'm like, yep, everything. We have proof of funds. I told him the name. And instantly as soon as I said her name, he looks at me and he's like, oh really? Like just that. incredulous, unbelievable. Are you sure? We're tired about the same person kind of look. And I repeated the name. He's like, how did she come into that kind of money? So I explained to him the story.

He's like, wow, that's really interesting. I haven't heard that. And since we are in such a small town of just 25 hundred people, where does get around? I understand that he would say that because you pretty much know everybody's business in this town. At the same time, I thought that that is kind of such a personal thing. That's not just not something that I would feel comfortable telling people. I would want to keep that private, so I assumed the same for her. I said that to him and he's like, well, good for you, I'm glad I hope everything works out. That's the first time that anybody had sent anything to me that

made me even bet an eye or think twice about it because she really was such a genuine person, such a nice person, such a helpful person that I couldn't imagine anything nefarious whatsoever. I write the offer up, it gets accepted. In our state, you have to provide an earnest money deposit. It's negotiable, it's usually around% to 5% of the negotiated price. $30,000 is what they wanted for the earnest money deposit. So I just needed to check from her for the $30,000 wire transfer, whatever. She knew that. We got all the paperwork signed and I'm waiting for the earnest money deposit.

The listing realtor is asking for updated information, there's inspections that need to be done on the house, to make sure that the house passes. They have about 10 days before they can change their mind on the offer. I'm talking to Beth and she's sending me information from her lawyers, sending me information from her inspectors. They're trying to set up all of the inspections

that need to be done. As far as I know, everything's going smoothly. The actual accepted offer was probably around, I would say March 8th or March 9th, so about a week after we looked at this house. We were all excited. The offer got accepted. All of this stuff is going to happen. And then she's like, you know what? I want to do something nice for my brother. She tells me that she decided that she's going to buy her brother a house as well. She decided that her parents were going to move in with her into this big house because there were so many bedrooms and they've done so much for her. They were going to live with her and she wanted to help her brother out by buying him a house.

She tells me I gave him a limit of 350,000. That's three times the average price there. They're looking at pretty nice houses. He was saying, I want to look at this house and this house and this house. I started showing him houses. Why have to have the proof of funds? So we use the same proof of funds. And I think I only showed him two or three houses. And every time I showed him the houses, he seemed very... I wouldn't say confused, but not really excited about looking at houses. And to me, it seems like if somebody was showing me $350,000 houses that I might get to live in, I'd be much more happier about this. Is why I found the other hand was ecstatic about everything.

I made a basketball game with my husband and we're watching our son. This is the day that I'm supposed to meet Beth to pick up the earnestest money deposit. Another friend of ours is sitting close to us and she asked me why I was so dressed up and I told her that we were getting ready to celebrate because I had just closed this big deal. I'm meeting Beth to get the Ernest money deposit and then we were gonna go have dinner to celebrate. She was really surprised that Beth was buying a house and she wanted to know what was going on. I mean, I can't get indulge in all of the details, but I told her.

She finally got her settlement and she's buying this house. It's a great opportunity for all of us. She started asking me more questions and she was just really surprised that she hadn't heard about it. At this point, I'm still so excited about everything and thinking that Beth is such a great person and she's done so many good things, that there's no doubt in my mind that this isn't what's happening. The look on her face was very much like, this is something that she's done before, and she started explaining to me that she told the local dealership the same thing and she

ordered a brand new vehicle. Everybody seems to be surprised that nobody knows about it. I went back to the defense of, that's a pretty personal thing to happen in your life. So, I would you tell everybody, there was just a personal surgery and something that happened that she wouldn't indulge the people around her. After the conversation, I can't say I didn't have any doubts. There was this little lingering voice in my head going,

why are all these people telling you this? I wonder what's going on. But I'm really still not being excited. You couldn't ruin my mood at that point. I'm just like, no, this is great. She's a great person. She's so good in my kids, she went through this horrible thing, she's finally getting something back for herself and she's not even taking it for herself.

