Matthew Cox | Inside True Crime Podcast - Scammer REGRETS Challenging An FBI Agent | Fraud Stories

Episode Date: June 17, 2024

Scammer REGRETS Challenging An FBI Agent | Fraud Stories

A hundred different families gave him a total of $10 million. My phone rings at my desk. I got my FBI, Special Agent Simon here. And it's this voice on the other end of the phone going, He's here! He's here! Just because you did this horrible thing doesn't make you a horrible person. We're all just victims of the circumstances of our lives. I'm so sorry.

I'm not kidding. All I can think about is that guy goes. going to trial. In Chicago, there was a guy named Gilberto Granados Lopez. This is long before I was an agent. And he was a, he actually had a community newspaper. He was a Mexican-American who had a community newspaper, and he'd been in a lot of legal trouble,

and he was kind of an activist type. And somehow he set his sights on this woman in Chicago, who was running a charity for, like, women and children in need in the Mexican-en-en-executive. American community of Chicago. And he was writing these scathing editorials about her, just absolutely slanderous stuff in his community newspaper. And so she eventually reaches out to him and says, why are you writing these things about me? You don't know me. I've done nothing wrong. But you're destroying my charity and you're destroying my life. And he said to her very brazenly

that I will stop if you give me $50,000 cash. It shakes her down. It's total extortion. She's like, let me get back to you. She can. contacts the FBI. The FBI then why, and not me, better and smarter agents. The FBI wires her up. You know, meets him again. He recount, she's like, you, so if I give you this $50,000, you're going to not write these horrible things about me. You're going to stop it. And he's like, you got it. And so she gives him the $50,000 and he gets arrested on the extortion. A pretty clear cut case. Very brazen. He goes to trial and he loses. a jury trial. Why would you go to trial if you've got wires against you or sorry, recordings

against you? Clearly, you shook her down. You've met plenty of people who chose to not accept the very generous plea agreement. He was not one of them. He decided to fight it. There was not much of a defense put up as far as I could tell. But because he was just a journalist and doing a nonviolent crime, he was let out between his conviction and told to come back in 90 days for his sentencing. Okay. Right? You've seen that.

Yeah. And not everybody gets held awaiting sentencing. And he disappears, never to be seen or heard from again. So smash cut to December 1995. I'm a brand new FBI agent assigned to Chicago. And what they would do in Chicago at the time for new agents is that they would assign you like an impossible case that you're not going to solve. We would call them old dog cases.

Right. And the idea is that that you're not going to be. damaging some real investigation by being a stupid young agent. It's really just an opportunity to get you out there. Cut your teeth, something to cut your teeth on that they don't really expect anything of. They expect nothing on it. In fact, they would be shocked and appalled if you actually made the case. They literally just want to get you out there knocking on doors, holding your credentials right side up. Right. And then, you know, interviewing people about this case that doesn't matter. That's really old. No one's going to solve. No one really cares about. And then doing the paperwork correctly, senior supervisor sends it back. It's all red. It looks

like you had a nosebleed on it and correct you with all the correct. then you make it. And so you're learning how to be an FBI agent during this probationary period. Okay. So I was assigned to catch this fugitive, Gilberto Granados Lopez, who had been gone for about six years at this point. Right. Okay. And so I was a CPA coming from a big firm. I had never done a fugitive investigation. I did fine at the FBI Academy, but this is my first case. And so I pull the case file and it's like, you know, this giant, like this is paper, right? This is, you know, 95. So the FBI had not gone to. digital with its case files. Paper after paper after paper from the original investigation. And I had never caught a fugitive. So I remember I took the giant case file over to the Violent Crime Task Force fugitive squad. And I found a guy there who was a deputy U.S. Marshal on the FBI Task Force, kind of in a giant old, grizzled Chicago type of

guy. And I said, listen, my name's Tom Simon. I'm a new agent. I've been assigned this fugitive investigation. I'm a CPA by trade, so I'm not really experienced. experienced in fugitive investigations, can you give me some pointers as to what steps I should be taking to try to catch this fugitive? And the guy, let me see that. He's leaping through and he goes, all right, Tom, here's the deal. This guy's Mexican. He's from Mexico.

He went back to Mexico. And he goes, you're never catching up. Mexico ain't going to extradite this guy. So here's what you should do. Go to your desk and read a comic book for a while. And then eventually your supervisor is going to see you and he's going to tell you that why aren't you working and you're going to tell him because this guy's in Mexico and you can't find them. And then he's going to assign you a real case and you can spend your time doing

that. Here you go. And so I'm like, I'm like, really, that's the advice I'm getting from you? You owe me lunch. Yeah, yeah. So it didn't sit right with me, the idea of going and sitting and reading a comic book at my desk, although I kind of liked comic books at the time. So I thought, well, this whole thing's a big charade. I'm going to play along with the charade. And I begin going through the case file, talking to people who were interviewed in the original case and people who knew this guy and family members and stuff like that. And I went out there and began knocking on doors and asking questions about, have you seen this guy? Do you know where he is? And no one knew where he was and no one had seen him in years, but I learned a lot about him as a person. And

some of that was really interesting. Guilberto Granados Lopez back in the 1950s and 60s. It makes me laugh that you say his whole name every time. So go ahead. We weren't really on a first name basis at this point of the story. He was the tango king of Chicago map. He was the best tango dancer anyone in Chicago had ever seen. Nobody had seen a guy cut up a dance floor in the ballrooms of Chicago as good as Gilberto Granados Lopez. Right. He may be doing this in Mexico. You're getting ahead of yourself. You're getting ahead of yourself. Do you read ahead in these mystery novels or do you enjoy every page of them? No, so, so it's very, I'm learning a lot about him. He was this great tango dancer, very respected. And I'm out there talking to all these old people

who were part of like the tango community of Chicago back in like the 50s and 60s. I guess there was a thriving ballroom dancing scene there. So none of which got me actually closer to catching him. I thought you were going to say that you met somebody who said like, oh yeah, I know him. We were down in Mexico last month with him. Stay tuned, Matt. Okay. So one thing I do learn, and you'll find this interesting, is that he was still receiving social security direct deposits to his bank account.

So I call the Social Security Office of Inspector General. I'm like, hey, not for nothing, but what's going on here? And they said that as long as he's a fugitive, he is allowed to get his social security benefits because he was a senior citizen at the time. But once I catch him and he goes into prison, then goes get cut off. And so I got a good lead here, right? Because I know what bank account in Chicago, the money is going to. So I go to the bank. And I say the guy, I show my badge.

I say the bank president, it's a very small little community. bank. I say, hey, listen, I'm looking for this fugitive, and he's getting his social security payments here. Is there any way, you know, you could tell me, is he coming in to get his money? Is the money being transferred to another bank somehow? What's going on here? So the banker, he should not have done this, but he was very nice. He like, pulls it up on his screen, is the bank president. And he's like, yeah, the money's just kind of accumulating there.

And it's been accumulating there for, you know, several years in the bank account. And no one's drawing upon it at all. It's just this kind of increased balance. And I go, so he's never come into the bank to get his money. And he goes, no, it's just getting bigger and bigger and bigger in his bank account every month when the Social Security payment is deposited. Seems like a waste. Yeah. So it was a dead end for me.

I give the guy my business card and said, all right, if he comes in to get his money, you call me, I'm going to show up. I'll have my blue jacket on. I'll say, FBI at the back. I'll say, get on the ground. And it'll be a very heroic moment for him. He's like, yeah, no problem. I'll call you. So he takes it shakes my hand.

I leave. Dead end. So I continue to kind of go through the steps, talking to former tango dancers about him and learning about my guy. And then one day, I'm sitting at my desk and I get a letter in the mail. Now, you have many young viewers. So the letters are what we had before email. And it had no return address. And I open it.

And it was addressed to me. And I open it. And it is a photocopied page of a magazine called Dancing USA Magazine. It's a trade publication for the ballroom dancing industry. I know you're a subscriber, but I wasn't. And it was the page that was, photocopied was from like two or three months earlier and it was from the letters to the editor page. And it was, and I looked through there and there was a letter to the editor in Dancing USA Magazine

from a few months earlier from Gilberto Granados Lopez. And he was writing about that, I guess the magazine had done a feature on the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, this big, beautiful ballroom and is really ornate. And the letter was basically saying how he remembers his time as the Tango king of Chicago and dancing in the Aragon ballroom and how. how upset he was that the ballroom had fallen into disrepair and was now hosting rock and roll shows. Who mailed you the letter? Do you not know? To this day, I don't know.

Probably somebody you had to. It had to be. I gave me a business card to everybody, right? And which had my address on it at the FBI building in Chicago. And so one of the people was still tied into the Tango community and was leafing through. And so, oh, my God, Gilbert Doranos Lopez wrote a letter to the editor. And it was kind of interesting because I had seen the Beastie Boys in concert at the Aragon Ballroom, the night before I got the letter about the Gilbert Donaldos Lopez complaining about the

Aragon Ballroom. But now I got a lead. Right. And think this through. This guy dancing U.S. One is proof of life, right, because he was an older fellow at this point. And so I know he's alive somewhere. And what else do I know about him? Think of. I mean, well, I mean, he wrote a letter to this to the editor. I can go to the editor. Maybe he still got the address. Maybe he's something. Maybe there's lead there. Right. He reads a magazine. Okay. Continue another step. Where's he getting this magazine? This is a trade publication for the

ballroom thing. Oh, so he's probably, he probably pays for a subscription and he gets it. He's a subscriber, right? If he's a subscriber under his name. Right. Yeah. This is good. Right. But right now at the beginning in 1996, this is still very kind of pre-internet, early days of the internet. I got to find

Dancing USA Magazine, because I don't have a copy of the magazine. And Walgreens doesn't have this magazine. So what I do is I get on the phone and I start calling around to different ballroom, ballroom dancing class places in Chicago saying, hey, this is kind of a crazy question. I'm with the FBI. Do you subscribe to Dancing USA Magazine? And I call around in like the third Arthur Murray dance studio I call and say, yeah, we got a bunch of copies just sitting there collecting dust in our waiting room.

