Trustee in Bankruptcy Requests for Bank Deposit Detail, No Visible Means of Support

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I had a few deposits over the last 90 days from eBay / PayPal into my account. 700-1500 maybe totaling 8k in 90 days. I attached my PayPal statement that shows 0 balance at time of filing. It was random stuff I sold to help pay for Xmas instead of using credit cards.

What’s considered a “large” deposit when a trustee looks at your previous bank statements?

Jay’s Answer (Jay Nixon, Bankruptcy Attorney in Janesville, & Kenosha WI)

If the total of all these small transactions was $8K, they definitely become a "large deposit" collectively and each "small" one, regardless of size, will be of interest to the trustee, who will probably want to see all the eBay details on each transaction, including the online identities of the buyers and the source of the merchandise sold. Sales or transferred where you were paid fair value to the items sold, by outside 3rd parties, will end up being of little or no interest to the trustee, although the opposite will be true for "sweetheart" deals, especially to close friends or family. Those can be undone, and the value recovered from those who received it. If you run an E-Bay or other online business, you will therefore need to declare and claim it as exempt, or risk losing it, together with any of its assets. In bankruptcy, honesty is rewarded above anything else, where the prize of a "discharge" or forgiveness of most debt, is easily obtained by remembering that rule. And, the opposite, that lying (known as the federal crime of bankruptcy fraud) is punished more severely than any other sin, by denial of the discharge. Bankruptcy rules are also cruelly enforced and investigated by the FBI, with referrals to the IRS US Attorney, or other agencies when things like tax fraud are uncovered. If you claim the business on paper, and net out all its expenses (including all IT expenses for an online business), however, it probably will have little or no net value and is therefore easily protected from the trustee, as well as from your creditors, during a bankruptcy case. You therefore need to take this seriously and make sure that you are telling your experienced bankruptcy lawyer the whole story. Attempting to navigate these dangerous waters on your own, however, often leads to disaster.