She's sharing it with everybody. Our friend that was sitting there was like, I hope that this is the truth and that everything works out for you. Even though she did not show up that day, she called me later and apologized such a get caught up, whatever. She actually met me at my house that evening. We talked for a while, and she lives right behind me. We're standing in the backyard, and she's telling me she's really dealing with a lot of stuff right now.

I just felt so bad for her, because she did have so much going on with the gossip and all of this and the stress of everything. At this point, she had started telling me that people were saying things that weren't true. Like, people are spreading rumors that this is all fake, that she never had a surgery, that she never had any issues, that this isn't real at all. It's just all gossip and she will be happy to move away. This house that we looked at, it's in the same county,

but it's far enough away that she's not going to be running into our hometown people every single day. She was really tired of the gossip and ready to leave. She didn't want to go to the basketball game because she said she felt like she was getting at all the time now. It's getting out that time now. It's getting out that this happened. She's buying this and she had this lawsuit. It is one of those things where it's 2,500 people in your little town. Probably a

thousand of them are related. Everybody knows everybody and everybody talks about everybody. One thing could get said and it gets warped so many times that it's nothing like the original comments. So all of this made sense to me I understood why she wouldn't want to be there It's a personal matter that nobody needs to know about but it's leaking out slowly and everybody's gossiping and changing what it actually is She gave me the earnest money deposit check and she handed me a personal check Which isn't really normal for a 30,000 dollar check? gave me the earnest money deposit, check, and she handed me a personal check, which isn't really normal for a $30,000 check. I was expecting a cashier's check

or something from the bank, or a wire transfers, what they were looking for. When I look at the check, it's actually written from her mother's account, her mother and father's account, and I ask, that's why would this be in their name? And she's like, well, my lawyers have in a hard time gaining access to my funds.

She's looking into it. We can't cash out some of the money market things right away. So my mom is loading me the money to put the Ernest 20 deposit down so we can keep the ball rolling. Everything seems to make sense. Her mother has been on board with this the whole time, so of course her mother is going to loan her the money. The only thing that was odd to me about

that two things, I guess. One, that somebody had just warned me, or for the second time said, hey, are you sure this is real? The other thing was, her parents lived in a run-down house. It's one of those average grandparents' house that they've lived in for 40 years. It wasn't anything that made them look like they had $30,000 in the bank that they could just write a check to their daughter for an earner's money deposit. I don't know.

Some people don't show off that they have money. So whom I did judge, and that's kind of the attitude that I kept. I was still at this point, was very much like, everything's great. I'm gonna have a new house soon. My kids are going to be happy. We're going to make all this money. Beth's going to finally get the house that she deserves. She's such a good person. Now it's still the outlook that I had. We get the earnest money to posit check. I give it to my broker and the processes he puts it in an ask-grow account and they

hold it there until the closing date. In the meantime, we are still making plans. We're getting ready to get a new home. We can get rid of this little tiny house that we live in. My husband and I at the time started talking and we're like, it's the recession. We need to get as much money out of this as we can. There was a couple upgrades that we needed to do to really make it a sellable house. We definitely needed a new roof, and the porch was bad. We started looking into hiring contractors for that.

We couldn't afford to do this, but my husband at the time had really excellent credit, so we're like, hold, put it on a credit card, because I'm gonna make $30,000 here in just less than a month or whatever. So we'll be able to pay it off, no big deal. We start renovating our house and making plans to sell our house.

My husband and I, after we got the earnest money to deposit check, that was pretty much the real moment. Like this is, we got the earnest money deposit, it's real. You can't go back now or she loses $30,000. That's the way the deal works. So we decided that we were going to take our kids on vacation, which we hadn't been able to do in years. So we started going online and we also booked an entire vacation

on credit cards. My kids had that to look forward to in the summer months. Two or three days after the earnest money deposit, my broker calls me back and says, hey, I went to the bank today to deposit that check and the bank wouldn't accept it. I don't understand why because best names not on the check or what. And he's like, well, they said, they don't think there's enough funds to cover the account. I thought that was strange because why would they write a check that was bad?

