With that many lies, diligence won't even help. "Our QuickBooks has been down all morning." redacted I flew to Dallas to evaluate a $600K SDE security business. I knew immediately he was lying. I worked at a software company. If QuickBooks had been down all morning, it would've been on CNN. Instead of leaving, I stayed to see how bad it would get. The office manager was in on it. The next day, I sat through 4 hours of meetings where every employee had been coached to act like they worked at a profitable business. They all knew it was losing money. ------------------------------------------- Here's the takeaway: A lot of buyers want to believe sellers are just confused. That the numbers are "messy." That nobody's really trying to deceive them. Some sellers are running full-blown deception operations. Not one person lying. An entire organization coordinated to extract your money. When you walk into a site visit and everything feels too smooth—everyone's on message, every answer is polished, every employee sounds rehearsed—that's not a well-run business. That's a performance. Your job is to see through it before you wire the money. This is not a game, folks.