I go, could you go get one? And the guy goes and gets it. And it starts flipping. And I go, go to the first couple pages. You're going to see like a page that has like the editor's name and the writer's names and stuff like that. And at the bottom, they may say it. And so Dancing USA Magazine at the time was published by a company in Omaha, Nebraska. And so I find out, okay, this is good.

So I next call in the old days, I find out what the area code was for Omaha, Nebraska. I called that area code, 555-1-2, and they get the directory assistance for Omaha, Nebraska. I ask for the number for Dancing USA Magazine. It's all old school. This is all old-school. None of this exists. This is like black and white TV stuff. And so now I get the phone number for Dancing USA Magazine.

And then I cold called Dancing USA Magazine. They answer the phone, Dancing USA Magazine. And I have no reason on earth why they would believe me, but I identified myself. My name is Tom Simon. I'm an FBI special agent. I'm conducting an investigation where I'm looking for a fugitive. I have reason to believe that fugitive is a subscriber to your magazine. I'm wondering if you would be willing to look up subscriber records and tell me if you have a

subscriber named Gilberto Granados Lopez and tell me where he is receiving this magazine. And again, 2020, that person hangs up the phone. That person thinks I'm involved in some kind of scam. 1996, hold please. She comes back to three minutes later. He goes, okay, I have his subscription card here. She gives me his address in Mexicali, Mexico. So I'm right back where I started from. No, you're a lot closer. You know he's in Mexico, but at least you have a... I'm in Mexico, but Mexico is not going to extradite him to the U.S. for this crime. Well, you got a high, you got to go down there with a black bag and like a couple of guys and just hit him with a taser and throw the bag over him, sit tight, and drag him off to the,

you know, throwing the back of a trunk and whew, right through. You may be surprised to learn that Guberto Granados Lopez was not that high of a priority for the FBI in 1926. You rushing into the fugitive task force and screaming, I got him, man, exactly, explaining what you got. They'd be like, gas up the FBI plane. We're going to Mexicali. Oh, these young guys.

These young guys kill me. Yeah. So what I did, though, is, is, you know, I sat around just sort of thinking about how I can get him there and get him, you know, how I can, you know, find him and get him back. And they, and everyone was, and I called around and everyone was saying there's zero chance that Mexico is going to extradite this guy to the U.S. on this. And so I decided to write, write a letter to him. And, and I wrote a letter. I created a fake letterhead. It was called the Fletcher group.

Right. And, you know, with the masthead in an address and phone, a fake address and a phone number. Now, back in these days, this is pretty much pre-cell phone for the FBI. Every pod of desks are, it was like Barney Miller or like four desks were just like together in the squad area. And they, like, you know, a bunch of them. There was a phone in the middle of it called the hello phone. Hold on a second. Do you know what Barney Miller is?

God, I knew it too. I love. I used to love. And then they had the spin-off fish. Avegota. Yeah. so disappointing anyway okay so think of a bunch not not like a cubicle farm like it is today but a bunch of old time metal desks pressed up against each other and in the middle of those was

an old school landline phone that was not attributable to the fbi it was called the hello phone and you would use it for kind of like quasi undercover operations and so when that phone rang if you were in the squad area you would answer hello and see and to see what they have to say see where this goes. And so I've used a hello phone number on my masthead for the Fletcher group. And in my letter that I wrote him read like this, Matt, it said, Dear Gilberto Granos Lopez, my name is Tom Fletcher. I'm president of the Fletcher group. We are a television production company. And we have been assigned we're on contract with PBS, the public broadcast system in the U.S. And we're doing a feature on America's greatest ballrooms, a series of 12 episodes.

So it's talking about America's greatest ballrooms, hosted by famous actor and noted tango dancer, Robert Duvall. Matt, did you know Robert Duvall was a tango dancer? I learned at the time, but you know who probably also knew that Robert Duval was a tango dancer? I mean, Alberto Granados Lopez. And so, as I said, we're aware of your history as the tango king of Chicago and your experience in the Aragon ballroom. We want to fly you. All expenses paid round trip to Chicago to go to the Aragon Ballroom and be interviewed by Robert Duvall on camera about your memories of the ballroom in its heyday before it fell into disrepair. If you're interested, please contact me at this number.

And then at the end, I said, I really hope that you accept our offer because we want to recapture the glory of the Aragon Ballroom. This is clearly something passionate to him. He's passionate about. Right. And I wanted to make sure I threw in the idea of recapturing something in there. And so signed Tom Fletcher. Put a couple stamps on for Mexico. Throw it in the mailbox. Think nothing of it.

So you know what I was thinking you were going to do? I was thinking you were going to say, like, you worked for the bank and that his social security was accruing. And that if he did not claim it soon, it would be, the account would be listed as being a base. and the money would be returned. We discussed that. We discussed that at length, the idea of telling him to go to an affiliate bank in El Paso, but just the logistics were just difficult. And then he starts calling the bank, and it's just, it would have, it would need.

But it's true. Like, they would be like, yeah, there's money, and it's just accruing. This is how much it is. Yeah, but the idea, the idea, what we are thinking is that we're cutting off that spigot of money unless you come claim it. And so that was our, that was our original, like, ruse, their thought. Right. But then the bank didn't know, have an address.

for him in Mexico. Right. But you could, you know, like, I mean, it's more so now, like, I think when Obama took over, or became, took over, became, when he became president, he actually did something, I don't know what it was, but signed some bill where a lot of these banks where things were abandoned, like, let's say, it's cheated to the state. Yeah. So, yeah, they're like, look, it's, we've been holding $400. We're taking it. Yeah. So, and they set up these things the um like the florida the in florida it's called like the florida treasury it goes into website and you can look up your name in it and see that like hey i had 12 dollars from uh that i overpaid the utility company that's sitting there waiting for me and you could claim it when i got

to the halfway house my buddy told me about it um and he's like well you ought to do this because you've been gone forever you probably have some stuff i'm like i got nothing i looked it up i had uh i want to say it was almost three thousand dollars in there from diff like $1,200 for this $600 for like homeowners insurance for some reason. I don't know why they would, but I didn't question anything. It's like, hey, $600, $1,200, $800, almost $3,000. It's found of money. Yeah, they signed it.

They cut you check. Right. It's you. But that wasn't a big thing back then. That wasn't until years later. But banks do, like sometimes people will, like somebody dies and they'll hire an investigator to track this person down. We had gone around and round around about the ways to leverage that.

And there were just too many pitfalls. Right. And this seemed more. like a kind of pure play that we could control the dialogue. We didn't need to enlist a banker to lie to their customers and stuff like that. And you know he's passionate about it.

You know, you don't write a letter to the editor. This is his jam, right? Like, he's still writing letters to the editor like 20 years after he danced his last dance. And so I sent it there. And like 10 days go by and then that hello phone rings while I'm sitting there in the squad area.

I answer it. Hello? And it's him. It's Gilberto Granados Lopez. And Matt, he was so excited to be a part of this show. He was coming all over himself. He could not wait to come to Chicago and be interviewed at the Aragon Ballroom by Robert Duvall. And so I stay professional.

I say, well, it's great. Well, we'd love to send you a round-trip ticket. In my mind, I'm thinking, well, I'm hoping he's only going to use half of that. And we're picking dates, and he picked a date. And by this point, a lot of 1996 had elapsed. So we were looking at like December, it was early December before Christmas. And don't feel sorry for him. And the story falls apart when you start feeling sorry for this guy.

And so we send him the tickets. You know, I buy the tickets, you know, using like cash or whatever back when you could go do that with United Airlines and send him the tickets. And told him I put him up in a nice hotel and all that. And he keeps calling over the course of like the next couple days. Why, would you like me to bring memorabilia from my time? I said, yeah, bring the memorabilia. Absolutely. Bring it all.

And so smash cut to December, 1996, pre-9-11. I'm standing there at the end of the jetway when you could do that with a little sign in my hand that said, Gilberto Granados Lopez, watching person after person, after person getting off the airplane. And none of whom were Gilberto Granados Lopez. I'm standing there waiting and waiting and waiting for this guy. And everyone's getting off the plane and just walking right past me in my little suit with a sign that says Gilbert Do Granados Lopez. And then finally, like, some of the crew members are getting off, the guys that the brooms are getting on.

And I'm just about ready to turn around. And I see him walking down the jetway toward me, kind of doing a little old man shuffle. He'd gained quite a bit of weight. And his eyes lit up when he sees me there with the sign. And he walked up and he goes, Mr. Fletcher, I go, Mr. Lopez, he puts out his hand to shake mine. I put my hand in his, put it behind his back, and put the handcuffs on him and bring him in.

Oh, were there, it was there. It wasn't just you. There was another agent there. Okay. And then somebody in the car waiting to drive us back to the office. What did he say? Well, I feel kind of bad for the little extortion. Don't feel bad for him. A little extortionate.

