$120,000 Was Stolen From Me... It Was My "Friend"

A few months ago, I discovered that one of my closest friends had stolen $120,000 from me. And as I dug into this, I found that this betrayal was way, way worse than even that. So I want to share this story with you because, one, it's the greatest and most painful betrayal that I think I've experienced, at least in my adult life. It's the most costly business mistake I've probably ever made, and I don't want this thing to happen to you. Sadly, I've come to see and learn that this pattern of behavior that I thought was basically impossible is far more common than I'd expected. And though it's not a lot of people that do this, they tend to run this pattern over and over again so that the number of people that are actually impacted by this is far, far greater. So if you see any aspect of yourself in this story, I hope that this wakes you up and prevents you from experiencing what I did. For context, several months ago, I'm closing the deal to purchase Charisma on command. I'm a 50% owner. I'm buying 100% from my co founder because we've been in a deadlock, and this is wonderful and amazing, but it's also the largest purchase I have ever made made. So in order to make sure that I can finance it, I start logging into accounts that I haven't been in for years. So, like, I'm looking at my retirement account, you know, the 401k that I haven't even looked at. Like, okay, I can liquidate this. And the other account that I look in is this crypto account, because several years prior, I'd had an employee and this close friend of mine who was named Ivan Hidalgo, purchase a bunch of crypto on my behalf. I'd given him $12,000 to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, and I just hadn't looked at it. Now, the good news was crypto had done what crypto did in that period of time, which is that $12,000 had 10x to about 120 grand, which is going to be very, very useful in financing this deal. So I plug it into my computer, I log into this nano ledger, and my heart falls off of a cliff because this graph falls off of a cliff. I watch it go up, up, up, up, up, up, up to $120,000, and then instantly, boom, $45. And my heart is racing, and I'm going, what the heck is going on here? As I try to discern what's happening, and as I hover over the transactions. I see that six months prior to this login, in the middle of the night, in a series of transactions, all of the money in my account was moved to other accounts. So I call the cops, I start trying to figure out what happened. I make that frog report, and immediately I think there's only one person that this really could have been. Because Ivan bought this for me. And when he bought it for me, he sent me a photo of the seed phrase, which is effectively the crypto password. Right? It's a list of words that if you lose access to this ledger, you can still get access to your account. And so that existed digitally. But I'm thinking, because I'm still naive at this point in time, maybe a family member of his got access to it. Maybe he lost his phone and somebody ran an AI scraper and they dug it and they found it. Now, this was especially naive, and you'll see this pattern over and over again, because about a year and a half prior, I'd fired him for lying to me. And gray area stealing, which is no longer a gray area, I now see what actually happened, but I fired him for that. So we weren't in contact at this point in time. We were no longer cool with one another. So I reached out to my co founder, who was still in interaction with him. I was talking to him because of the deal and said, hey, can you. Can you check? Like, did he lose his phone about six months ago? Did you hear anything? Does his number change to a green numbers? Like, no, still same phone number. So I start piecing it together and I go to my crypto friends and they help me with this website called Arkham Intelligence. And they say, you put any crypto wallet in here and it will show you all of the interactions that this wallet has had publicly. So thank God for these friends. I take the account that took the money, I put it into Arkham Intelligence, and boom, it explodes with information. It's got all these charts. And I'm filtering through this, like black screen, super matrix style, except it's not matrix. It's so obvious. It's not reading zeros and ones. Because I look and his literal name is present on this page. Investor Ivan is staring at me. His OpenSea. NFT account that I witnessed him access from my apartment is listed as having interacted with the account that took the money. So thank God. Thank you. You know who you are. My friends, I love you. I appreciate you. You helped me a ton. So I feel a huge wave of relief. But also like, oh, Crap. No more deception. You know, this is what happened. So I draft this text in this email, which is to him, hey, I know exactly what happened on this night. I know exactly what you did. Send this crypto back and this will be the end of it. If you don't, there's going to be a civil and a criminal case and you're looking at potentially years in jail because, you know, I've done the whole chatgpt. What could likely happen for from this. This is not a small amount of money. A significant amount of time goes by, like a day or two when I get a response from him that is, hey, I'm on vacation, not sure what you're talking about essentially. And I'll put receipts up so you can check it out if you'd like. I write back, you know what I'm talking about. Don't pretend, send me the money. I'm hearing through my co founder who I'm discussing this deal with at the time that he really doesn't know because he's talking to him and saying, I've never heard of this. This is so strange. I haven't heard from years. So weird. I'm on vacation, I can't, I'm busy, I can't even handle this. And he treating it seemingly like it's not a big deal. So I continue to write and I'm talking to friends who tell me that I am going to have to show him hard evidence because in one of his texts to me he says, these are huge accusations. If you have any hard proof, I'd like to see it. Which is a weird thing to say, like, how would I have hard proof of something that didn't happen? But I do. And so they coach me through the recording of this video that I start. The first time I record it, I'm screaming and swearing and I