Reddit Stories - OBSERVED my TREASURE hunter factory take my SPOUSE'S purse at his memorial service

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #tifu #memorialservice #treasurehunter #purse #betrayal #familydrama During a memorial service for my spouse, I witnessed a shocking act when my treasure hunter factory employee took my spouse's purse. This unexpected betrayal left me feeling hurt and confused, questioning the integrity of those I once trusted. The incident has left a lasting impact on our family dynamics. redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, memorialservice, treasurehunter, betrayal, familydrama, emotional, loss, trustissues, personalstory, relationships, grief, workplacebetrayal, community, support, advice, lifeeventsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6816713/support.This episode includes AI-generated content.

I hope you enjoy this story. Observed my treasure hunter factory take my spouse's purse at his memorial service and accumulate more than $100,000 in charges on his plastic money within a month. I permitted her to utilize it, thereafter. Reported her to the police. I, 28F, recently lost my husband to leukemia. My husband and I had been married for three years before this and his diagnosis was revealed to us just a month after our marriage.

It was a devastating time for us, but my husband was a brave man and he was really strong for us until he just couldn't be strong and brave anymore. He succumbed about a month ago and I have still been trying to cope with the loss. He and I met in college and started dating shortly after graduation when I ran into him at the company where I was supposed to be interning at. We were not friends in college, but we knew each other and sometimes talked to each other. I liked him but I was too shy to do anything about it and I think so was he, so it never fructified when we were in college. But when we ran into each other afterward, I took it as a sign

from the universe and we started dating. I don't regret anything, we spent a lot of beautiful years together and all the best memories of my life have been with him. He was a wonderful, smart, sweet, and amazingly beautiful, beautiful person, which is probably why I put up with his mother. My mother-in-law, Veronica, is not a nice person. I hate to say this about another woman, but I had always known that she was a total gold digger. Let's look at the math here, Veronica is just 48. This means she had my husband when she was just 20, but my father-in-law is almost 60. I don't know his exact age, but he is in his late 50s. So that means that Veronica got knocked up by a man almost two decades older than her when she was just 20. Had I been talking about

somebody else, I probably would have given them the benefit of the doubt and wouldn't have labeled them a gold digger. But honestly, Veronica was just that. How do I know that? Well, let's just say that she pretty much confessed to it herself. The first time that I met her was at dinner, and she was in the middle of her third divorce. She separated from my husband's father when my husband was about five years old and it was because apparently, suddenly his advanced age had become a really big problem for her. She was just 20 and didn't even have a college degree, so she had never worked a day in her life. She had been a stay-at-home mom

and had married my husband's father as soon as she could. She locked him down, stayed with him for a couple of years, and then, filed for divorce and walked away with a huge settlement and alimony. She lived off of that for a couple of years, and that combined with the child's support was enough for her.

I know all of this because she bragged about it and wouldn't stop talking about herself, sufficient and street-smart she had been from a really young age. She told me that it was important for women all around the world to be able to look out for themselves and she thought she was the perfect example of that. Then, she found her second husband, and he was a bigger fish compared to her last. He was also almost 15 years older than Veronica and Veronica was just in her late 20s at the time, so she was still pretty young and attractive.

The guy had his own business, so obviously, he was a perfect man for Veronica. She flexed about how he was a married man, but she was a married man, but she was a very good. She managed to impress him and win him over somehow. She laughed about how she had managed to break up their marriage and get him to divorce his wife just for her. He got married just a month after his divorce came through, and by then, Veronica was already pregnant with her second child. She gave birth to her daughter and stayed with her second husband for a significantly longer time this time. She stayed with him until her daughter was eight years old, but unfortunately, this time it was her husband who cheated, but it was better for her because she still got alimony and child support.

And these were rich guys that we were talking about so you best believe that the money was flowing in. Even when she was talking about her second husband, it didn't feel for even a second that she had any regrets about it. She didn't seem to feel bad about the fact that she had broken up somebody's marriage just because she wanted him. And neither did she seem to feel bad about the fact that this guy had turned out to be a dishebag and cheated on her as well. To her, it probably seemed just like a deal that happened after the divorce and her relationships were definitely purely transactional in nature. And finally, she started seeing her third husband a few years after her divorce from her second husband.