Why would her mother write a check that was bad? Why would her mother write a check that was bad? My broker is really great. He was a pretty patient guy through this whole thing. He's like, I'm going to make some phone calls and see what I can do. I don't want to try to cache this because it is so high. If we cache it and it's not good or if it's fraudulent, this could be a felony. So he didn't want to do that until he got more information. I called Beth and asked her about it. And she started getting very, like, too busy to talk to me. I guess is how I would describe it. She kept telling me, well, I don't know right now, you're

going to have to talk to this person. I don't have the answer right now. I will shoot you in the email as soon as I find out. The text messages started being more vague and frequent. And her answering her phone was really hardly ever at this point. Also, when my son was supposed to do things with her son, there was always these excuses why they were busy or they couldn't. This is about the same time of the year

that we started doing Little League baseball. Myself and my ex-husband, my children's father, coached the Little League team and we were looking for other parents to help so we put out a team-wide email saying, hey, we could use help from anybody willing to drive people or bring drinks or do whatever for practices. One of the men who volunteered happened to be Beth's ex-husband. He shows up to the baseball practice and we're talking and I was like,

I didn't wanna say anything because I don't know how their relationship is. A lot of people don't speak after they're divorced. So I didn't bring anything up but he actually said something to the other coach and was saying, hey I heard that Sadie is selling Beth a house. They started talking and he began to tell stories about why they were divorced. And that Beth had defrauded their mortgage company basically, she kept writing bad checks or making excuses,

saying that it was other people doing it, strange things, and he didn't know anything about it. She didn't make any mortgage payments, and he didn't find out that they were losing their house until basically they got an eviction notice on the front door. That is why they actually got divorced. The other coach told me this and said, maybe you want to really think about working with her if she's this kind of person in doing these kind of things. I don't even know what to think. I am so confused.

I go home and I'm speaking with my husband at the time about it and I'm like, what do you think we should do? We've already dumped so much money into the house. We've got our credit cards like close to maxed out. I'm freaking out at this point now because I don't know if I should believe her or not or if I should believe all these other people that are saying things. He's like, just ask her. Be straight up with her, collar, find out what she says. I definitely don't have the nerve to confront somebody the same day. I really have to cool off first. I get on the phone with Beth and I said,

hey, what is going on? The earnest money deposit is not going through. I'm hearing all these things that none of this stuff is true. You need to be honest with me because my future depends on this. I am basing my future on the outcome of this sale. And the kindness that you're showing me, you need to tell me what is going on. And all I got was, they're all lying to you.

None of that is true. I 100% have this money. I'm just tired of this town. Nobody likes me in this town. My ex-husband is the one starting all these rumors and saying all these negative things about me. Everything is fine. I will have my lawyer call you tomorrow. We will get all of this straightened out and I will get you a new earnest money deposit check. I have no choice at this point, but to let it ride. I have so much bet on this. I can't fold now. I went with it and I kept believing her. I started getting emails and phone calls from her lawyer. Explaining to me, the situation,

they're going to have a new check out to us. They're going to do this. They're going to do that. The whole time that I'm getting these excuses from her lawyers. The selling company is calling me saying, is everything good, we don't have the earnest money deposit check yet, we need XY and Z to prove that this is still going on. I'm going back and forth trying to make everything happen. I really don't know what to think, but I still can't fathom that she is lying to me. The whole entire time,

my son is playing baseball with her son, and I have to deal with her ex-husband showing up, and I think that he's just trying to start crap, that he's not telling the truth. I don't know who to believe at this point, but I don't want to believe that he's right. The son is very much believing his mother as well. The sun is coming with us to show us, him and my son are making plans of what they're going to do, how they're going to build a treehouse on the property, they loved airsoft, so they're going to have airsoft wars, all of this other stuff. I mean, how could you tell your kids all of this if it wasn't true? So that's another reason on top of everything else

