My best friend of eleven years organized a neighborhood fundraiser in my name, collected $34,200 from our community, and transferred every single dollar into an account I had never once touched.
I want to start from the beginning, because if I just tell you the ending, you won’t believe how long I let this woman into my life.
Kourtney and I met when our daughters were in the same kindergarten class. Eleven years of school pickups, wine on her back porch, crying on each other’s shoulders through divorces and job losses. When my mother-in-law, Patricia, passed away from ovarian cancer in the spring of two years ago, Kourtney was the one sitting next to my husband, Derek, at the funeral. She held my hand.
So when the Maplewood neighborhood association asked me to spearhead a fundraiser for the Delacroix family — a young couple down the street who lost everything in a house fire — I immediately called Kourtney. She was organized, she had run bake sales and charity auctions for the school, and I was still grieving and overwhelmed. It felt natural to say, “You handle the logistics, I’ll be the face of it.”
That was my first mistake.
Kourtney set up the donation page on GiveTogether within two days. She texted me a link, it looked legitimate, it had my photo and a little bio she’d written about me. People started giving almost immediately. Neighbors. Local businesses. Derek’s sister, Tamara, shared it on her Facebook page and told me she was proud of me. I felt genuinely good about something for the first time since Patricia died.
Over about six weeks, I watched the donation counter climb. We hit $10,000 in the first weekend. By the end of the campaign, the total displayed on the page was $34,200.
Kourtney told me she’d handle the disbursement. “I already have all the banking set up,” she said. “I’ll write you a full breakdown, don’t worry about it.”
I didn’t worry about it. I trusted her.
The Delacroix family thanked me at a neighborhood barbecue that July. They hugged me, they cried. I assumed the money had been transferred. I never asked to see a receipt because the gratitude on their faces told me everything had gone through.
Three months later, the community board president, a retired accountant named Roger, emailed me asking if I could clarify a discrepancy. He had reached out to GiveTogether on behalf of the association to confirm disbursement records, and the platform had come back with something he didn’t understand. The registered account holder on the campaign was not me. It was Kourtney. And according to GiveTogether’s transfer logs, the $34,200 had been sent in two installments — $18,000 on August 3rd and $16,200 on August 19th — to a personal checking account under Kourtney’s name, not to any account associated with the Delacroix family or the neighborhood association.
I read Roger’s email three times standing in my kitchen. My hands were shaking.
I called Kourtney immediately. She didn’t answer. I texted her. No response. I drove to her house and knocked on the door for four solid minutes. Nothing.
I forwarded Roger’s email to Derek, and the two of us sat at the kitchen table for two hours going through everything. Derek pulled up the GiveTogether platform on his laptop and requested the public transaction records. Right there in the donor history, timestamped, was the paper trail: every donation, every payout, every account routing detail. Kourtney’s name. Kourtney’s account number ending in 4471. Two transfers. No forwarding payment to the Delacroix family anywhere in the log.
Derek’s sister, Tamara, had donated $500 to that campaign. When I called to tell her what we’d found, she went completely silent for a moment and then said, “Kourtney asked me to donate through the link she personally sent me. Said it was easier to track.”
I went to the police with the GiveTogether export logs printed out and a written timeline Derek helped me put together. The detective assigned to the case told me the transfer records constituted clear documentation of wire fraud. Within six weeks, Kourtney was charged. Her attorney tried to argue it was an administrative error, a misunderstanding about account setup. The GiveTogether records didn’t leave much room for that story.
The $34,200 was eventually recovered and delivered to the Delacroix family, who had no idea any of this had happened. They thought I had simply been delayed. The community board sent a formal letter to every donor explaining what had occurred and clearing my name.
Kourtney pleaded no contest. I don’t know what her sentence was. I haven’t spoken to her since the day I drove to her house and stood on her porch knocking.
The Delacroix family sent me a card afterward. Handwritten. It’s still on my refrigerator because I’m not ready to take it down yet.
Eleven years. I genuinely thought I knew her.