At the time, she was probably around 39 and she was done having kids because she was sick of putting her body through that. Two had been enough, her words, not mine. Her third and last husband was around her age, in his 40s, and he was all also a businessman. I think it's safe to say that Veronica had a type and that type was a rich businessman who had a ton of money, and would always keep her happy. She got married after around two years of dating and got divorced after three years of marriage. The reason for that was she wanted to be free and marriage just wasn't sitting right with her anymore because

apparently it was a lot of work for very little payout and her third husband was apparently really suspicious of her all the time so she just couldn't deal with it and wanted out. She had enough money now, thanks to all the child's support and alimony, she had saved some from it and was probably going to get compensated from her third divorce as well. This is the story that she told me when I met her for the first time at dinner. And obviously, the first impression was not a great one. I did not like her at all, and I honestly felt sick. The fact that she had done these things was not as bad as the fact that she was bragging about them and making herself seem like some clever, resourceful, independent woman. She genuinely thought that she was a self-made woman

and it was pretty disturbing to hear her talk about her past. So yes, she was a gold digger and she was proud of it. Now, I actually didn't even get to meet my mother-in-law for a really long time. My husband and I started dating when we were in our early 20s, around 22, but he didn't introduce me to Veronica until we had been together for two years because unsurprisingly, he was not on board with his mother's lifestyle. He knew that she was a gold digger and he was pretty ashamed of it. He had told me about it after we had been together for almost a year and I had kept asking him why he was not introducing me to his mother. He had introduced me to his dad since he was a lot closer to him. But when I kept asking him and I didn't drop the topic, he told me that he

was embarrassed and he hadn't even told his mother about me yet. He said that he was afraid that I wouldn't like her, because, well, you know why, and that would somehow jeopardize our relationship. Only after I had comforted him and reassured him that no matter how bad his mother was, it would not affect our relationship, did he introduce me to her? My husband had warned me about her and told her that her lifestyle choices were ones that I would never agree with, but I had not expected it to be that bad. And I definitely hadn't expected Veronica to be proud of what she was. After that first meeting, I didn't keep in touch with her, and thankfully, she didn't try to stay in touch either.

My husband would visit her occasionally, but that was about it. He didn't cut ties with her because despite everything, she was still his mom, and he told me that he would feel guilty abandoning her since he was the only positive and permanent fixture in her life. Even her daughter didn't talk to her anymore, and she pretty much had nobody to rely on. That was not a surprise at all, but I was really happy that my husband was such a good. good person. I did talk to my father-in-law about Veronica, and he told me that he really regrets having anything to do with her. He told me that he loves his son and that's probably

the best thing that she could have given him but he had been having a midlife crisis because he had been single for a really long time when he met Veronica on a dating app. He had considered that she might be with him for the money but when she got pregnant and decided to keep the baby and insisted that they get married as soon as possible, he couldn't say no because it would be immoral and unethical of him. So he agreed, and when she stayed with him even after the birth of my husband, he actually started to believe that she might have genuine feelings for him. But of course, that was not true, and she left as soon as she could. That really messed him up and he couldn't really bring himself to trust other people again. Of course, he has had relationships

after that, but he says that it's just never been the same for him again. So while he continued to suffer because of what Veronica did to him, she was living it up with no regrets and seemed to be having the time of her life with her husband and her alimony. Anyway, he regretted his first marriage with her, and he was a good man, as far as I knew. Veronica had never been a good person, and that was pretty evident from her history and her attitude towards her past. I wouldn't say that I have had a bad relationship with Veronica because that would not be true. I haven't had any sort of relationship with her at all. Ever since I got married to my husband, I have met her only at family events. She even attends those really selectively, and more often than not, she's missing because she has