that I couldn't imagine that this was not true. Who would do that to their children? I kept getting emails, but my broker is like we need more than just emails. So the lawyer called me. It showed up on my phone as a unknown caller. There was no number attached and I answered it. She's talking really fast and trying to explain to me the situation. She told me that the way these funds were tied up, it was gonna take longer to get them released. There was nothing she could do about it. She hopes that we were patient. She will talk to the selling realtors if they need us to or whatever they have to do to make sure that the steel goes through. I get off the phone with her and I remember looking at my husband at the time and saying

that really sounded like Beth with just a really thick southern accent. Everything that everybody else had been telling me was kind of like warming its way into my brain going, maybe this isn't true, maybe you should start looking into it more. I think that was the moment where I really started second guessing it. My mom happens to work at a law firm. She was a legal assistant at the time. The following day I called her and I started asking her questions. If there was any way she could look things up,

help me kind of troubleshoot, prove or disprove things because I'm getting worried. I gave her some names of the lawyers that were involved with both the lawsuit and the lawyer that was working with both the lawsuit and the lawyer that was working with her. So she started doing sub digging. Her boss has actually got involved and really helped out and started looking too, because

once they knew the situation, they felt, this is important. You don't want your daughter to be a part of this deal if it's not true. We started asking questions about it. March 17th, we were supposed to close on March 19th. The other company started asking, where's the earnest money deposit? We don't have proof of it yet. Well, we didn't technically have it either because we still hadn't gotten a good check. My broker started sending emails to the bank that sent us the proof of funds

letters trying to verify whether or not those were really proof of funds. The morning of March 19th, which is the day that the money was supposed to get wired over, I finally got an email back from the bank that sent us the proof of funds that said, I'm writing to you on behalf of Beth, they're apologizing for the runaround that they have given her and myself that her funds are still tied up in a bunch of little things. They are going to need an extension before they can close and that they will fax me a copy of the wire as soon as it happens. At the bottom it says that Beth is the sole owner of these accounts and may withdraw $2 million to purchase the home as needed and is signed at the bottom by the Operations Manager of this bank.

This was when I'm like, finally, we have some information, somebody finally got back to us, this is going to go through, and then we sent it back somebody finally got back to us. This is going to go through. Then we sent it back to that same bank for verification. The next email I have says, hello, I'm sorry it took me this long to respond, I just received this email from Beth. I know it is not legit. She didn't even spell the man's name correctly that was supposedly the author of the email. He currently has been out of the office for the past week. He had a family emergency and

hasn't been it. If there's anything else I can do, let me know. So I get this email back and I am freaking out now. I'm still like half in half out. I have put so much time into this. I have so much money involved. To even think that none of this was real. That somebody that I trusted my children with. My children loved her like a second mom pretty much. She did a lot for my son. She did a lot for my son. It ain't be sick to my stomach. I'm embarrassed. I am ashamed. I am angry.

I am sickened by the thoughts. And then at the same time, I feel so bad for somebody who has to do this. To what? To feel better about themselves? Such a conflict of emotions all at one time. What do you do? As a realtor, you do with a lot of,

maybe not so honest people, that's a nice way to say it, but you deal with a lot of people, and people tell you what you wanna hear. It comes on both sides, whether it's the realtor telling you what you wanna hear to buy a house, or it's the fire saying that they can buy more than they can buy, or if it's the buyer saying that they can buy more than they can buy or if it's the lender saying that they can do more than they can do.

