Arrested!

[You can watch the news report here:
http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/kiro-7-investigation-movers-operating-illegally-wi/njYqq/]

We met online a little more than three years ago not knowing how the future was going to turn out for us. (The distance between Seattle and Scotland is a country and an ocean, not really what people consider a sure-thing for a relationship).

To make it work we both saved-and-scraped up all our extra money just to visit each other for a couple weeks at a time (it turns out flying back and forth from Scotland is quite pricy). A couple years later we got married (woo hoo Vegas baby)!

Getting me to move over to Scotland was a whole other set of difficulties (who would have guessed trying to leave America was so tough). There were many things that I loved but wouldn't survive the trip, like my amazing Thunderbird:


(Just look at that magnificent beast, it just screams, "USA! USA! USA!"). That was one of many things I sacrificed to move here (my Craigslist history filled up pretty damn quickly). It was important though, the things we had to pay for was ridiculous (visa alone was $1500, there was the plane ticket, almost two grand for the moving company, another couple grand for the cats....)

Because we had to save up and sell stuff to have me move we didn't have money for trips to see each other, that combined with waiting for the visa to be approved added up to us not seeing each other for eleven months! (You can imagine how happy we both were when I landed in Scotland)

Eventually I narrowed down all my belongings to one fancy package:


Ok, maybe "fancy" isn't the appropriate word but you gotta admit that everything fit nicely (protip: use one-sized box for everything possible and "Hi my name is" tags to cheaply label the boxes).

What you're looking at is all my worldly possessions; everything from my fancy desktop computer with impressive dual monitors, to all the books I collected over the years (some impressive collections in there), to the binders of mementos my now-wife and I made every time she visited (we saved things like receipts, maps, certificates for crossing huge bridges, etc.; my memory isn't what you would call very splendid so this was my way of keeping the memory of our adventures).


Some of the fancy things I DID have were signed stuff by their creators. That one in the top left? That's Hideo Kojima who rarely makes appearances to sign stuff, and at that event he was signing posters but I snuck that in before his goons could say no (that's also the original cart I played when it was new). There's a bunch of rare collectible things in there like comic books that aren't printed anymore, complete collections of series, and money from different countries.


That's Tesla on that Yugoslavian 5 Dinar bill (I also had a couple Serbian 100 Dinar bills with him on there). This is money you can't actually get in the US; you literally need to be in that country to get them. There's way more than what I listed here in my stuff, super personal stuff and more memories that I never bothered to take a picture of.

The company I hired to move my boxes overseas hired another company who hired Jeff (I'll get to how I know his name in a second). Jeff was a cool guy; even offered to put the stuff that's only in bubble wrap there in boxes. Little did I know that when he left my house he would never be seen again.


Jeff left his copy of the paperwork at my house, with that I got his eMail address and with a quick Google search I found out he's been known to scam people with his moving services (don't take my word for it, [The Seattle Times ], [his Yelp page ] has some good stories (the one where he craps his pants at someone's house is quite entertaining), and even [his Facebook page ] has a link to his now-gone Selz page (who has a page for a moving service and also lists that he's auctioning things off....))

Nobody can find him (the State has been trying to find him, even). The moving company hasn't really done anything (read that as: they've called his cell phone and nothing else). The Attorney General can't do anything since it's alleged criminal activity. The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission can't do anything because their jurisdiction is only intrastate. The police won't do anything because they say it's a civil case. The FBI won't help because it doesn't add up to more than a million dollars. The insurance company won't pay because it wasn't fire, lightning, a tornado, or a plane crash. There's some weird loophole these guys are exploiting and it's making life difficult.

Full disclosure: I'm literally losing sleep because of this. I worry that I'll never see my stuff again, I worry that I just paid these people to steal everything I own, and I worry that there's no way we can make this right. 


This fundraiser is to raise money to help with legal fees and getting back some of those things I lost (sorry about the crappy text up top that photo, this place won't let you put a photo up if it's too small). We're surviving on one income right now and have no way to fund this on our own.

I left behind my job, my dearest friends, and my close family to start a new life. All I have is my ten T-Shirts and whatever else fit into two suitcases.

Please help put things right.

Help show these people they can't get away with stealing people's stuff.

Help me fight the good fight and finally build a life with my new family in this strange, new country.