This story is designed to make me look cool. So please do not shatter this. No, so as we're driving back to the FBI, office for booking. He asked me if it would be okay for us to swing by the Aragon ballroom to tell them that he can't be on the show. I said we'd let him know. Well, you're just not getting this argument. Mr. Lopez. I don't seem to understand. I'll give you a picture of he and I. You guys can put it in there. I took a picture with him. Yeah. He's got his handcuffs on. He's doing this. I'll show you the picture. It's not

terribly far from that. And so, okay, so we go back to the office, you know, process them. You know, keep on, he'd already been convicted of this crime. Yeah. The judge, who was his trial judge, was still on the bench, you know, what, eight years later, whatever it is, and, you know, many years later, and remembered the case. And, and so, so Lopez ended up getting eight years in prison. And, well, more for the, for the abscondion, right? Is it called absconding? at that point, right? I'm sure he didn't, it wasn't escape. I'm sure that the,

he did not get the low end of the guidelines. I don't believe he was charged with any new crimes. But the judge, you know, when you take a look at the guidelines, who knows, for a non-violent, non-threatening extortion, which is what he was originally convicted of. I don't think it would have been eight years.

But the judge will never tell you that. As long as it's within the guideline range, he loses his ability to appeal the sentence. And so that was it. So I caught the Tango King. But then there's this weird little epilogue to the story. So years later, you know, that was 96, we get, you know, I become an adult in the FBI. My voice changes.

I begin shaving. Right. And 9-11 happens. I get on a terrorism financing squad. I'm doing like, you know, important kind of big global cases. And one day my phone rings at my desk. I'm like, FBI, especially agent Simon here. and it's this voice on the other end of the phone

going, he's here, he's here. I'm like, I'm sorry, who's this? What's it? What are you talking about? Who's here? Who is this? It was the banker. Gilberto Granados Lopez had gotten out of prison,

paid his debt to society, and then gone to the bank to try to withdraw his social security money. I had never told the banker we caught him. He had kept my business card for nearly a decade at that point waiting for the Gilberto Granados Lopez to come in so I could go arrest him like I'd promised I would. I was like, sir, I am so sorry. I caught him years ago. He's already served his prison sentence. As far as I know, that's his money. Please, you know, give him what's his.

Thank you so much. Very interesting, right? Like, I thought you were going to say he died in jail. It's going to be a lot. He died a few years later. He was an older fellow. So what are your coworkers say when you caught me? Yeah, did you go back to the guy and say, hey well you don't want to spike you don't want to spike the ball um i do you know that guy it became a very fun story that i've been telling for nearly you know 30 years at this point and people knew i had done it and it it i think it may have cemented my reputation with some of the supervisors that i can bring some creativity to the job that's not good i need to go to i need to do a hole oh in your face bro it's better to it's better to act like you've been here before you know

Aged, hey, just doing my job. Yeah. Just doing my job. So anyway, so that's the story of the Tango King. Do you have any others? We have any other financial crime? All right, so here's a fun story that I think your viewers might enjoy. So many, many years ago, there...

I feel bad for Lopez. Like, the poor little guy. Don't feel bad for Lopez. He's a bad guy in the story. I honestly kind of forgot what he did. He was trying to extort $50,000 from a children's charity. He was trying to rip off. a children's charity that was helping out like widows and orphans in the Mexican-American

community of Chicago. He was a bad guy. They're fine. He probably kicked his cat. He probably kicked his cat. He might have he did a surgery or something. There was nothing sweet about this old man. There was nothing sweet about this old man. He sounded very sweet when he came and then he wanted to call he wanted to swing by the ballroom to make sure like, you know, he seems. I mean, he was deceived by me, but he wasn't a sweet man. He's a bad guy. Your empathy for bad guys is. It's appalling. It's appalling. Hey, real quick, just wanted to let you guys know that we're looking for guests for the podcast.

If you think you'd be a good guest, you know somebody. Do me a favor. You can fill out the form. The link is in our description box. Or you can just email me directly. Email is in the description box. So back to the video. Okay.

All right. I don't know if you remember. We're going back in time a little bit, but not as far as that one. There was a bestselling book that became also. a best-selling Netflix video called The Secret. Do you remember that? Yeah, The Secret. Oh, God. What was the author's name, Rhonda Barrett or something like that? Horrible. Somebody made much, I only read like a couple chapters. Yeah, it was like, like dumb-dums all across the world really fell in love with this book. And the author was on Oprah. Yeah. And the idea behind the secret is that if you want something

in your life, whether it's success on YouTube or whether it's money or a husband, you don't have to do anything for it. All you need to do is think about it and concentrate about it. Manifested. Well, right. Now we call it manifest. with all the dumb dums on TikTok who were into this. But that was before, this was before that. Anyway, and this book was a massive bestseller. Like, could not have been a bigger bestseller. And then Oprah, like, supercharged it when she had the moron author on the show.

Yeah. It was like, it was like 150 pages and it was tiny. It was like this big. You know what I'm saying? It wasn't a, each page had, you know, a hundred words on it. A couple platitudes about, like, every morning, like, you know, like, write the word money and stick it on your mirror and look at it every money and money will find you, you know, stuff like that. Like, you know, it's absolute horseshit. And so, so the secret's this giant best-selling

book. And so there was a fellow in Chicago who was sort of, I mean, I'm not just not Chicago. And there was a fellow in Honolulu where I was working at the time as an FBI agent named Albert Perkins. And he had a brainstorm. He had a brainstorm that he was going to go on, like, he was going to become a motivational speaker. And he was going to talk about how he was going to offer an investment program based on the tenants in the book, The Secret. And so he ended up advertising this. I learned the secret. And he brought in some of the people who were on, I guess it was a video version of The Secret

that it was a DVD at the time that was on Netflix and stuff like that, where some of the people who were like were these self-actors or? No, so self-help gurus who were quoted in the book, The Secret, made a video. In fact, most people probably actually saw the video and never actually read the book in modern times. But he brought in some of those people to give speeches about all this nonsense. But he made himself the headliner. And he fills the Blaisdale Arena, kind of the big basketball stadium in Honolulu with a bunch of people from Hawaii who wanted, who were into this secret nonsense and wanted to learn how to manifest money in their lives. And he said that he had this investment company called C-N-R-G, C-N-R-G.

where he could take your money and invest it using kind of the secrets from the book, The Secret, and make you astronomical rates of return. And not a lot of people fail for it. I'm pretty sure that's how Warren Buffett did it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not a lot of people. And he said he had these contacts that could get certificates of deposit from other, from like obscure banks that would pay astronomically high rates of return, you know, 18 to 20% a year.

and if you would give him the money, he would use the secret and make you rich. Not a lot of people fell for it, but seven families did and gave him $3.6 million. Oh, my God. Like, that's ridiculous from seven victims. That's a ton. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the victims was good for about like 2.5 million of that. And other people were just giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to him, but only seven families.

And you'll be surprised to learn that he took that money and mostly spent it on himself. He bought some corvettes with the money that I ended up seizing as the investigation was unfolding. That's a lot of corvettes. 3.6 is a lot of corvette. We're getting to part two of the story. And so he bought some corvettes. He spent a bunch of money on himself. He paid down his credit card debt because I think he had some credit card debt at the time.

And he was mostly, and I think he established an office for his company's synergy because he thought this is what was going to catapult his investment company into something really big. Right. But there was no actual investment activity taking place. And I remember going and taking his Corvette from him that day, and he ended up pleading guilty to the fraud. I got a warrant to seize his Corvettes. He pleaded guilty. But what was interesting about this case is that $1.2 million of the $3.6 million, he did invest in a Ponzi scheme run by a different guy. So a scammer invested in a Ponzi scheme.

Right. So he rips off his people with the secret scam. Meanwhile, there was a fellow about the name of Patrick Rakuta Nanahari. Okay. Rolls off the tongue. Yeah. Patrick Rukuta Nanahari was originally from Madagascar, and he was raised. A little tiny country off the coast of Africa.

It's where vanilla is made. I was going to say, I don't know anyway. If you have a bottle of vanilla here, or if you drink vanilla Coke, that vanilla came from Madagascar, most likely. There was also a cartoon movie with singing and dancing animals that I found out is not. real. There's no actual singing and dancing cartoon animals in real Madagascar. I also know that Heinrich Himmler, who was the architect of the, architect of the where they got, the final solution in World War II. The Holocaust.

Yeah, Holocaust. One of his plans was to move all of the Jews to Madagascar. I doubt Madagascar was made aware of this, but I don't think their opinion met much. There's a lot of master planning going on back then. Yeah, that was one of his plans was like, here's what we're, here's our, one of the parts of the final solution was, hey, let's move all of them over here. Right. That's all, that's all I know. So Patrick Kukutenanahari, again, born in Madagascar, lived there as a child, but then immigrated to the U.S.

And settled down in Fort Myers, Florida. That's right down the road. Right down the road. Right down the road. Not that it's pertinent to the story. Gay guy, long-term relationship. Everything was copacetic. But he wasn't really lighting the world on fire career-wise.

But then he had a brainstorm. His brainstorm was that he was going to go to Hawaii, and he was going to tell people that he was a Forex trader. And Forex, for those of you don't know, is foreign currency trading. The idea that I can trade dollars versus yen's versus euros and use the fluctuation in prices between those currencies to trade profitably. And every single hedge fund that I know of that has traded based on Forex, very successful Ponzi schemes.

Like, I don't think I've ever heard of a successful one. Every time somebody says starts it off with, you know, I was investing in Forex trading, I think the Ponzi scheme, bro. And it always ends up being a Ponzi scheme. I mean, you know, maybe I'm wrong, but I have you hear of a successful one. Right. So, Forex trading is a real thing, but it's so hard to make money doing it, right? Predicting the fluctuations between currencies is just, it's very difficult.

Right. And even people who are professional Forex traders have wild swings in their success and failure. Patrick had zero experience in this. It was all just kind of aspirational to him. Maybe he read some. Had he read the cigarette? He had nothing to do with the secret whatsoever. This was not his jam.