show them like, is this what I should send to him? They're like, no, no, less swear words. We're not trying to. We're trying to scream at him. We're trying to get him to send the money back. So they helped me with the charisma aspect of this, which is to flatly explain everything in this video that I send to him. This is you, Ivan, this is your wallet. It's only got like 30 transactions in the last four years. And there's multiple instances of you interacting with investor Ivan on OpenSea, which is your OpenSea NFT account that I can tie directly to you. The options that you have are continue to deny this, bring that denial to court and see how it goes, I wouldn't recommend it. You're going to lose both the civil and criminal case and then you're looking at actual jail time. I don't recommend it. I'm willing to do that. The other option is that you can send me back the money now. And what do you know? He gets this video and remembers. Oh yeah. And the process begins of him sending me this money back, which I was able to recover in full, except that it took, you know, some, some teeth pulling in order to get him to do it, obviously. And he would not refund me for the cost of the nano ledger. But he did wish me a Happy Thanksgiving, which seemed strange after everything that happened. And just for context, this was someone who had been to my house for multiple Thanksgivings. This was my genuinely second closest friend after my co founder. This was someone who I took to my sister's wedding as my plus one, even though it was like a kind of a goofy thing to do. He slept on my couch for months at a time. Full access to everything in my life and my heart genuinely like so much care and affection and trust was given to him. So that Happy Thanksgiving line, it just cuts even. Like, holy shit, was any of this real? And that thought keeps echoing in my head because yes, I have the money, but now I can think. This guy's been hired for years. He had intimate access to everything in my life, including my business. So I have to go look. And at this point I've bought the business. So I now have access to his old email account and my co founder's old email account. And there's just correspondence in there that is helpful for me to dig into. So I start going into Ivan's old email account and I find which is something that you should start to pay attention to a lot of weird stuff. The first thing that I find is seemingly ridiculous lies. Like one of the things that's in there is a lease agreement for the apartment he'd been living in. And he told me that the apartment was like a certain amount of money, let's say X per month. But this lease agreement has it listed as one half of that amount of money. Why lie about that? And I started to see there were so many of these like unnecessary, small, for seemingly no purpose lies that I was able to corroborate through this email and through speaking to other people about this. I also started to talk to people and I found that there was this pattern of behaving differently around people of status and power. So with me, I experienced him as very Generous and very kind. My brother was friends with him, but he'd stay at the apartment. But my brother was constantly complaining that he was not paying for coffees, that sticking my brother with the bill, that he was stealing his clothes, even though he would tell him not to do it and sort of just shrugging it off. And I was like, oh, you know, they're just bickering as like, you know, like they were almost like brothers themselves, like me and my brother, whatever, it's fine. And I realized that when I stepped away from the business, this same thing happened, which is now that I didn't have power, our relationship completely shifted. He stopped answering my calls, he stopped like it was just over. And so this pattern of behaving one way in the face of status and power and a genuinely another for others is something to pay attention to and to listen to the stories of people around you who relate this to you. But far more serious in these emails and in correspondence with my co founders was the founding story of why we had even hired him. See, at the time when he was hired, I think in 2018, I was very busy with videos and my co founder did this hire, he ran the process and I came in at the end for like the final which of these two people. But I hadn't seen any of the references. I hadn't really seen the application. I hadn't seen even. There was a story that he had sold his digital marketing agency. Ivan had done this to a larger digital marketing agency for 3 million Canadian, which is why he was wanting a new era of his life. He wanted to be a mentee essentially at a larger business, but had all of these digital marketing skills and provided tax documents and references and weird looking like income forms. But all of this had come in and so I finally get eyes on this and I see, oh shit. As I start to really look at it. Yeah, at first glance, these are tax documents. They're like signed, they're filled out, except the business number and the year is listed as well. This is like a 2016 tax document. But when I run that business number in Ontario's business lookup and find the actual business, the business isn't founded till September of 2017. So I'm looking at a tax document that doesn't correspond with public records. He's written in his application, like, this is the name of the company I sold to. But I can't let you talk to them right now. The lawyers or whatever. It wasn't even cancer, you know, something, some weird thing. But when I call that company and say, hey, have you, did you guys purchase a business for roughly 3 million Canadian 2018? The woman goes, no. I say, well, maybe you wouldn't know. She says, no, I've been here for 20 years. Let me put you in with the CEO. I'll have him email you. So he emails me and says, hey, how can I help? And I explain the situation. And within like a five minute phone call and two hours of waiting, I get back an email from the CEO that says, I do not know what this is. I don't know what you're talking about. So the entire founding story that predicated this business relationship, this friendship that was, I thought, like so close. Someone that I would genuinely like, I didn't care about money. If I'd lost money, which I lost a tremendous amount working with him