post by /u/WifeIsAScammer
why should it be deleted
post below
TL;DR I recently learned that my (soon to be ex) wife is a prominent internet scammer using Amazon.com, and has been for at least 2 years. I want to divorce her and turn her in but she says "you will regret it" if I do anything, said she'll either claim I raped her or was a co-conspirator to her fraud, or something else like that. She makes much more money than I could ever imagine, and I now own many expensive things gifted to me by her. The amount of fraud is likely in the range of several $100k.
This is kinda wordy so I've broken it into paragraphs. (I know you guys hate wordy posts. Sorry.)
Background: I've known my wife for about 4 years, been married for about 2. She's always been well-off and comes from a wealthy family, but started having a much greater personal income around the time we married. She's claimed to run a small wholesale business, buying from product distributors and manufacturers and selling to people locally. I've not thought to question it since I'm historically terrible with money and finances and was more than happy to let her handle taxes and bank accounts; I'm an artist and will admit that, while I do sincerely love her, it's been convenient getting to play the reverse sugar daddy and focus on my art without having to work for a living. I went from a 1-bedroom apartment to a 3400 sqft home with a 3-car garage.
Her scam: It turns out that she has found a way to steal inventory out of Amazon warehouses. Amazon offers a service called FBA (fulfillment by Amazon) in which 3rd party sellers can send inventory into their warehouses and then Amazon sends it on to the customer when it sells. If multiple sellers send in things it can all be "commingled," meaning there's no way to know which person sent in any one particular item, you might ship in a laptop computer but when a customer buys from you they might not receive the one you sent in, they might get one someone else sent in since in theory they're all the same thing. What she does is send in boxes that are of similar size and weight of a valuable item such as a gaming laptop and sticks a UPC barcode on it. She mails these fake boxes into the warehouse and then places an order for them to be sent back to her. Because it's all mixed together she usually receives the real thing instead of the fakes she sent in. Then she sells them locally here through places like craigslist.
My dilemma: I just found out about this very recently and am still reeling from it. I confronted her about it and she says if say anything about it she will blackmail and frame me. My biggest concern is that she really could paint me as a co-conspirator because now I own a lot of expensive things thanks to her; she even bought me a fully-equipped 2016 Lexus for my last birthday for example. I don't know how much the total fraud is but it's surely several hundred thousand dollars. Maybe over a million even, I don't know. Sell a few $2500 laptops a week and it adds up quick. I want to divorce her and turn her into the police but am afraid I'll end up in prison right next to her.
Emotionally I'm completely destroyed. If she had just cheated on me or something like that I could get past it, but right now I'm feeling like Skyler White learning that her dorky husband is actually a violent drug kingpin, not to mention I'm beating myself up mentally for not catching it sooner. I want to throw up. But I have the rest of my life to recover from this heartbreak and bemoan it. Right now I need practical legal advice. Please and thanks.