He probably watched a YouTube video on Forex trading and walked away feeling that he had this thing licked. I can do this. But for reasons unclear to me, well, he said that he wanted to, he was Mormon. and he wanted to market this thing to Mormons. There's a sizable Mormon population in Hawaii. So what he did was... So he was in a long-term homosexual relationship, and he's Mormon. There's all kinds of conflicts here going on, I feel.

I feel like this was... I'm feeling for this guy. He's going through a lot, and, you know... He's trying to make a buck. We'll see if we can come up with a bad guy in this episode that you don't have empathy for. Okay. And so what he does is kind of unusual. He takes out classified ads in...

in the paper in other places, I guess, advertisements in Honolulu and says he was going to be setting up shop at like the Sheraton Ballroom there, offering seminars on how you can make money through his company's cyber market group and in Forex trading. That sounds like a scam. But he was guaranteeing people 6% a week on their investment. That can't be a scam. That's perfectly reasonable. 6% a week is really, really attractive to the people of Hawaii. They thought, my goodness, my ship's come in. And so he goes to the seminars.

He goes and puts on these seminars, pretty good crowds at the Sheraton, explaining, you know, showing them, he had a PowerPoint set up with like graphs and charts and made it look very professional. He's got a little bit. Talked about his, how, and his deal was, you're going to invest the money with him. You're going to get 6% a week. And the money he makes above that 6% a week, he gets to keep. Right?

So it's costing you nothing. And there were a hundred different Hawaii families who signed up with the cyber market group and gave him a total of $10 million. Plus a 2.5 from with the single largest victim being Albert Perkins, who was reinvesting the money from the secret. See, Albert told me that he thought it would all be okay because he would be getting 6% a week. And then he, and then that's his real secret, right, is that he was investing. investing this money with Patrick at six percent a week. Patrick, for his part, had no idea that Albert Perkins was ripping people off and didn't really care. He was just another victim in his own scheme. So we have conmen, con and con men. It's a fraud within a fraud. Exactly.

So Patrick gets his 10 million bucks in. He goes back to Fort Myers and he gets everybody's banking on information. Do you know what he did then? He began paying people 6% a week on their money. That's not using a long-term strategy, using your money. But what happens is it begins to go viral, right? Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Hawaii is very much kind of an old school, who you know, like, let's talk to the other parents at the Pop Warner football. Hey, come here, I got to tell you something. I invested with this guy. The whole thing seemed kind of fishy. I only put 10, 15 grand into it. I've been getting 6% a week wire transferred into my bank account. And then more money starts to flow into Patrick. And eventually, though, of course, it collapsed, as they all do.

do. And then Patrick begins offering excuses as to why he was unable to pay. And he was talking about the European banking crisis. And they always have some long, long problem. And everything's going to be okay. And then the phone starts ringing at the FBI. And I get to sign both cases. And so Albert Perkins, toward the end of that case, you know, he was willing to cooperate against Patrick, but he was just another victim. I had 99 other victims. And Albert Perkins had straight up lied to his victims. And so he pleads guilty. Albert Perkins ends up getting four years and nine months. I hop on an airplane from from Honolulu, fly to Fort Myers. And unannounced

knock on Patrick's door. And he invites me into his kitchen. I sit down and interrogate him from about 45 minutes and walk out with a sign handwritten confession from Patrick that he was running this Ponzi scheme. No excuses? No. He thought initially or? He, you know, He'd done some kind of hypothetical trading online of a Forex. I think he may have tried to trade like a little bit of money. And he just lost it immediately and realized, oh, that's no good.

This is much harder than I thought. Yeah, it's way harder, yeah. And then, you know, it's like online poker, right? It's easy when you're playing with the hypothetical money, but when it becomes real money, you find yourself losing quite a bit. And so he just thought it could be sustainable as long as he continued to pay people out and they would bring new investors in. And I told him that's exactly the definition of a Ponzi scheme.

And so he ended up pleading guilty, and he got 7.5 years in prison. But then because he would never got citizenship, my understanding is he was deported back to Madagascar, a nation he had not lived in since he was a little kid. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. I knew a kid. I knew a guy who got deported back to Jamaica, who came here when he was like two. It happens a lot.

He doesn't know anybody in Jamaica. And then when he was like 19 or 20, He applied for his citizenship, like, or 18, whatever it is when you're allowed to, you have to kind of make your decision. Yeah. He signs for it. And within, I think, like, two months before that, he had robbed a bank. And so then he applies for a citizenship. And then a couple months later, he gets arrested.

And they're like, on the form, it says that you haven't committed a felony, something along those lines. They're like, and two months before you even signed this, you did. Yeah. And so they said, so once you're finished. finished, you're going back to Jamaica. And I see him all the time. He was like, walked by and he's like, I don't know anybody in Jamaica. I don't know what I'm going to do. Yeah, I know. I'm like, I'm sorry. I don't know what to tell you. I think Patrick was the same way. I don't think he had lived in Madagascar since he was a little kid. And I don't know that he'd been back to like

visit grandma or anything like that. But again, I never really find out the epilogue on these guys. I'm not in their Christmas card list after I put them away. Keep tabs on them, write a letter and say, hey, how you doing? Yeah. But that was a massive case. And I met so many people in that case. And, you know, because it was pretty new to Hawaii at the time. And so it got me out there knocking on doors. And it also kind of solidified my reputation with the prosecutor's office. They're kind of putting together this big case in an organized fashion. And, you know, the worst thing about Ponzi schemes is that, like, you know, unlike like, if it's credit card fraud or, you know, some kind of little, like you get the bank to lend you money, you know,

something stupid like that. Like, as opposed to that, Ponzi schemes, it's like, it's, well, not always. Sometimes they're institutions. But it's almost virtually all. all individuals. And it seems like it's always individuals that can't afford to lose the money. Right. So it's not like it's a guy who's got a hundred million who put these weren't bald. A hundred thousand. Yeah. These are people like, this is my life savings. Yeah. There was something about Hawaii and we don't want to disparage people from Hawaii because they're wonderful people, but finance and business and investing is not one of the kind of strong. It's not just not one of the industries that cultivated, right? You know, they're good back in the day with agriculture. They're

great with hospitality. They know a lot. They're very smart people. And they're and kind people, but they don't know anything as a whole about finance and investing. And so it was really easy during the seven years that I worked there as an FBI agent for people to come from the mainland and just rip them off blind. Yeah. And so don't give me any ideas. Um, yeah. Okay. So what, uh, okay, so those guys are no good. They're gone. They're gone. They got out of jail, though. Yeah, they did. They did. And Hawaii's a small community. And Albert Perkins, you know, His family had gone to the Catholic church that my kids were going to the school at, and everybody knew him.

And so he lived about a mile and a half from me. And so it's such an insular community there that you kind of get to know these people. What do you even do in Madagascar? It's a big island. Yeah. It's big. Yeah. But I just don't see.

He's probably working in a vanilla factory. Or maybe, or, you know, or I don't know if he's banned from visiting every country on planet Earth, but he could go elsewhere, I suppose. I still feel kind of bad for the guy, but anyway, yeah, scumbag. I get it, I get it. All right. So, probably, what there's probably learned his lesson. He may have found God.

You don't know. He could have been a totally different part. He probably feels horrible. He could have a wildly popular podcast on YouTube. He could. He could. Okay, so what else have we got? What else have we got?

All right. Let's go back in time again. Oh, these, oh, I see the combination of these. I love that they, they enter, they are, you know, the one inside the other. Yeah. Wire fraud. All right.

This is a relatively small case, but it was kind of interesting the way it played out. There was a back before, there was a big bank in Chicago called First Chicago Bank, first National Bank of Chicago, which is now Chase, but there were several other iterations as banks continued to buy each other. So this is back in the first Chicago days. Got a call. I was on the bank fraud squad, and this is still the 90s, I believe. Got a call from the bank saying, we got this crazy.

situation where a, someone in our wire transfer department, you know, wire transferred $250,000 out of a customer's account without the customer's authorization. Can you come and talk to this lady? And so I go and talk to the, they would often do that and have us get the confession from their own employees before they would like terminate their employees. So I sit this woman down and we, and I get talking to her and there's no way she did it. Like it was her log on on her computer, but she confesses to me that she let, she would never log off her computer when she would go to lunch. And so she literally gets up, goes to lunch, and doesn't log off. And so there's this one hour window of time where the, um, where, where her computer's

unguarded and another employee and evidently hopped on the computer and wired transfer 250,000 hours out of a customer's account. And, um, and so we begin taking a look at like who, who went to launch at different times and cameras and in different places. And we narrow it down to a woman by the name of Tijuana Roberts, that she was, she had to be the one who hopped on. Now, the money ended up going into a bank account at a different bank, $250,000. I feel like if you can't get the, if you can't get them a mugshot of this woman, I feel like you can pick a black woman. She was, she was African American. No. I do have her mugshot. It's true. It's completely irrelevant to the story because there's lots of good African Americans out there. I'm not saying

You're not. I'm just saying. In fact, how dare you? So, Tijuana wire transfers, 250 grand. But here's what's interesting. So it goes to an account that had been established the day before with a $100, like, minimum deposit. Like, someone established the account. The next day, $250,000 gets wire transferred into the account. And then...

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A fellow, the account was under the name of Karans Smith, C-A-R-R-R-R-R. R-A-N-Z, Smith. I feel like this may have been planned. You've done this before. And so he, and so as soon as the wire transfer comes in, Karan's Smith shows up to withdraw $250,000. And the teller, who had been properly trained, said, said, you know, what's going on here? And he said, well, I sold a car.