You get a lot of that but nothing to this level. There is nothing that I have in my experience at all that could possibly get me ready for something like this. How can this not be real? And how, if it's not real, how could I possibly fall for this? Because I felt, at this point in my life, I had bartended, I was a nurse, I have sold real estate, I have dealt with, so many different kinds of people, I can read people, I know how to deal with all different types, I can usually adapt to my environment type thing, I just felt like I could figure this out. I'm not one of these people that this is going to happen to. I'm too smart for this, you know. The same day we got five different emails. We finally got a hold of the man

that the final email was written by and the original proof of funds letter was written by. Email doesn't say, yeah, we never sent that. The whole entire time, she was still insisting that this was true. Not only was she insisting this was true, but her mother had called me and was very upset with me that I had even accused her of lying because her daughter has gone through so much and had to deal with so much that how could I possibly not believe her? I tried to explain to her the facts. I asked her about if she wrote the check for $30,000 and her mother didn't know anything about the check for $30,000. So obviously that was also a lie, but when I asked her about it, she accused me of lying. There was no way her mother was going to believe that her daughter would do

something like that. I got a few more phone calls between the time that we got this last letter and the time of the actual closing date. We pretty much sit around and wait to see if the wire transfer actually happens. That was pretty much our only option at this point. We had already figured out that it's not going to happen, but because she kept calling and kept sending us emails, saying that it's on the way, the money never came through. The deal was done for all of us. Not only did the deal fall through for me, I'm obviously out $30,000.

I have a house, but I thought I was selling it. We don't have the future that we were thought we were gonna have. We don't have the friendship we thought we were gonna have. We don't have the friendship we thought we were gonna have. Now I have so much more debt that I can't even afford that I shouldn't have done, which I mean that's on me. I can't blame that on her, but she knew the whole time. She was helping us make plans. She was, oh that's so exciting. I'm so glad you're putting a new roof on your house. I'm so glad that you're doing this. You guys will get so much more out of it and then you can do more things with us And you can always one of those it just changed our whole future It got to the point where that by the end by that last day

The day that we were waiting for the funds. I had to tell my son that he couldn't hang out with his friend anymore And that was pretty hard. It wasn't necessarily that I didn't want him to be with his friend. I definitely didn't want him to be under that kind of influence. He didn't understand. I mean, he's a 12-year-old kid. He has no idea what's going on. I have to pull my kids aside and tell them we aren't moving. We don't get to go on vacation. We're going to have to return all of those flights and trips vouchers that we had, the stuff that we were going to do, it's not going to happen. I had zero clue whatsoever until after the fact. I didn't know what happened until a couple years later. Once I got into like late middle school, early high school, is when people started actually talking about it.

I didn't understand why my parents didn't like them and why I couldn't hang out with my best friend anymore until I got older. So it was confusing for me as a kid. I'm really sorry. That must have been really hard. This is like your first really close best friend and then do you remember the reason that was given why you couldn't hang out with him my stepfather at the time It's a very blunt person you wouldn't give me specifics

He just used a couple choice words to describe Beth and that was that I couldn't really argue and then they're like you can go To his dad's house and he can come over here without giving a reason. In my mind, I was just like, oh, they're being mean. Growing up she had only been nice to me. It was less convenient because his dad was busy more. I couldn't go and hang out with him as often. So that was tough. Once Beth started letting him come over more often, it settled down, but definitely for a little while, it was rough. We still coach the baseball team that her son was also on. We did finish that season out, but pretty much after that, she didn't talk to us.

I never saw her again. I got a final email from the quote unquote lawyer saying that the wire transfer has been enacted. I got a proof that the wire transfer has been enacted. I got a proof that the wire transfer has been enacted, which shows a wire transfer not only to the selling broker, but the commission to my broker, which is crazy. It's a word document. You don't get a statement like that in a word document. And now looking back, it looks ridiculous, but at the time I was hoping that that would be the final one last hurrah, like maybe this is for real,

but the funds never came through that day. The crazy thing is the last email that I have from the other broker says that we have no plans to take action against Beth and the other parties acting with her on her behalf. If you have anyone else interested in buying the property, please advise. Our number one goal is to selling this property for the highest and best dollar. We apologize for the inconvenience on everybody's part. They had their lawyers read through all of the information and verify that it was fraudulent. The last conversation I had

with her, we were arguing this was at the point where it's getting so close to the end. And I'm so frustrated. I'm like, you're making me look like a fool. And she was adamant. I don't know what you're talking about. We just need to do this. She told me that they needed to verify that the hot water heater was working.

