My Ex Hid Millions of Dollars

How he lied to me, stole our money, and how he hid it

My husband and I are in our kitchen. He hasn’t paid off the furniture we bought for our rental properties. I’m confused since I’ve just handed him our bills and we no longer carry credit cards or debt.

“Why haven’t you paid this off?” I ask. “You need to take the money out of savings and pay it.”

“It’s all gone,” he says.

“What’s gone?” I ask.

“Our savings,” he says.

“Are you kidding me?” I ask. “How could you have rifled through that much money? How could you do that without telling me? I never took money out without letting you know.”

“It’s my money,” he says angrily.

His anger and the word ‘my’ should’ve been a clue my husband was lying.

But I was trusting and naive when he first began to lie, cheat, and steal.

He hid millions of dollars and left me with no savings or retirement.

My husband’s plan was not only severe, abusive, and diabolical — he initiated it the moment our marriage began to struggle. My story and his financially abusive plan are complex.

I will list it numerically for ease of absorption.

My hope is it will never happen to another human being again.

Let alone our children who do not deserve it.

I will explain how my husband hid millions of dollars. I will explain how he made it appear he was broke. I will explain his exit strategy to make sure I would get nothing in the long run.

But first, I will explain how he lied to me.

The following events happened during the ten years I tried to save our marriage.

How my husband lied to me

1. My husband and I begin to experience marital problems. Within months he declares we are living beyond our means and I am spending too much money. This confuses and annoys me because I pay the bills for our home, business, and investment properties. I know it isn’t true so I calculate our net worth. It’s close to 2 million dollars. We are 40 and 42 and no longer use credit cards. I have managed our finances since the beginning of our marriage. We have significant cash savings. I increase our savings annually. One investment property does not have a mortgage and I have paid down the mortgage on another.
2. My husband who hates dealing with finances now wants control of our money. He takes over the bills for our home, business, and investment properties.
3. Within a few years of our marital problems and my husband handling the finances, we stand in our kitchen. This is when he tells me all of our cash savings are gone. Not long after, I find a P.O. box key. I question him because all of our mail and shipments are sent to our home or office address. He says he wants another address for business mail.
4. My husband begins to ruin our credit but I am unaware because he is paying the bills. He takes out a personal credit card and a business credit card in my name. He does this by intercepting promotional offers directed toward me in the mail. Again, I am unaware.
5. He tells me he wants to get new life insurance policies because he’s found a cheaper alternative. I trust my husband. These events are happening over a period of time. We are attempting to work on our marriage. I do not yet realize you should stop trusting your spouse the moment marital issues begin. I review the policy briefly and sign. I will later find out he has made himself both owner and beneficiary of my policy. I would never have signed if I realized he was the owner. During our divorce, I find out he canceled his own policy years earlier but continued to keep a policy on me years into our divorce.
6. My husband decides he wants to sell our investment properties. It’s something I urged him to do when the economy was suffering. Because I initially suggested it (years earlier) I don’t question his motives. We are roughly five years into our marital problems.
7. I go to a store to look at treadmill equipment and realize my credit has been destroyed. I question my husband. He again says we are living beyond our means despite the fact I strictly use a debit card. The only reason I found out was they asked if I wanted to get a discount by opening an account.
8. My husband starts to ration what he will let me spend. He refuses to give me money for several birthdays or Christmas for our children. He says he doesn’t have it. He leaves a small amount of cash in an envelope and tells me I am to use that for any expenses. I am a stay-at-home mother who built a business and investment properties with my husband. I have now become financially vulnerable.
9. He claims our business had a big financial collapse and there’s even less money.
10. I come home one day and he tells me he has canceled my American Express card. It’s one of two cards I’ve had since I graduated college and thus, a part of my longest credit history. I am furious. But at this point, I have no idea that destroying my credit is a large part of his financial abuse strategy and increasing my vulnerabilities.
11. It’s year six and I attempt to get him to separate. He refuses to move out of our house. He says he’s broke and can’t afford to live on his own. I am desperate because he is behaving badly and upsetting my children so I elicit the help of his family member. My husband responds to the email saying he is broke. With their permission, I copy one more member of his family and I explain we have sold our rental properties the past year and let go of an employee. We are in the positive by $120,000 annually. He is caught in his lie and finally agrees to separate.
12. While we are separated my electricity gets turned off. My husband claims ignorance and says he somehow forgot to pay the bill. A few months later I am out at a restaurant with friends. My debit card is declined. I no longer carry credit cards because we do not use the ones we have. I call my husband and he says he froze my account. My friend sees him at the grocery store and explains she had to pay my bill. My husband laughs and says, “Oh, I was teaching Colleen a lesson.”
13. Eleven months into our separation my husband says if I don’t let him move back home he won’t send our oldest son to college. He says we can’t afford it. I knew he might be doing this intentionally because we were nearing a year of separation but I didn’t want my son to pay the price. It was a mistake. I should never have let him back in the house.
14. A year later I initiate the divorce. He immediately refuses to give me food or school supply money. It takes three months to get him to move out of the house. Once he does, I begin to receive foreclosure notices, health insurance cancellations, electricity turned off, sheriff’s deputies at my door with warrants in debt, the mortgage company knocking at my door to see if the home is still occupied, repo guys in my driveway in the middle of the night, and much more.

