Better and worse ways to spot a liar
Not sure if trying to "trap" the liar is always the right way to go. Once I had to work with a freelance web master and we were trying to cancel his contract and make him transfer the domain name to us (an association I was working for). I confronted him by asking politely for a written copy of his contract because I thought he was lying about the length of the contract. He was insulted and claimed there was a verbal agreement several years ago. I don't know if he was right or wrong about that, but after that he would make up things about basically anything (such as, that changing the owner/registrar of our domain would cause his other customers' files to be deleted etc.). We now offered him money to break out of the "contract" early, but now he was already stuck in his lies. If he would say that it was technically possible to move the domain name, he would also expose his earlier lies.<p>After almost a year of arguing with him, he offered to transfer the domain before the end of the "contract". But for "technical reasons" it had to be done after the hosting company had shut down the web site and e-mail, which caused some downtime for us. In retrospect it would have been much easier if I hadn't questioned him in the first time.