And she goes, he sold a car for $250,000. I mean a house. He had no good answers. and eventually he gets nervous and leaves, so the money was recovered. Right. Right, because the guy who was receiving the money,

this Karan Smith was a fool. And so was the person that set the whole thing. And we had like an amazing picture of like Karan Smith staring into the camera of the posted above the teller as if it had never occurred to him that there may be cameras in the bank. So just an awful, awful plan from day one. Tawanna Roberts, I think she lawyers up.

decides not to talk at all. And yeah, that's right. She didn't talk to me. And so, and meanwhile, we have this Karan Smith, and we need to kind of prove that up. And so... Is that real name? Like you guys tried to. Produced real ID.

Illinois driver's license and they were Karan Smith. I look into Karan Smith, and we got a problem on our hands because Karan Smith at the time was in prison for beating his wife to death with a hammer. I feel like this might not be the same guy. Right. And so... Are you suggesting? that it's possible to get the DMV to issue a driver's license and someone up to someone

else? In 1998, these things could happen. It's insane. But we had a picture of the guy, you know, there. And so I go to the prison. I think, well, he's not picking Karan Smith like randomly. Maybe Karan Smith knows this guy or whatever. So I go to the prison and I'm, you know, I'm 27, 28 at the time. And I had never met anyone who'd be. beaten their wife to death with a hammer. That seemed like a pretty significant crime. And how long had you been married at this point? Funny year. And so, yeah.

Give it some time. Yeah, yeah. Now it all makes perfect sense. But at the time, I found it shocking to the conscience. I hear you, Karan. I hear you. I'll put some money on your books when we leave when I leave. And so I have no idea what kind of reception I'm going to get from Korans. And so, you know, me and my partner are kind of like led into like a room at the prison to sit

down with Karan's. And I said, Karan's, listen, I wanted to talk to you about something. It seems that someone has used your identity to steal $250,000 from a bank. And I was totally expecting him to tell me to go to hell. And like, you know, I don't talk to the FBI. I go to hell. He was so offended that someone would ruin his good name by stealing his identity. Like, how dare somebody besmirch the good name of Karan Smith? And so, and so he's like, why not? I can't. can't believe anyone would do this. And so I show him the photo of the surveillance guy staring up at the camera, you know, Jimmy. Bald African-American guy. Right. And he starts laughing. Karan starts laughing. And I go, do you know who this is? And he goes, yes and no. I could.

And I go, I can get out of jail. No, no. He wasn't playing, let's make a deal. Really? And I go, well, what do you mean? And he goes, it's one of two guys. They're twins who live next door to me when I was arrested and uh and uh and uh they're ron and rick and he goes they're both crackheads he called them hypes they're twin hipes and i go what's a hype and he goes a crackhead i go okay and uh and so and i go and you don't know which one it is and he goes no but they live next door to me um you know one of them probably went in my house and kind of like stole my shit when i got arrested and uh and then they went out and got an id in my name and he goes but i can't tell you which one it was because Ron and Rick look exactly alike, you know, bald African-American guys with mustaches and

beers and beers. I pulled up Ron and I pulled up both of their driver's license photos, and sure enough, these guys were identical twins in every way, shape, and form. And so, and so I thank Karan so much. Oddly, could not have been a nicer, more polite guy. Well, I mean. Again, you've been in prison. I have not. I had, I had my own biases and prejudices against people who beat their wives to death with a hammer. I know you're willing to look past things like that. Did you put some money on his books, nothing? Did he get anything for helping? I mean, he seems, you know, like he led you in the right direction. He got his good name cleared. Oh, God. He got his good name cleared. Poor guy. Yeah. And so, um, so I begin looking

into it. And he's a widower. You have no sympathy for that. And, uh, and it turns out it had to be wrong, uh, because, uh, the other, the other, uh, steward brother was in, uh, in rehab at the time. So I'm basically able to eliminate it by who was, who had the availability there. Go to Ron. Ron confess, dimes out Tijuana, agrees to testify against Tijuana in exchange for whatever deal we were going to give him. And that was enough to make Tijuana plead guilty herself. It seems like such a fun job.

You know, you get to walk around. You get to talk to interesting people. You get to, you know, I would love that job. It was fun. And I mean, and she only got 18 months. Yeah. I was going to say, I don't think he was. probably facing much of anything either.

Yeah, I think Rick, Rick may have just gotten probation or something like that. Because, I mean, there was, it was tech, everything keys off the dollar amount of the loss. Right. There's an interesting question here. Was there a loss in the case? It was potential loss. The bad guy, well, the loss came when the money left for Chicago Bank and went to LaSalle Bank, right? And so, and that account holder was out $250,000 bucks for, you know, a day or two or whatever.

And so, you know, but I think the courts took a look at this and realized that this was a, cacamamee scheme and that it doesn't make sense for the taxpayers to be paying for the care and feeding of this this idiot crew all right but uh yeah but so that it but i learned something from that case that that people who commit like objectively heinous crimes like beating their wives to death with a hammer aren't necessarily horrible people when you talk to them right right and which it seems self-evident now having done this for 30 years but at the time i was a very young age agent, and I had my biases and prejudices, assuming that if someone is a bad guy, it's like the Marvel Comics, where they're a villain all the time.

Yeah, yeah. Right? No, no, they have people that love them and that they love, and they had a moment of, you know, of insanity or whatever, you know. And that's when I began kind of developing my philosophy, which I use for interrogations, even to this day, is that no one should be judged but for the worst thing they did in their lives. Right.

And I tell people that. And I get them to talk to me and build empathy with them. confessed to me that, listen, you know, just because you did this horrible thing doesn't make you a horrible person. We're all just circumstances, victims of the circumstances of our lives. I'm so sorry. All I can think about is that guy going to trial and his lawyer saying, we just need one married guy on the jury. You're going to walk. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, you're an evil man. Okay.

So, okay. You know, and I feel like you, you probably showed up here thinking this is going to be a serious talk. No, no, no, it is a fun show. I love going on this show and interacting with you. Anyway, so that's the story of Tawana, Ricky, and Korans. So I want to tell you a story. Please. I have a buddy named John Posiac who, when Nancy Pelosi's husband got attacked by the crazy guy with the hammer.

Yeah, yeah, insane. So, you know, and we have a, he and I have a dark sense of humor. Not that I'm saying that that's right. Clearly, once again, a hammer story. Yeah. It's the hammer episode. So you could put a little hammer somewhere. the thumbnail anyway um so yeah so if we were you know and it was completely inappropriate we he

and i were making jokes when we heard about it we were like oh my god um and then there were all these different stories on what had happened you know with the guy attacking him and why was how did he get there and did he get inside and it was a whole thing so so some guy showed up at nancy Pelosi's house and her husband was there and he somehow another forced himself into the house, and I probably have this wrong, but he attacked him with a hammer. Yeah. And apparently he was, you know, he was bludgeoned, you know what I'm saying? He was hit a few times, but he ends up getting a hold of the hammer, whatever, he fights him off. No, he gets a hold of the police. Oh, and he called, Paul Pelosi is able to contact the police who show up to the

house. And there's this weird scene where, where Paul Pelosi, like, answers the door with the hammer guy next to him, like grabbing, holding like Paul Pelosi's arm and having a hammer down and decide. And that's how we know about this because we have police body cam footage. And the interaction between Paul Pelosi and the police, Paul Pelosi was a cool customer because he's telling the police, like, I don't know who this man is. And he's in my house. And he has struck me with a hammer. He's being very in. Meanwhile, the other guy's just standing there, like holding his forearm with like a hammer in his hand. And the police are like, why don't you guys, what guys, you know, why don't you step outside, sir? And so the cops ended up arresting the lunatic.

And, but it fed into all these online conspiracy theory guys that Paul Pelosi was involved in some kind of like love trist with this guy and, uh, and all that. But there's no evidence of any of that. Right. The whole thing was just this bizarre story because when people are in like impossibly weird, stressful situations, they don't act normal. And Paul Pelosi wasn't acting normal when he answered the door for the police officers. Right. He was entirely like, he was very composed, which is probably how he's lived as entire adult life as, you know, how else to act. Well, you know, as the husband of kind of a head of state and is that you just sort of need to be composed and people are going to say horrible things to you and stuff like that and you just kind of keep your cool and be professional. The guy was actually, he must have been mental, right?

Like, I mean, yeah, he clearly didn't want to kill him. He had the hand he could. Dude was a dude was a lunatic. But Paul Pelosi is like standing there and his tidy whiteies or something like that when the guy comes there. So the whole thing looked weird. Well, before we really knew what we were still in the, in the, you know, the conspiracy theory stage. He was like, it had just happened like that, or morning or something, but that night and all these things. So Boziak goes, and he goes, I'm raising money for this guy.

I'm getting him but a lawyer. I've got to set up a crowdfunding guy. I go, no, you're not. And he sets up a crowdfunding, and they take it down immediately. You know, immediately he said, yeah, they said something about it. I mean, we're laughing and joking. And I'm like, I don't think you can do that. He goes, I'm going to give him the money.

He goes, I'm not pocketing the money because we started talking about that couple. There was a couple who had raised money for, like, a homeless guy, who was a veteran, I think, because the veteran guy had helped the woman or something. I don't know. And then they pocketed almost all the money. Sure. And he was like, I'm not pocketing the money. So we were laughing, but they shut it out immediately. So crowdfunding really does lend itself to fraud because there's just not a lot of accountability.

Right. And just because, you know, GoFund me or what are some of the big Kickstarter or one of those things is out there, you know, putting it on there. It's not really an endorsement that this is a legitimate effort. to make this thing happen. Right. And so I worked a case against a guy named Dan Summers, and he had a brilliant crowdfunding idea, which I don't even know that it was really going to be a fraud from the beginning, but it certainly turned into one.

