Wedding Planning Scam: $6,500 stolen

In 2018, we hired Gillian as a partial wedding planner to help us organize the events outside of the wedding. As part of that, we asked Gillian to organize our shuttle transportation for the weekend. As we worked with her, she asked to manage our payments to make it “easy for us”.

As we got closer to the wedding, Gillian started becoming increasingly pushy about transferring her the money, saying we might not have transportation if we don’t transfer the money. A week before the wedding, we definitely did not want to jeopardize our transportation and so we transferred her the amount due.

Shockingly, a month after the wedding, we discovered that Gillian did not transfer even a deposit to the transportation vendor. She wrote a check to the vendor that bounced. We ended up paying the vendor ourselves.

We’ve communicated with Gillian and gave her many opportunities to return the money but each time she made commitments and never met them. We published a review of her on TheKnot that she deleted, and then she finally sent us a check for the money we are owed.

Given her history, we asked her to confirm that there are enough funds before depositing the check. Initially, she said she’s really sorry but there are not enough funds and that she’s trying to get more contracts signed with other people to be able to return the money to us. Then finally she confirmed we should deposit the check. We deposited it, and it bounced.

To date, Gillian took $6,500 from us.

Barbara and Gil Raichshtien