There was issues with that. They were concerned that it wasn't going to hold up. During that conversation, she kept telling me that her inspector had been there and he needed to go back and fix it. Houses that are worth that much money have these electronic lock boxes on them. The two can't gain access to unless you have a realtor lock. It's an electronic lock, so you have to be there with that in your hand and push the button in order for it to open. So there is no way that any inspector had been there without somebody knowing he couldn't have gotten it. So I know all of this stuff is a lie at this point that this is not gonna happen. She was just adamant.

This is gonna happen. I will have this person call you. I will have this person call you. And that was the answer for everything. I will have somebody call you and tell you what is going on. Well, you've had lots of people call me. I'm not so sure at this point, but it's not all you, whether you're putting on a Southern accent or has a voice changer or whatever you're doing. How do I not know that these aren't all you?

There's nothing to back any of it up. So the last conversation that I had with her that wasn't via email was us arguing over whether she was telling me the truth or not that she she was adamant that she's 100% gonna buy this house and that everything's gonna go fine. I'll see in the end. I don't know what she was capable of doing. After this is all said and done, all of this stuff was a forgery. All of the emails said had had the person's name, it was literally like, if you got an email from the bank, but somebody's name at County National Bank or Bank of America or whatever, it was all of the emails show up that way.

I still don't know how she did that because this was before like spoofing was a thing. The amount of deceit that goes into that, I didn't think that she had that in her, because she seems so nice that takes a hard poker face. I did not think that that's the kind of person that she was. I was definitely upset when I found out. Finally understanding, I was at an age at that point where I understood how tough that was for my mom. And the fact that she could have lost her job and people thought that she wasn't

cooots and that could have been very bad for my family. Why do you think she did this? I don't know. The more I think about it, I think that maybe she needed a friend in this gave her friendship, but we weren't that great a friend. It wasn't like we spent a ton of time together. One thing that I do remember is how excited she was for us. So I don't know if she got something from seeing us be happy

about what our future was and what things could, how things could be. I don't know if it's like pathological, lying or compulsive lying. Maybe she started lying and she just couldn't stop. I really don't know. I've never got an answer. The girl at the basketball game had said that she had done the same thing with the local auto salesman. They did order the car and the car showed up and she went to pick it up and she had no funds. There was no way that she

could pay for it. She took it off a lot that day and drove her for a few days and then when she couldn't come up with the money, they had to take it back. If it was that kind of thing where she just wants to act like she has money, but there's no way you could get away with that with something like this. You can't get a house without actual money. There was no money wired. There was no money to be wired. She could have gotten so many people in trouble, especially her parents writing a $30,000 check

from their account. There was just no end game. I just don't understand at all. The sad thing is too, is since we did live in such a small neighborhood that we still run into each other afterwards. And if we were in the grocery store together, she'd just avoid me.

We'd go to basketball games. She'd act like she didn't even know me. I don't know how you could even show your face after that. She acted like it didn't even affect her in the slightest bit. I don't know what she told her family. Her dad, I don't know that he even cared either way I believed a word that came out of her mouth, but her mom definitely did. Her mom saw me in the store a couple of months afterwards and came up to me and she still didn't understand what was going on and why I was upset with her daughter and why I wouldn't let my son go to church with them anymore because her daughter was just as much as a victim as I was.