His company was Realty eVest, and the idea was that he was going to create a crowdfunding website for people who wanted to invest in small real estate projects. So here's the example. So let's say you want to build an old folks home. with 20 beds, okay? Right. And you get it all specced out, and it's going to cost you $20 million to kind of build this facility. And the banks are just not into giving you the money because maybe you don't have a good history with that. Maybe your credit's not great. And maybe you have a

felony for being in prison for bank fraud? No judgment here, Matt. No judgment. And so the bank's not excited to give you the money. And so what you're going to do is you're like, hey, well, I have an idea. I'm going to crowd fund this and a payoff pay a really good rate of return to my investors who are going to give me the $20 million. And so the idea was that Dan Summers Realty Evest site, you as a real estate developer will put your site up there, explain the project, and say that you're going to pay out 10% a year on this investment. The idea would be once the building is built, you would then pay back, pay everybody back and then refinance it now that you have an actual building that can be used as collateral. That seems reasonable. Totally reasonable. There's

nothing wrong with that plan. And so, but the problem was this. So there's a lot more people out there wanting money than there are people who are interested in investing in real estate through crowdfunding. So, Sue, you put your, you put your thing up there for the 20 million bucks. Let's say you raise 1.6 million of that. And, but there's a deadline on all these crowdfunding things. You know, you have to, and so people actually send their money in through wire transfers to realty evest who's supposed to hold that money in escrow. And if it does not, if that doesn't hit the $20 million funding goal, everyone's supposed to get their money back. Right. Make sense? Yeah. And so the, and very few of these projects were ever fully funded, again, because there's tons and tons of people wanting money, but not a lot of people interested in investing in real estate using this platform. And realty evest was going to be getting a piece of the action, you know, 1%, 2%, whatever, whatever their percentage was of the amount of money raised. So let's say they only raised a couple million dollars on your $20 million project. What Dan was doing was creating the illusion that that project had fully funded and keeping the money for himself.

Right. Right. So the real estate developer gets nothing of the couple million dollars that was raised. He's told, I'm sorry, your project didn't get funding. We're taking you down. The investors are led to believe that the investment did in fact fund and they need to be getting their 10%. You know, say 12% a month. They get their one, 12% of years.

They get one, then he begins paying people out, one percent per month on the money that he rate, on, you know, for the real estate investment. The problem is there's no actual real estate happening. Which is a Ponzi scheme. It's a Ponzi scheme, right? And so he brings in, um, $740,000 doing that and pays out some, you know, pays out some amount. But the, but, and then it begins to. collapse. And then the investors start calling the FBI, and I get the case. And the, and the, basically, and so I ended up interviewing all of the real estate developers who had done nothing

wrong. And they're like, hey, I wanted to build an old folks home for 20 million bucks. I put it up there. It didn't hit his funding goal. You know, I went away. They had paid like Dan a couple thousand bucks to get even the listing on the website. So Dan was enjoying that money. But that's not, that's not a fraud. And so, and then you talk to the investors, we're like, it's weird. No, I thought I was invested in ABC, you know, Matt Cox's retirement home. Right. And realty e-vest was going to be the conduit for the payments back to the investors and for everything.

All money would flow through them. Perfect because he's the middle man. He's able to. Right. And so the investors had no relationship and did not know and never spoke to the real estate developers. If they had, this whole thing would fall apart. Right. And so I ended bridging that gap.

and interviewing all the victims and then interviewing all the real estate developers. One of the victims, I'll tease you, was a very famous Fox News host whose name I'm not going to give out on the air because he's a crime victim and deserved compassion. Is he supposed to show up to prison on July 1st? I have no comment. I have no comment. Fox News host. And so that was what?

I think, was he in Foxx? Who are you thinking of being? I was thinking of a, he does the war room, not Sean Hannity. I'm thinking the other guy. He was on Trump's, in Trump's cabinet. Come on. Fox News host? No, he was, I thought, he's been on Fox News.

Steve Bannon, yeah, Steve Bannon. Steve Bannon was never a Fox News host. Yeah, yeah, but he's, I was saying he was on Fox News. That's why as soon as you said Fox News, I thought, I could see him. He does the war room now. I actually do, I do, I've been on the war room like 20 times. Okay. interviews me for spots for home title lock, but it's not going to be happening for a while.

Yeah. He's only supposed to go for like four months. Like as soon as he gets there, they're going to put him in a half of house. That's for his contempt of Congress. Yes. Yeah. He's got bigger problems, though, in New York for his Bill to Wall scam. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, boy, I bet he's praying Trump gets in there. Well, Trump parted him for those federal charges. And then New York came and said, well, guess what? We have lots of victims in New York. Oh, yeah, they're New York charges. So that's nothing you can do. That's still awaiting trial. And so, yeah.

Anyway, but my victim in this case had nothing to do with Steve Bannon. Okay. To be clear. And so anyway, so now I have this great case. I got a $740,000 case, you know, maybe a couple dozen victims, you know, one kind of high-profile guy. And so it's time to talk to Dan Summers. So I show up at his office and I sit down with him. And he, and his whole thing was.

He would not admit it was a Ponzi scheme. And I was like, well, and I go, to be clear, you were paying off investors with their own money and the money of other investors, right? And he's like, yeah, you know, that's what it came to. And I go, how is that not a Ponzi scheme? Right. And he's like, well, the real estate projects didn't fund. Had they funded, I would have paid everyone off. So I was just, you know, trying to pay people their investment returns.

I said, but there's no investment. And so we went round and round. It had to be like two hours. And then I say, stop. Dan, and I go, I can tell you just don't like me calling it a Ponzi scheme, but it has all the elements of that. And I go, can we agree that if you could go back in time and do this whole thing differently, if you had a time machine, you wouldn't do this because what you were doing was misleading

the investors. And I go, you may have been misleading the investors for all the right reasons because you thought there'd be some project that would come in that would make it all right. But you did that. And he goes, yeah, yeah, I did. And I go, okay, then we're talking about the same thing here. And I go, if you don't want to call it a Ponzi scheme, that's fine. We can set that aside.

There's a fraud. Yeah. So what I want to do is just let's talk about the specific conduct that happened and help me understand why it happened so I could take that information to the prosecutors and maybe even later the judge and they can understand the situation you're in. And so why don't you almost make it seem like your health? And so why don't you begin by, let's take the statement here and let's edit it to make it accurate. And so we sat down shoulder to shoulder and we crossed out the word Ponzi and wrote

the word investment and we wrote the word this. And we crossed out the word lie and led the investors to believe this information that was something different than the truth. And so you edit it. And then he was nice enough to sign the confession at the bottom. I thanked him very much. And then went back to the office. And he walked out and went to the grand jury and indicted him. With his own confession. When you walked out, he probably felt, I felt very good about this. We had a Rappore. Feel good. Like, we've done some good work here, Tom.

Right. But the point is that this guy didn't set out to run a Ponzi scheme, right? This guy set out because he had some great business idea. And in his mind, it would have been just fine if millions of investors had come in to invest millions of dollars and all these real estate projects. And he's just taking a little taste. And it probably would have had it worked out like that. But, I mean, did he admit that, like, I kept the money, like, I should have given him the money back.

I told them they would get the money back if it didn't completely fund. Right. No, no, no. There was no question about the facts of the case. He just never saw himself as a criminal. As a Ponzi schemer. Right. This guy had no criminal history. You know, he was a nice guy. I'm a good person. His wife was, you know, he and their grandparents and all that. But he had all these investors, you know, who lost $740,000 bucks. He was unable to pay back because he had told them something different than the truth. Right. So what happened? Well, he dragged his feet a long time like he's going to go to trial. And I was like, I kept telling the prosecutor, I'm like, figure out a way to get through to this guy, through his attorney, of course, and let him know that we are not out to get him.

I don't have a hard on for Dan Summers, but we're going to minimize the damage to his life if he takes a plea deal versus going to trial and getting raked over the coals on this thing. and the and the prosecutor was unable to get through to the defense attorney who was unable to get through to Dan like he just was trial so he so we're headed for a trial and then I find this and then I find a bunch of evidence that was provided to me by a we'll call it a cooperating witness in the case that Dan's wife was helping to facilitate this and she was aware of it as kind of the internal accountants and secretary and she had never been in my radar screen on this thing we're going to indict the wife so what I did was I showed up at Dan's house he was represented so I couldn't interview him with a target letter for his wife. And a target letter is basically a letter from the U.S. Department of Justice saying, you know, you were now a target of a federal investigation. You were soon to be indicted. We recommend that you hire a criminal defense attorney and have them get in touch with the prosecutor on this case to see if we could work this thing out prior to the indictment. And I showed up a dance house. He answers the door. He's very surprised to see me. I said, here's a target letter for your wife. Can you give this to her? He's like, what do you mean? I go, well, you know, I'm not supposed to be talking.

talking to you because you're represented, but your wife needs an attorney because she's going to be indicted on this, and she's going to be sitting next to you at the trial as a co-defendant. And he's like, is there anything that I can do to make this go away? And I said, well, I'm not the one to negotiate, please. I'm just the investigator, but why don't you have a conversation with your attorney? And perhaps your attorney can have a conversation with the U.S. Department of Justice prosecutor, and, you know, maybe then you guys can work it out, but I'm not a party to that. I'm just the investigator in the case.

Here's this for your wife. A week later, he's in court. Right. Clitting guilty. guilty, and the wife never got indicted. It's funny how often that happened. And he ended up getting 21 months in prison. 21, he probably could, if he had, because he probably, he didn't get acceptance of responsibility.