because he was not effective at his job, obviously, because he hadn't done the things that he said that he'd done that didn't matter because he was my friend. And so this caused a tremendous amount of pain, but also a lot of how the hell did this happen? Like what was occurring in me that I created space for this. And there's a number of things I told you, some of the small ones, but the real one that I want you to pay attention for is if you don't trust your own sense of distrust. Because I did not. When I thought that someone was lying to me or wronging me, particularly in a huge way, I would start to feel like I was mean, I was being bad. How could I accuse that person of that? Especially in the face of someone who double tripled and quadrupled, downed. Now I could confront someone for a minute if they said, yeah, you're right, that would create that instant relief. But I would feel so guilty if I believed something bad about someone else that they contended was not true about them. And so I look back at my own correspondence with my co founder and I see this instantly. I have an email that him is like, this feels like a mentorship. He hasn't taught me anything. He has no discernal expertise. He can't even seem to write. Which was all like, it was ridiculous how bad his work was. It was so bad that we stopped paying him for a month and that was that. I thought that was such an admirable thing of him to not get paid for that first month, but it was so abysmal. What I didn't realize is that I had this distrust of my own distrust that became pathological responsibility taking pay attention for this because Instead of saying, you know, we disagree and therefore you're going to go, it was, you know, you say this and I don't feel it. Therefore, I need to give you more opportunities to show yourself to me. I need to elevate your position. I need to explain myself more clearly. I need to give you a different project because if you couldn't succeed in that one, but you say, this is true about you, I must not be using you effectively. And so for the next several years, I promoted endlessly, like, he would fail and I would give him another promotion to incentivize him to do better in this way of, like, what have I not done right here that is making this apparently very effective tool not work. And that was how he had access to things. Like, I was like, oh, well, maybe he can help me with crypto investing. All of this came because things weren't working, because I was ashamed of my own sense of distrust, because I didn't want to have the experience of sitting in front of someone and saying, I don't believe you. This feels completely false to me and I don't want to work with you any longer. And it wasn't the same nefarious, fabricated lie, but that same thing was present with my co founder. Because what I didn't want to do, and I brought it up several times, was say, I don't trust the way that you ran this process. I don't trust that this is the best possible candidate. I don't trust that you're effectively doing your job. Because if I had done that, the underlying fear would have come rushing to the surface, which is, I'll be alone. Because if I dig into this and I find that you didn't do a good job here. While I'm doing these videos, this calls into question our business relationship, which was already there were things that were sort of sticking out as this isn't working great. And I did not want to see things because I did not want to have to go it alone for any period of time. And this is so critical. I see this in constantly in romantic relationships and close partnerships from the third party. You'll be standing there, like, reading somebody's text exchange or the history of how their boyfriend went out and had this really suspicious activity. And it'll be really obvious that something is off. But you'll watch someone contort themselves in order to believe the story, because what is really driving them is this terror of being alone. And so they'll confront the person and basically allow them to lie to their face because it soothes that feeling of. Of now I have to go it alone. And so just ask yourself, is that occurring in my life? Am I taking pathological responsibility? Am I terrified of being alone but not acknowledging and therefore lowering my standard? What you will do in these circumstances is avoid. You will avoid looking at the text, you will avoid digging into the references, you will avoid going back and saying, hey, that was a weird story. I'm going to actually get external verification of that. You will avoid all of that, and that will feel mean or bad if you were to do it. Pay attention. And so I hope that those yellow red flags are sticking out to you. I hope. And one other thing I should say is that if you've known me over the years and we've interacted and you've felt that I have explicitly or implicitly vouched for Ivan as a worker or anything, I just want to make clear that I do not. I do not. If that's not already evident, I unfortunately expect that this pattern could continue for two reasons. One, after all of this theft, when I'm in the business, I log into the Instagram account to find that there's logins coming from the country that he's in. And I go in and see that even after all the theft and the return, he apparently is liking his own photos from the Charisma on Command account. Which signals to me that this pattern of like, image construction has not stopped. And also I reached out to him to be a part of this video. I gave him the questions that I had. I told him that the way that I wanted this video to go was for him to be. To tell his story on screen and to investigate where this pattern comes from. And hopefully that it would be like a healing moment, which was perhaps naive but wishful thinking of me. He said that our interactions in the last two years had been negative and stressful. These are the interactions where my money has been stolen and finally returned. And that's why he didn't want to do it and really refused to answer any of the questions that I'd asked and then blocked me. So that's what I'd like you to know about that. I hope that for some of you this is a wake up call. For the rest of you, that's my heart. I just wanted to share it with you. So thank you. I appreciate you guys watching and I will see you in the next video. Peace.