other parties to attend since she is just a socialite. And I'm grateful for it, I don't think I would want to meet her more often. She was there at our wedding, but she didn't stay for long and cleared out as soon as she realized that my father-in-law was going to stick around. She was very distant from the family and I appreciated that because I did not want her around. That did not change, even after my husband's diagnosis. She would rarely ever visit, and since my husband was not well enough to visit her, they stopped seeing each other altogether. She would maybe call once in a while, but that was pretty much it. She never put in more of an effort to stay in touch with him or even to check up on him, which I thought was particularly cruel and disgusting, given the fact that he had

never abandoned his mother, even though he had every reason to cut her off because she was straight up a bad person and an even worse mother. But he never gave up on her and the least that she could have done for him was at least visit him a couple of times when he was sick and couldn't even get out of bed because he was too weak. However, she did not, and I wish I could say that I was surprised but I really wasn't. Anyway, this went on for three years and my husband put up a really good fight. Like I said, he was a really strong and brave man and I am so proud that I was able to have known him the way that I did. But he just couldn't fight anymore and a couple of months ago, we were told that he might not make it. So he got his affairs in order while I tried to cope

with the fact that he wouldn't be around anymore while also trying to make the best of my time with him here. The last few months were beautiful and even though he was really weak and could barely do anything for himself, it was all I needed to go on living for the rest of my life. I can't believe that it's over but unfortunately, this is all the time that I had with him. Naturally, when he passed away, I was devastated, and I could barely bring myself to do anything, but I had promised myself that I would be the one to organize his funeral, and I decided to power through everything and arrange for a funeral as beautiful as he was. As I said, Veronica had barely been in touch with us for the past few years, ever since his diagnosis.

But then, last year, she started visiting and talking to my husband, more often. We gradually realized that this was not because she was turning over a new leave, but just because her money was running out. There is only so much you can do with limited money and no source of income. Add to that an absolute lack of financial responsibility, you have a quick way of going broke on your hands and that's what happened to Veronica. She had been living extravagantly for the past few years, and it was a miracle that the money that she had been saving for the years before it even lasted her that long. But now, She had exhausted most of her funds and was buttering my husband because she needed help paying

off all her bills and still maintaining her lifestyle. My husband was a kind man, but he was no fool, and he knew exactly what his mother was trying to do. But he was way too sick to put up a fight with her or demand that she stopped coming to see him so instead, he decided to deal with it as slyly as he could and kept on delaying the conversation. Any time his mother would start talking to him about money, he would steer the conversation somewhere else and he played it really well.

He was clever about it and was able to evade her for almost a year, which was pretty impressive. And Veronica was low, but she wasn't stupid enough to directly demand money from her suffering son. Anyway, my husband was able to evade that for as long as he was alive. And I knew for a fact that Veronica would never demand or even ask for money for me because we definitely did not have that kind of relationship. And around the time of the funeral, I wasn't even thinking about it. any of this anyway. I was really busy on the day of the funeral because there were a lot of guests

to attend to and I had a lot of work. I didn't even have enough time to grieve, because my husband was a pretty well-known guy and he was loved deeply by a lot of people. So it was no wonder that a lot of people had attended his funeral, it was actually pretty sweet. At one point, I thought I had come upstairs because I needed to freshen up a little, but that's when I heard noises from my husband's room. Guests were supposed to limit themselves to the downstairs area. So I had no idea why anybody would come up and I decided to peek into the room to check out who had come up. I was shocked when I realized that it was Veronica who was puttering around in the room. She had her back turned to me so she couldn't see me, but I could see her very well and she was going through stuff on my

husband's bedside table. I was about to go in and confront her but something told me to wait and see what she does because I was curious. A few seconds later, I noticed that she grabbed something small and shoved it into her purse as quickly as she could. I decided to walk away from the door, went to the bathroom and waited for her to go back down. After she was gone, and I had heard her leaving, I decided to go into my husband's room and check what was missing. I realized that it was my husband's wallet that she had shoved into her purse. My husband's wallet still contained all the cards that belonged to him and I hadn't touched it after his passing. He had spent his last couple of days in the hospital and the wallet had been at home because I wasn't going to let him