And she really honestly believes that the whole lawsuit thing was somebody fraudulently scamming Beth. Like Beth was told she was winning this lawsuit and it never existed. These funds were never there and it was Beth that was getting frauded, not me, where I don't know. I can't even imagine that that's the case. And it doesn't add up at all. After the fact, other things came out that she had done. She's no longer part of the church because of fraudulent things that she had done to them, like faking

illnesses to get donations. Things like that, there's at least an end game. She's getting something from it. If you're gonna lie about it, she has a reason, like, I'm going to get money, I'm going to get something from it. But this whole situation, it's kind of an anodilvy thing. What did you expect to happen? Where were you going to get from this? To this day, I'm still bad, but the fact that she hasn't caught a charge in any way for something that she's done because after the house, she disappeared again

because she got caught by the church. After the house, I figured that if she were to get caught doing something like that, somebody would take action. Somebody would get the police involved. I don't know. It never did. Wow. Was it two different churches that she had raised funds for her that were for false causes? Yes. So the first incident which was explained to me by her ex-husband, I don't know if they had just split at that point, but she was going to a church. She started losing some weight and then told the church she had gotten cancer and the church started

raising massive amounts of money to help pay for her surgeries in medication. And then she just disappeared. The church basically excommunicated her. Then never come back because they finally realized that it was a lie. And the second incident was the same thing. She went to another church, the one that I went with them regularly to. I don't think it was too long after the house, it's in. And it turns out there's another canter scare, Beth got really skinny and I found out later that she actually had surgery, got all this money from the church. I think that I was told that's how they paid it off. I don't know how it came out, but, well, again, small town rumors.

But the word is that she actually had a tummy tuck and liveose section with the money that she had started raising, and that's why she got so quote unquote sick and looked so horrible. And then she got more donations and then she moved to another county for a few months. The church finally said, yeah, this is enough. Don't come back. You've taken a banish of us too much. There's been other things like she was an accountant or something a bookkeeper for one of the local factories.

And she had money had come up missing and it was basically she had the quit or she was gonna get fired She didn't get anything for that. I guess if you do these things and you're not getting in trouble for it Why wouldn't you just try something else? And I feel like that's what she just kept getting away with things because nobody did anything about it It was less than a year later She had come down with cancer and had some go-fund me type things going on and the church started doing fundraisers for her and she was accepting money to get a place to help pay for her medical bills, all of that kind of stuff. I don't know how it was exposed, but in the end it was exposed that that was all fraudulent to the point where the church asked her to leave. She was kicked out of the church basically. And that is another thing too, that her mom was very much

like, the world is against my daughter. So she has her mother believing in everything that she says. Her children, now that they're older, they have said some things to my son. They're not good friends still, but they stayed friendly, and they graduated together. They stayed in the same middle school and high school the whole time.

The sun was very much like, he knows his mom does things that she shouldn't, but it's his mom, that kind of thing. Probably the worst part about it is that her kids had to go through all of that too. It wasn't just our family. We're fine. I just had to work harder. I paid my bills. We got things caught back up.

It was stupid decisions that I made to buy things I didn't to work harder. I paid my bills. We got things caught back up. It was stupid decisions that I made to buy things I didn't have money for. I can say that now and the time it was devastating, I didn't know how I'd ever get through it. But we did. What makes me feel the worst about it is that her kids had to live with that and they keep having to live with that

and she keeps doing those kind of things and nobody does anything about it. She's never been prosecuted for anything. She's really never been reprimanded for anything other than the fact that the church kicked her out. She can go somewhere else and do it because there's never been any legal ramifications. There's never been any monetary ramifications on any of this. She's never learned her lesson. And I can't even imagine what those kids had to see and how embarrassed they also have to be to do that. Unless she's just pulled the wool over their eyes like she did her mother and they believe

everything that she says to. But it doesn't sound like that. It sounds like the children finally know. Definitely their father knew what was going on. So hopefully he helped them kind of stay on the straight and narrow, but I don't know She's not in that same town anymore, but she's about a half an hour away My kids still run into her. How did you see this impact your mom? She's very Reserved with her emotions. I've seen her cry and stuff that very very rare occasion

