Wedding Catering Fraud

Location: Portland, Oregon.

My fiancé and I are planning a wedding for the late summer of 2026. Earlier this summer, we booked our dream caterer. We live near one of their locations, love the food and the service, and they can accommodate the gluten free needs of myself and my family. We spent weeks going back and forth with the Catering Manager at the company, negotiating prices, dishes/linens, entrees and appetizers. We visited a location to do a formal tasting of the menu we put together, where we met the Catering Manager and other employees face to face.

After the tasting, we decided to book their services for our wedding. We received an online invoice including details of the services we were booking, spent a day deliberating, and then issued a payment through Venmo (this should have been the first warning sign, in hindsight). We paid through Venmo in large part because the Catering Manager encouraged us to do so, since using an online platform avoided the 5% transaction fee, a significant savings on a purchase this size.

Months later (within the last two weeks), we were contacted by a different employee, who shared that the Catering Manager who we conducted our business with had actually been defrauding customers and stealing (embezzling?) the funds paid by individuals booking their events with the restaurant. The Catering Manager created their own Square account to issue invoices with the company logo, to extract payments from customers without passing those funds on to the restaurant. It is unclear for long this has been happening, but this article describes over $300k in theft affecting more than 250 couples.

Now, the restaurant has relayed to us that they will not honor the invoice that we received and we are just out the funds. We have many questions about the legality of this process, but recognize we are better served by consulting a lawyer who can provide us specific legal advice for our specific situation.

So, the big question: How do we actually engage the services of a lawyer for this issue? What kind of lawyer would we reach out to for consultation about next steps? Has anyone else had a similar experience? What next steps did they pursue?