use it for anything. So it had stayed in its place, and since I was having the funeral, just four days after his demise, his lawyer, and I hadn't had the time to cancel his financial tie-ups either. We figured we would do it in the due course of time because anyway, it was not going to be in use, so it wouldn't matter. But when I saw Veronica take that wallet and leave, I knew that she was going to use it for her own gain. For a few minutes after that, I was just disgusted by how heartless and psychotic this was. I can't imagine anybody who would attend their own son's funeral and then steal their wallet. I mean, that's literally crazy. But I decided to let her get away with it because I knew that this was going to be illegal and she would get into a whole lot of trouble for it.

I didn't care about the consequences, because I wasn't the one who was going to have to face anything. So the day went on as usual and Veronica left shortly after I had seen her in the bedroom. I saw her sneaking out, not even daring to say goodbye to me, her son's widow. For the next few weeks, I didn't hear from her at all, and I knew that she was up to something but I didn't know what. The next few weeks, I was barely in touch with anybody because I was still sorting out all the legal aspects because my husband was now gone. The only person I spoke to was his lawyer, and since they had been really close friends when he was alive, he had known everything about Veronica, and I felt comfortable telling him

what I had let her get away with. I just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't get into trouble for permitting this to happen, and he told me that it was unlikely, and even if I did get questioned, then I could just say that I was grieving and people would pretty much believe it without a second thought. So that's how it went and earlier this week, Veronica finally got back in touch with me and she told me that she had accidentally picked up my husband's wallet at the funeral and hadn't even realized it for so long. But now that she had discovered it, she wanted to return it to me, so I could cancel all the cards and stuff. I told her to visit me instead because I had already spoken to people at the bank and asked them to mail me an itemized bank statement for all the

expenses on both the cards and they had done so just a few days before Veronica reached out to me. I had also gotten the cards cancelled, which was definitely by Veronica. I wanted to return them because now they were just pieces of plastic and were useless to her. But she had been, but she She didn't want me to know that they were not working because otherwise, I would realize that she had been using them. Little did she know that I already knew everything and she was about to get screwed. She visited me a couple of hours after the phone call and once she was here, I didn't even waste a second before handing her the bank statement for the credit card.

And I've got to say, she was really not holding back on her expenses. She had racked up a debt of more than $100,000 in less than a month and very little of it was from paying off her essential bills. Most of it was frivolous expenses and funnily enough, flight tickets to another city every weekend for the past month. But I don't want to get into that. The point was that she had spent a lot of money and I told her that I knew she had been the one to take the card on purpose and she had been using it so far. It was really stupid of her to expect to get away with something like this because of course banks keep track of what you spend and where you spend it. She was shocked, but she recovered quickly and told me that this was her

son's money so she was allowed to do whatever she wanted with it and I was nobody to question her right. I thought that it was crazy because it was the credit card that she had been using, not the debit. So she had actually been racking up debt for him, not spending the money that he already had. I told her that she had better returned the money and clear the debt or else. I would be forced to tell the bank officials that the card had gone missing after my husband's funeral and I hadn't even noticed it until recently when I cancelled all of them. And then I would tell them that it was she who was using it, which was illegal, and they would have no problem tying her to the card because there were obviously other expenses and records

to prove it. So then she would go to prison and would stay there until she was really old. She started throwing a fit as soon as I said all of that and told me that I was the most horrible person on earth for letting this happen and screwing her over on purpose. She believed that what I did was pure evil and morally wrong on so many levels that she couldn't even fathom that anybody in the right mind would be capable of something like this. I think she must have cursed at me for around half an hour before she finally left, in tears. I've already spoken to the bank since then and told them that the card had gone missing. And now, they are going to deal with her. The problem is that I was recently talking to my mother about this and I told her all about what I had pulled off and that Veronica might even go to