Well, he did. We gave it to him, even though he waited to the last minute. Again, nobody really was out to see a public hanging of this guy. And in our minds, the most important thing was to get him back out in the street so he could begin paying restitution to his victims. That was, that was not my experience with the U.S. attorney at all. They weren't concerned about getting me back on the street at all. But he also, 21 months, like, honestly, for 750, I guess that, I mean, I guess that falls

in the guidelines, but usually these guys cooperate. So they'll get less than that. Like, for seven, like, I always tell people like, look, you can basically still a million dollars and go to jail for like a year. Right. If you cooperate. One thing to understand about Ponzi schemes is that they're very unique in the world of fraud and calculating the sentencing guidelines.

Let's jump back a little bit because maybe not everybody in your view of are familiar with the sentencing guidelines. For fraud, your sentencing guidelines key off of like three or four main factors. One is your criminal history. Do you have a criminal history? And then you get into a different bucket. He did not.

Two is the amount of loss. How much money was, you know, were victims ripped off for? The next one that they want to see is how many victims? Is this a mass marketing scheme with hundreds of victims or there's one or two victims? Then there's a lot of smaller categories that go into the sentencing guidelines calculation, more than minimal planning,

acceptance of responsibility, meaning you please, you plead guilty. Sophisticated means. Sophisticated means where they're vulnerable victims, things like that. And so with Ponzi schemes, it's kind of funny.

And there's case law on this. He received $740,000 from investors, but he's also paying fake investment returns along the way. So the net loss to the investors ends up being, his, ends up being more like $400,000.

Oh, okay. And the Supreme Court has ruled that the number has to be the four, $400,000 number that the sentencing guidelines key off of, even though he accepted $740,000 under false pretenses from investors. Okay. When did that change? Because I remember in my case, they were trying to say, like, well, there's potential loss, you know, like there's of. That's an entirely different fact scenario than a Ponzi scheme.

Ponzi schemes is a very specific kind of fraud because a Ponzi scheme, you're actually paying investment returns to your victims. Right, right, right. The problem is they're not being derived from any income-producing activity and they're really being done as a marketing technique so the victims will tell other people. And what's also interesting is that some people make money on Ponzi schemes, right? If you're an early investor, and let's go back to the other, if you're an early investor in this and you're in you're making, you're getting high investment returns, you can get more money back than what you put in, but you don't get credit for that in the sentencing guidelines for getting people money. that ends up being a zero, not a, doesn't net out against the losers. That makes sense. And Bernie Madoffs, there was some guy who had put in half a million dollars and gotten out like 15 million over the years or something.

It was a ridiculous. Right. So you don't, so Bernie Madoff did not get a reduction in his sentence for the money that people made in the Ponzi scheme. But that guy, when you're computing his numbers in the Excel spreadsheet that I put together hundreds of in my career, he would be a zero loss toward Bernie. sentencing guidelines. Well, what also happens is they turn around and they go back to those guys and say the money you got was illegal, we need it back. They try and claw back.

I never did clawbacks, but I've seen situations where the investors just sue each other. Oh, okay. Like, hey, this guy made money. I lost money. That was not investment returns going to him. It was my money. And then they end up suing each other. And DOJ sort of has no dog in that fight.

But I've never gone to a victim and try to claw money back from them. I don't know that that happened and made off. You think it did? I think it did. I know that I've met guys where the, what do they put, the person they put in charge of getting all the money back? What is, what is, what, your probation is generally the, no, no, I mean, like the arbitrary, or what do they, where they sell off the assets and. Oh, the, trustee, bankruptcy trustee, like. There's another name, but yeah, I don't, so they put this guy in charge.

He's usually a lawyer. He starts selling off the assets. And then he finds out, okay, well, you made $15,000. Like, you put in $500,000, but you made, you know, whatever, $15, like, you owe us $14.5 million. And then so this guy and this one 50, well, actually, there's a few of them, but I've heard this before. Sometimes the people just don't have it. And so they're not going to throw you in jail because you made money. It's a civil judgment.

Right. And then other times they'll go to them and they'll negate. And this actually, this one guy that I'm talking to the guy in prison about, he was like, They got negotiated. Like, he negotiated where, like, I'm not going to pay you. I can't pay you all the money back. I don't have the money. And here's what I can pay you.

And he actually negotiated and paid him like four or five million dollars. Like, or we can, we can go to trial or we can argue in civil court and you try get the money. But even then you might just get a judgment. Like, I'll pay this money. And so he was negotiating with the government to get the money back for the victims where he was saying, look, I'm a victim too. Yeah. If you do this to me, now you're creating a victim. I'm being victimized, you know, but yeah, I guess most of those are just no money.

You know what I'm saying? It's gone. It's spent. I mean, you're selling off the assets and you get pennies on the dollar back and the people just don't ever get their money back. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah, that's pretty much that story of Dan Summers. I don't know what he's doing now.

He's probably out of prison by now. And that was one of my last cases because I remember I went to the sentencing, you know, right around the time that I retired. We had a guy on here, Jim DiOrio, and he was talking about how he had arrested people. He's like, I literally would be at dinner with my wife and see him. And they'd walk and they'd be like, Dan! Oh, no, Jim, sorry, his name was Jim Deoria. Did I say, Dan? Jim, Jim, DiOriot.

And they'd be like, Jim. He'd be like, remember me? Like, yeah, I do. How are you doing? He was like, they're so happy. And I'd get up and shake their hand and be like, how's it going? He was, but it's funny, like, I've never seen a guy he had prison. Yeah, he's like, he's like, he's a guy at prison. He went for y'all. He's like, yeah, he just got out like a year

ago. We're six months. You know, he did like eight years. He's like, like, he was a serious criminal. But he's like, but they don't have. I had inmates send me Christmas cards from prison. Yeah. I mean, that's the trick is it. It's not my job to punish them. It's my job to find out what happened. And quite often, after they send me the confession, they say that no one has ever been as kind to them as I was and compassion and willing to listen and willing to understand what they were going through in their lives that led them to this. crime and so they don't go to prison hating me right they go to prison understanding that they were treated respectfully they never lied to anyone or about anyone and uh and so i you know my criminal

people always ask me if i'm worried that uh you know about criminals coming back to like murder me it's just not a thing right i've given them no reason to i think most of the guys that i've met so it's probably two different things one 80% of the guys think like all the g a he hated my guts that someone, he was a bat, he lied, or this, or he says, a piece of garbage, or he, you know, whatever, they've got some grudge. But I'd say maybe whatever, 10 or 20% of the guys. And these always tended to be the guys that were, that were, that understood what they did and were sorry for it and legitimately just wanted to get out of prison, start their life over. And that had kind of humbled, been humbled by it and been like, no, man, I, you know, I probably shouldn't have gotten them 15 years. But, you know, I did. And to be honest, like, everything didn't go the way I was hoping it would during the investigation.

I don't feel like this was right and that's right. But the truth is, they were pretty fair. They were super cool to me. They were, you know what I'm saying? They kind of go, those are the guys that, and so those are the guys that typically had no ill will towards the U.S. attorneys or the agents, whether it was DEA, ATF, FBI, whatever. And then there were always the other guys who, you know, hated them. Everybody was this.

And then they've really never really wanted to admit. that they've done anything wrong. It was always the snitch. It was always the DEA, where they were playing dirty. And they never really admitted, like, I was breaking the law and I should go to prison. So, yeah, it was always interesting their frame of mind. Because the truth is, the DEA agent was probably fine. You know what I'm saying?

Like, you're manifesting this government, you know, conspiracy against you to make yourself feel better like you're a victim. But the truth is, you know, you were so hard pill to swallow. for a lot of people that they did something really, really bad. And so, you know, in my interrogation techniques, I was trying to really get past that and say that, you know, you are not defined by that bad thing you did, but let's talk about what that was and what the circumstances of your life that led you to making that bad decision. But you were also, for the most part, dealing with guys that had made one or two bad decisions, like not guys that are career criminals that

had been in and out of prison, right? You had some career con men at some, you know, every now and then. But no, for the most part, my guys were, you know, my guys were people who had run a single scam, very few frequent flyers. Right. So what are you doing now? Well, I'm doing a lot of cases as a private investigator. A lot of my cases right now are fraud cases because that's sort of my thing and where people have been ripped off in a scam. And I take the investigation as far as I can. I try to collect money from the bad guy to get back to my clients who are victims. And oftentimes I end up taking the case as far as I can, then shepherding it. to the FBI on behalf of my clients who are crime victims. Now, they have the ability to call the FBI themselves, but I believe I have a knack for kind of putting these cases together in an organized fashion to try to sell it as almost a lobbyist to my former colleagues at the FBI

who are just thrilled to get cases that I've packaged up for them to work in these frauds. But the other, so a lot of investment frauds and embezzlements kind of go that way, but I've been working lately, it seems there's just been a huge wave of romance scams. You familiar with these? Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So, and the victims always tend to be senior citizens. And so I got a call from a senior citizen in Jacksonville who said that she's, you know, she's falling in love with this guy. And he's like on his deathbed in China. And she needs to wire him a bunch of money so he could get out and they could be married, even though he's super wealthy himself. His money's all tied up.

And I said, and she wants me to check him out and see if he's for real. And I said, and so I go to her house. And she tells me the whole story about meeting this guy online. And he's this sort of this international man of mystery. And he's got this accent because he's German. And I said, well, you sure it's not like Nigerian? She goes, no, no, it's definitely German. German living in China.

And he travels so much on business. He was in China and he was in the hospital there. And she's been sending money through cryptocurrency, going to these cryptocurrency, these kiosks at gas stations to putting cash in there to send money to the crypto wallet. it so he could, you know, get the lawyer to get the visa out or pay for the medical bills. And his money's tied up right now and he can't get at it in China because of trade issues. And so she had given away a sizable percentage of her fortune. And she sends me a picture of the guy.

