HUFFINGTON
06.24.12
> ROMANCE PREDATORS
The two spent hours on the phone comparing notes.
“This was a Lifetime movie,” Megan
says. “This isn’t what happens in real
life and certainly not to me…I’m not a
stupid person. Naïve maybe, and certainly too trusting, but not stupid.”
Megan tried to get her money back by
pretending for another six months that
she hadn’t uncovered Funches’ scam, but
keeping up that charade was preventing
her from moving on and getting over how
devastated she felt. Emotionally spent, she
gave up on getting her money back, closed
her old email account, changed her cell
number so he would stop asking her for
money, and deleted any other evidence that
Andrew Funches ever was part of her life.
About a year later, Megan got a note
from Funches’ lawyer saying he’d declared bankruptcy and that she was one
of his listed debtors.
It’s now been eight years since Megan dated Andrew Funches, but this past
March he resurfaced in her life in the form
of a handwritten letter a woman sent to
her. The story was the essentially the same:
a name, a mob debt and a five figure loan.
Megan and her correspondent are
members of an unusual club. They and
at least 18 other women living in multiple states all began comparing notes and
say that they have all been fleeced by the
same man, who they say uses the names
Andrew Funches, Ty Fortner, and other
aliases. The victims say that Funches/
Fortner lives in Chicago, is 41-years-old,
and claims that he works for an insurance company.
Tamara White, now 50, has been trying to get her money back from Ty Fortner since 2008. She says she loaned
him over $28,000, most of which was
meant to cover his mob debts, and was
forced to take him to court to try to recover her money.
Another woman, who ask that her
name be withheld, said in an e-mail that
she’d lost her house in a short sale and
went into bankruptcy years ago. Had she
not loaned Ty Fortner $20,000 when
“I was standing in line
at that bank, and there
was a tiny little place
in my heart that was
saying, ‘Don’t do it.’”