This is a long story but I (34f) and my husband (34M) were scammed out of 30k by my husband’s brother (37M) who we will call Jack and his wife (37F) who we will call Sarah. I want to preface this by saying hind sight is 20/20. You’re going to be thinking how fucking stupid are these people, which is something I ask myself everyday.

In 2022 I was on maternity leave after having our first child. My husband and I were trying to get a mortgage, we were not in a good place financially at the time and we struggled with finding a bank that would lend to us.

At the time we were spending a lot of time with my husband’s brother and his wife Jack and Sarah. They approached us with a proposal, Sarah had come into a large inheritance, we were never told exactly how much but we were lead to believe it was in the millions. Essentially they offered to buy us a house. So the deal was they would buy us a house and we would give them what we had saved for a down payment which at the time was roughly 20k and we would give them money monthly to “prove” to them we could afford a house and they would hold on to all the money for us until we can go and get a mortgage and pay them back.

Right from the get go I had a bad feeling about it. I had always had a gut feeling about Sarah and Jack that I couldn’t place, but I chalked it up to my inability to trust people. My husband assured me his brother wouldn’t do anything shady to him, so I believed him.

So we got a relator and started looking at houses as time went on every time we said we liked a house or wanted to put an offer on a house Sarah and Jack would find something wrong with the house they would tell us because they were fronting the money and would essentially own the house until we pay them back that they didn’t want to invest in a house with problems. So we would keep looking, I honestly feel like we looked at 100’s of houses and they always found something wrong. So at this time things were starting to get really bad as a whole, I was having a lot of doubts about the situation so my husband and I would constantly fight about it he would insist nothing wrong was happening because his brother would never hurt him like that. My husband was also never home he was working everyday and would pick up extra shifts even overnight shifts to help make extra money so that we could afford to give them monthly money which amounted to about 2k a month. So on top of our rent , car payments , credit bill , houses bills etc we were also paying Jack and Sarah 2k a month.

Money was getting tight, so there would be some months my husband would ask Jack if he could hold on to 200$ and we would pay it back when we can and Sarah and Jack would lecture us saying that if we couldn’t afford this now how would we be able to afford a house, they would gaslight us. It was humiliating.

As months went by things kept getting worse they refused to put an offer on any house we liked and we kept shelling out money. I was alone all the time with our son I don’t have a lot of family support so I was learning to be a mom by myself. It got to a point where I was done I told my husband I no longer wanted to do it this way and we needed to get our money back. At this time my husband was talking with his other brother Jared and things started to unravel. Apparently Jack and Sarah had gone to several of Jacks family members and given them some version of the story we were told and had convinced them to give them large amounts of money, as much as 150k. The best part of this story is that neither of them had jobs, they were literally living off of everyone else’s money.

As things began fall apart , apparently Sarah had several pending court cases for fraud, Jack used this to pin the whole thing on Sarah claiming she was crazy and that he didn’t know there wasn’t any money. I don’t buy this for a second, but most if not all of my husband’s family members believe him.

About a year later everyone has had their money returned including us. I told my husband that I am completely done with Jack and Sarah there is no reconciling and that they will not know our children either. I do not want my family anywhere they are going to be. I have also expressed this to my husband’s family. Jack has claimed he is no longer with Sarah but they are still married and welcomed another child into this world in July. So here is where I ask AITA, any holiday or family event we run into conflict because my husband will come to me and ask if we can go to whatever event is going on at the time I will ask is Jack going to be there he will respond probably, so I always say no. My husband and I will get into a disagreement about this, he will then relay the message to his family and they will get into a disagreement about it. I feel like an outsider , my husband claims to be on the same page as me but keeps asking me to compromise my boundaries for whatever event is going on. I didn’t do anything and I feel like the bad guy. Everyone seems to have forgiven and forgotten.