She did a really good job at hiding how it actually affected her. I didn't know that anything was wrong until years later. Did you guys stay friends? Yeah, we were really good friends up through, I'd say, freshman, sophomore year. I caught him in a lot of lies and I didn't want to deal with the drama so we kind of fell out of friendship and then we reconnected again a couple years ago and fell out of that again because of more lying situations. So what would you say was the hardest part and the biggest impact for you and for your family? For me, it definitely, it ruined my outlook on people in general.

I don't trust anybody. It is so hard for me to take anybody at face value. And I double check everything. I vet everything now. I'd make phone calls. I'm definitely not as naive. I don't trust anybody. And that's probably a bad thing

because I definitely gave that to my kids too. It's really hard for them to trust people or get close to people because they're on the same page now. They saw me go through this and how devastating it was. How could somebody lie to your face like that? Maybe not the best lesson to learn, but it definitely taught me not to just trust people because they seem nice. That was a big lesson.

It was definitely a little knife growing up, put my full trust in everybody who seemed genuine. The monetary hole that it got me into, I mean, you shouldn't spend money that you don't have. Don't count your chickens before a hatch, all that kind of stuff. But you're so excited because your life's gonna change. You can do all of these things. Let's get a head start. Let's not wait. It was just the excitement.

And I didn't have any reason to think that it wouldn't work. I've never had a situation where one of my deals didn't go through, especially when it went this far. Yeah, I'm so sorry. I can't say it's a good lesson to be learned. I'm glad that I learned the lesson. It's helped me in a lot of other ways in my life in making choices, whether it's monetary or life-changing. I do a lot more research.

I'm not going on a hope and a prayer anymore. I don't know what I could have done differently to make things better. I wish that I was more cautious. Like I said, I am now. I think that honestly that this is some kind of mental health issue or something. I really wish that there was more help for people who do these kind of things. There should be some kind of consequence for what they do so that these kind of things stop. The fact that so many people knew things that had happened previously before this happened to me, that Beth had done, and nobody said anything,

that's another thing. Like, if you have a friend that's doing something, you're like, ah, and what if she knows this? Or if I wanted to, they know that you really should say something, because it can cost somebody their world, their future. Too many people were like, well, I didn't know it was my place, or I didn't think it was my place, or I figured that they could figure it out on their own. We can certainly hold compassion for this woman and perhaps her mental health challenges and also hold her accountable and say this is not

okay and your behavior has far-reaching effects and it's hurtful. Yeah absolutely. Gaslighting is the best way to describe it. You're never seeing the other side of the story. And the fact that nobody else is there to tell me any other side of the story or nobody's willing to tell me hey She's done this before she's lied to people before This was definitely something that I also wanted so bad. So maybe I did believe more than I should But the fact that there's nothing to deter these people $30,000 fraudulent check is a felony. The banks didn't want to do anything about it. None of the realtors wanted to do anything about it.

She could just keep doing this and she will keep doing this. It's painful and so many levels. You're embarrassed in a shame. You feel that to your core when something like this happens to you, you don't want to tell people. So that could be why nobody else knows about these things because she's done it to them and they're so embarrassed in a shame about it happening that they let it it to them and they're so embarrassed and ashamed about it happening

that they let it happen to them that they're not telling people. And that was the same thing with Anna Delvito, right? That's why a lot of people didn't come forward until a journalist dug into it is that people were embarrassed because as a professional, they want their reputation protected.

But also when there's no consequences, people will continue to do what they do and Unfortunately, they get better at it and more extravagant usually in my experience until they do end up in jail Yeah, definitely Thank you so so much for taking the time. I really really appreciate it appreciate it. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, stay safe friends. Something was wrong is a broken cycle media production, created and hosted by me, Tiffany Rees.

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