jail now. I thought that I had been righteous and I still think so because all of this could have been avoided if Veronica hadn't been a nasty little thief. But unfortunately, my mother thinks that what I did was horrifying and she can't even speak to me because she agrees with Veronica and believes that what I did was too much. She hasn't been speaking to me and says that if I testify against Veronica then she'll never speak to me again. I don't understand how this is my fault because I was not the one who was stealing my son's wallet at his funeral to pay for God knows what and support my extravagant lifestyle. I feel like my mom is making a big deal out of this, but I feel really bad now. Ida for allowing my mother-in-law to steal my husband's wallet at his

funeral just to get her in trouble? Update 1. Hi, so most of you were of the opinion that both Veronica and I are messed up, that might be true, but at least I'm not a thief. And at least I was not using my son's credit card to go see my lover every weekend. Yep, I received a call from the guy that she had been seeing and he told me that what I had done was disgusting and I had better watch my back. So far, I've been facing the consequences of my actions. My mom is not talking to me and my dad thinks that this is going to be a difficult problem to fix because my mother is really big on morals and ethics and stuff. And I also have to worry about some guy who is threatening me. So no, so far this has not been great and I'm actually kind of worried about what might happen next.

My husband's lawyer, his friend, has told me that he's going to be there for me, no matter what. So that's reassuring, but I'm still feeling kind of weird about what has been happening. Because there is a 100% chance that Veronica might end up in jail. Update 2, hello. Just wanted to inform you guys quickly that my mother has threatened to disinherit me if I testify against Veronica in court and that is literally the craziest thing. I don't know why she's doing it, but I have decided that I'm not going to let her get to me. Yes, what I did might have been wrong and it came from a place of hatred and revenge, but I didn't ask Veronica to rack up a debt

of this crazy amount. I didn't ask her to steal the wallet and use the credit cards of her deceased son. She did that all on her own, and even if I hadn't been involved, she definitely would have gotten into trouble for it. So I don't know why my mother thinks that. that it's okay to blame me. If she has to blame somebody and have the moral high ground, it should be Veronica and not me. Update 3, hey, everyone. So it's been a couple of weeks since I came online here and I have been really busy. My mother has decided to cut all ties with me. She didn't remove me from her will because my dad didn't agree with it, but she says that if I testify against Veronica, then she will literally never speak to me again. She says that she wants

to believe that she raised a good person and I'm not acting like one right now. Honestly, I don't even know what that is supposed to mean because I'm not trying to be a good person right now. I'm just trying to do right by my husband and myself. That's all that I'm interested in doing. So for her to say weird stuff like that and expect me to feel bad about it, it's just stupid. The trial has already begun and I'm supposed to appear in court for the testimony in a couple of days. I already know what I'm going to say and I know that. I know that that Veronica will get a lot of heat for this. But do you know what? It's not my fault and I refuse to be blamed for it. I'm not going to take accountability for somebody else's psychotic behavior and be

okay with it. I'm sorry, but that is not how this works. So my mother can be as mad as she wants to and even stick to what she said and not talk to me ever again, but I'm not backing down anymore. Sometimes being right is more important than being good, especially when it comes to people like Veronica, who have never been taught a lesson in their life. My father-in-law actually thinks that this is great and she totally deserves it because she had it coming for a long time. So there, at least some people agree with what I'm doing and these are people who know Veronica the best. I still haven't heard anything from the guy who called me up to threaten me a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not scared anymore. I don't see any reason to be scared.

of doing the right thing. Update 4. So, the trial is over and Veronica has been sentenced to 10 years in prison. She had been pleading, not guilty in the beginning, but with time, it became pretty clear that that was not true. It feels really weird that another person is going to be imprisoned because of what I said, but this was bound to happen. It's crazy but yeah, that's what happened.

My mother lived up to her promise and has blocked me everywhere, after telling me that she was really disappointed in me and that she was never going to speak to me for the rest of her days. I don't know what's going to happen with us, but I'm not going to apologize for anything. Because I don't care. My dad and I are still in touch and are going to continue speaking to each other because he's not a weirdo who thinks it's wrong to send bad people to jail. So that's about it. Now that everything's wrapped up, I'm going to try and process my husband's passing and cope with that. Thank you so much for hearing me out here.