How my husband stole and hid millions of dollars

1. I trusted my husband so I rarely looked at our joint business account. Bank records only go back seven years. By the time I realized he was hiding money, I could only find six months' worth of overt transactions. There were countless checks written to him off of our business ($5,000-$10,000-$15,000-$20,000) and only a few had faint deposit stamps. The bank told me they were likely deposited in the night deposit box. There were large ‘counter withdrawals’ of $10,000 and $30,000.
2. Ultimately, as our marital problems progressed my husband began hiding money in different ways. Instead of taking it out of the business account, he was directly depositing a large portion of the income in other accounts.
3. He opened what’s known as ‘Beneficial Ownership of Legal Entity’ bank accounts. These are bank accounts that can evade subpoenas because they list the person as an ‘Administrator’ or ‘Authorized User’ of the account and not the business owner. My husband listed one of our sons as a business owner and himself as the ‘Authorized User.’
4. Interestingly, after the divorce my husband made my teenage son go with him to an office building because he said he had written our son’s social security number wrong on taxes. He said he transposed the numbers by accident and my son needed to sign something. For example, let’s say a part of the social was 321 he wrote it as 312. An innocent mistake? Or an intentional attempt to mislead bank records by listing a different address for our son on the account and an incorrect social security number. I didn’t find out my son had run this errand with him until after the fact.
5. I was naive to the real purpose of the P.O. Box. In order to hide and transfer money either in person or online my husband had to create new bank and investment accounts. Banks and financial institutions require a physical address.
6. It also appears he hid money in an illegal trust. No reputable estate attorney will create an illegal trust because they realize an individual is trying to hide money. Because reputable attorneys shy away from this they are often created online.
7. There are additional indicators that he hid money out of the country in London. It is nearly impossible to serve a subpoena in London because of the Hague Convention. If you are successful it could take up to three years to get a response.
8. The greatest financial abuse in divorce is among the self-employed because they can manipulate and lower income. My husband lowered the income to make it appear that the business was making less than it had twenty years before. He was actually hiding 50% or more of that income elsewhere by funneling it through the Beneficial Ownership of Legal Entity bank accounts and into investments that ultimately ended up in trusts and out of the country.
9. My husband threatened bankruptcy multiple times during our overly-long abusive five-year divorce. I believe this is still his end game. He ruined our credit for three reasons. He wanted to make the story that he was broke seem more believable. He wanted to make sure I had no money to fight him legally during or after the divorce. He wanted to ultimately declare bankruptcy post-divorce and say he was too broke to pay the small amount I receive monthly.

What makes my husband’s plan even more abusive, more diabolical?

And more disturbing.

It was devised by a group of men within his industry.

It took me a while to figure it out. I knew the men my husband went to high school and college with would never condone doing this to their wives and the mother of their children. I knew the men who lived near us wouldn’t either. I got smart enough to track down a few divorced wives within his industry.

Our stories were all the same.

Our husbands said all the money was gone because we had lived beyond our means for years and the wives were big spenders. What marriage could withstand that type of financial collapse? They destroyed their credit. They either threatened or declared bankruptcy. The wives were left with no savings or retirement and some without alimony.

The majority of these women built businesses with their husbands.

They were married for decades and they were cheated out of everything.

I think the only reason I received some alimony is that my youngest son was still with me. If not, I believe my husband would have made sure I got nothing. What I do receive I don’t view as alimony. I was a 50% owner and President of a business I built with my husband. Because he manipulated and lowered the income what I receive is nearly 75% less than I should be getting monthly.

The MeToo Movement hasn’t yet progressed from professional environments to domestic environments.

Although this outrageous abuse does technically involve a corporation that employs the abusive divorcing men who inflict it. They get away with it by being listed as independent contractors. But being paid by 1099s doesn’t make a company any less guilty of being complicit in enabling shared financial abuse tactics inflicted on women and children.

I know what you are thinking.

You believe in justice as I did. You believe people who lie, cheat, steal, and break the law will get caught. They will be held accountable.

Divorce is an entirely different animal.

As someone I know once said, “Normally your husband would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law for forging a loan and credit cards in your name and stealing money from a business partner but in divorce, they can get away with it.”

I endured years of stress, duress, unpredictability, and anxiety in divorce. I couldn’t sleep or think straight. I never knew what my husband was going to inflict next.

I worry about sharing my story in case it falls into the wrong hands.

I’ve decided the unscrupulous and the abusive will find a way regardless.

It’s more important to educate the naive, trusting people who love them.

Let them know how to protect themselves from financial abuse. Let them know how to self-protect the minute a marriage declines. To be alert and look at all bank records, check credit annually, get a bank account in your name only, a credit card in your name only, make sure to check who is listed on the mortgage, and understand the warning signs of financial abuse.

The moment my husband started rationing money that was a sign of abuse.

Even if I still didn’t know he was hiding money. It was a sign of control and financial abuse. When we separated and he turned off the electricity and froze my card I thought it was random. Two isolated events in nearly a year but it was indicative of not only financial abuse but of the abusive wrath still to come.

This is how my husband hid millions of dollars.

He had our original net worth, ten years of hiding money during our struggling marriage, and the five-year overly-long abusive divorce. We were completely financially fit with no extraneous debt. The amount of money is staggering.

I neglected to say my husband didn’t pay off our primary home. He never paid down the mortgages as I did. This one large mortgage played into his poor broke man strategy.

This was how my husband made it appear he was, in his words, ‘A broke man.’

This was how he developed his exit strategy for the long run to leave me broke.

This is how an abusive man lied to me.

• Read the articles below that will tell you how to avoid the financial abuse my children and I endured.