Bankruptcy asset investigators — lawyers and accountants who serve as chapter 7 bankruptcy trustees — are learning what most teenagers have already figured out, which is that you can’t always believe what you see on Facebook and Twitter, according to a commentary in the Wall Street Journal today. “Gotcha” moments in which they discover people in bankruptcy posing in glamorous-looking jewelry, piloting boats and ATVs and even displaying buckets full of cash have fallen flat as the items turn out to be fake, or not theirs at all. Last month, a New Mexico trustee was questioning a bankrupt man about his hobbies, pushing him to discuss his fishing gear and identify his preferred brands, says the bankrupt man’s lawyer, Michael Daniels. The impatient trustee finally snapped, “You were using a much nicer reel on your Facebook page!” Daniels recalls. The man replied that he had borrowed gear for the shot. This October, when Ido Alexander saw photos a young man had posted on social media, he thought he had hit the bankruptcy jackpot. Alexander, a Florida lawyer working for a court-appointed trustee, dispatched an appraiser to the man’s home to inspect the expensive-looking gold chains and other jewelry he had been posing in, which he hadn’t declared as assets in court filings. The appraiser made another discovery that is becoming all too common in the age of social-media braggadocio. “At the end of the day, it was really costume jewelry,” Alexander says.
