> ROMANCE PREDATORS
“He was talking about living together,
and we were going to get married someday,” Megan says. Such promises, she
admits, appealed to her romantic side.
“I think I’ve always had a little bit of
an optimistic view on love,” she says.
“I don’t want to say fairytale, but yea, I
think I used to idealize love.”
But two months in, Megan says,
Funches came to her with a story of a
$10,000 gambling debt that he owed
to the mafia. Megan initially said she
wouldn’t lend him money, but a few
weeks later he told her that if he didn’t
pay, they were going to shoot him.
“I figured it was at the very least an exaggeration,” she says. “But he would retell
these stories, very detailed stories and
HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
experiences…It was very thought out.”
Megan says Funches tried to convince
her to give him the money by saying he
couldn’t move cities to be with her until the debt was settled. She had doubts
about his story, but managed to quiet
them by considering the alternative.
“Something didn’t seem right,” she
explains. “But what I asked myself is…
What if something did happen and you
could have stopped it but you didn’t?”
Megan loaned Funches the money and
drew up a promissory note and a payment
plan which included interest charges and
late fees for missing payments.
“I was standing in line at that bank,”
she recalls, about to transfer the money,
“and there was a tiny little place in my
heart that was saying, ‘Don’t do it.’”
She did it anyway.
“I overrode that. I wanted to prove
that [suspicion] wasn’t true, that he was
real,” she says.
Megan said Funches still came to visit
her after the loan, and he even paid her
a few hundred dollars. But not long after, he started dodging her phone calls.
“I was sitting at home one night and
something felt so off and I started searching and I found all these [online dating]
profiles,” Megan says. “I think there were
six of them that I found that night.”
She hired a private investigator who
put her in touch with another woman
who was owed money by the same man.