This woman's like 75. And she shows me a picture of the guy who she has never seen herself. They've only had phone calls and text messages and stuff like that. And he's like a young looking, like 49-year-old, like white guy. And I'm like, I'm like, this guy's supposed to be 60 something? She goes, isn't he handsome for his age? I said, yeah. And so, but some of the money that, and so in this giant kind of fictional, so I'm saying,

I don't think this guy's real. And I go, but if you want me to explore all this, I'll trace all the phone numbers. I'll find out what happened. But she had sent money to a woman's name who was supposed to be her boyfriend's lawyer's secretary in WikiWatchi, Florida. You know WikiWatchi? Yeah. It's where the mermaid show is, right?

A lot of bad people in Florida. I'm a licensed private investigator in Florida, so you go where the cases are. And so she goes, this lady in Wikiwachi is the key to the whole thing. So my client was packaging up packages of cash and sending it to a woman in WikiWachi, Florida, under the sincere belief that the woman in Florida was the secretary for her boyfriend's attorney

who's trying to get him out of China so they can live together. Boyfriend's super wealthy. And she's like, I know that secretary will be able to give you some idea about whether this whole thing is legitimate and how we can get my boyfriend out of China. And so, you know, I quoted her price and she paid me and I get in a car and I drive to WikiWatchie, Florida, about four hours from Jacksonville where I live. Do you get excited when you're like, do you, are you like, what do you feel? Like, don't you feel good about like, you feel like you know what's happening?

You feel like, well, this case, it's clear to me from having investigated like a bazillion of these that this is a romance scan. Yeah. So my position at this point is, can I get any money back for my client? And what evidence can I do to stop the bleeding, to make it, make it, to convince my client who is metaphysically certain that her soulmate is lying in a hospital in China, And they just want to be together. I need to convince her that this is nonsense.

She's been talking to her boyfriend now for all of about six months as he's bleeding her dry financially. She's known me for about six minutes after she found me in a Google search, right? And so I'm at a disadvantage here as far as making the case to her. She wants me to go to WikiWachi to interview this woman that she's been sending money to. I do it. So I get in the car and I drive for four hours to WikiWachi. And I get there. And it's a senior citizen trailer park.

I knock on the door, you know, Bernice's house. And Bernice comes out, and she's also, like, 75 years old, curlers in her hair. I was like, can I help you? I identify myself as a private investigator and former FBI agent and say that I'm investigating, you know, a gentleman by the name of Hans, so-and-so, whatever's name was, the name that, the German name that she was given. And she's like, Hans, Hans is my boyfriend. And I said, well, I'd like to talk to you about that. And she's going, let me get dressed. So I'm waiting outside the trail where she gets dressed.

She invites me in. She's like a hoarder. There's like stuff pile from floor to ceiling. And she tells me the story of having met Hans, the same guy with the same phone number and same email address on a website called Silver Singles, like a dating website for senior citizens. And she had given him like her life savings with like an entirely different story of he was caught in like Azerbaijan or something like that. And they're, you know, very similar story.

meanwhile the other hans and i go do you have a picture of your hans she pulls it out it's an entirely different guy they used a different photo for the hans fictional character for the wiki watchy lady than the uh than the other lady so i take a picture of her stuff i go why were you receiving money from this other woman and he goes he goes i was doing that for hans's business she's a client of hans and so i was getting the cash then i would take the cash to the bank and deposit my account then i would use the cash app to send cryptocurrency to hans in Azerbaijan because I've been helping him out with his business. And she goes, but he's been doing weird things lately and having me apply for tax refunds

in states that I don't even live in. And so she's like, she's filing taxes in Arkansas with fake tax returns to get refunds that are going into her bank account that she needs to send to Hans. And she's never met him either. No, she's just another old lady wrapped around the axle. And so I basically show her the two. two Hanses. I explain what's happening with my client. I tell her that, that the, that you cannot send any money, this guy. This guy's not who he says he is. It's likely to me that he's probably

in China, India, or Nigeria. Those are kind of the three hotspots for these type of romance scams. And, um, and you just got to stop sending money to him. And I go, he's not real. None of this is real. And so I felt like I did a good job of deprogramming her. And then I go back to my office, I drive four hours back and I write all this up in a report with like the two photos. the two Hanses, comparing the two stories that the ladies had. And then I take it to my client and I kind of lay it all out for her. And there's like a attorney making my closing arguments. And then she finally got it. And then I counseled my client on that, the problem is that once you actually pay money in one of these romance scams and show that you're vulnerable to this,

you get on a list that's like bought and sold on the internet among these con artists. And I said, the only way you're going to be free of this burden is to change your phone number and change your email address. And I go, or else, because those things are right now compromised. And so that's a really tough thing for an old person to do, right? Because in their mind, they think of their phone numbers is like an old school landline. Like, that's how my family gets a hold of me. My son, who never calls me, you know, he has that number. And I hear from him every Christmas. And so, So, you know, I talked to her and eventually she changed her phone number and changed her email address and hopefully they've been leaving her alone. But she lost hundreds of thousands of

dollars. The lady in WikiWatch, she lost, you know, 40, 50,000 dollars. But then she was also used as an unwitting money launderer for other victims. And she's fought, she's also committing fraud by, or tax fraud by filing these taxes unwittingly. Yeah. I mean, again, she wasn't my client and I wasn't taking money from her to solve this mystery in her life. But I did give her a lot of free counseling about what she can do to unwind this mess. But these romance scams are just like ripping and tearing through the senior citizen community. And it's all just based on loneliness, these lonely old guys and lonely old women. And the bad guys who are doing these frauds, again, from Nigeria, China, India, they're going on to these senior citizen dating sites and just

creating dozens and dozens of fake profiles to rip grandma and grandpa off. there was i i so the common one that used to be where you would be contacted by somebody in russia um you know young girl and and they contact you on a dating website so dating they use the dating apps then you start corresponding before you know it you know they're complaining about money you're you then send them a little bit of money and she's super hot oh she's gorgeous yeah i just had one down in, I'm sorry, I wouldn't interrupt you. I went down in Vero Beach, same story. It was the, the woman who was, you know, falling in love with the 75-year-old guy

who was, it was Ukrainian and, like, insanely hot. Like, you'd never seen a woman like this before. Well, I, so there had been, I watched a program on this, and then I actually read some stuff on it, where, so what they did was, and it was the same thing every time, you know, and usually it's just a guy. It's some guy sitting in Romania or somewhere who's got, you know, he's going online, every day approaching, you know, 80 different men, you know, 40 or 50 of them are responding. He corresponds with them, you know, as a girl, you know, maybe every day he's getting four or five

that are, you know, over the course of a week or so. So he's got 20, 25. And then out of those, you know, maybe five or 10 start sending them little bits of money. What happens is eventually the scam is, I really want to come to the U.S., I've saved this much money towards the, it's going to cost $1,500. I've saved 750, but it's going to cost me another, take me another year. And, of course, the American guy's like, I'll give you the other 750. Oh, I know. Oh, that's so sweet, so nice.

But I also, I have nowhere to stay. Like, I could stay in a hotel or I could stay on, you know, if you don't mind, I could sleep on your couch or, you know, you can stay with me. Okay. So he sent 750. Then she, I got the ticket. I'm on my way. Yeah. She gets to, gets to, um, is going through customs.

but she never shows up calls on the phone i'm on i'm in customs they will not allow me into the united states because i don't have the minimum amount of money they're afraid i'm coming here to stay to work when i told them i was just coming on a vacation for two weeks and i need $1,500 can you wire me through western union $1,500 and i'll give it right back to you as soon as i walk get through customs. So he gives her another 1,500. So now he's given her $2,250, you know, at a minimum. And then, of course, she never shows up. And then he's embarrassed. So he doesn't call anybody because he realizes it's a scam. You know, sometimes doesn't even tell his buddies because he's humiliated. You know, they're like, you're 40, 50, 60. Do you think this 22-year-old

Russian or Ukrainian or whoever was going to? And I had read an article in Wired where there was more Western Union offices per capita. For a limited time at McDonald's, enjoy the tasty breakfast trio. Your choice of chicken or sausage McMuffin or McGrittles with a hash brown and a small iced coffee for five bucks plus tax. Available until 11 a.m. at participating McDonald's restaurants. Price excludes flavored iced coffee and delivery. In some little town in Romania, where they had so many of them. And that's where all the wires were going.

And all of these different Western unions are owned by like different mobsters. So, but it's hugely profitable. Actually, I want to say, was it 60 minutes or something who did this huge thing on it? Yeah. And then I looked into it. I was like, oh, my God.

And then I read an article. I was like, oh, my God. Yeah, you know, Western Union is like whack-a-mole. They're trying to cut it off in cash app for what it's worth that they feel like it's a senior citizen who's being ripped off. They'll cut them off. The problem is these Bitcoin ATMs.

Have you seen these things? They're in gas stations all over America now. I haven't seen one, but I've heard about them. Right. So I did a study when I was in FBI, and I can't get into two deep details about what I did, but I thought, all right, I'm going to find out who's using these Bitcoin ATMs. And I thought I was going to find, like, money launderers and dope dealers. And I was going to make a bunch of big cases. It was all monitoring the activity of a Bitcoin for like, you know, six months time to see who's using it and what dollar amounts they're doing. It was all senior citizens who are being ripped off. Because they're charging like 25% off the top, like the ATM fee for buying Bitcoin. You'd be a fool if you were And I mean, I think anyone is into Bitcoin's a fool. But if you were going to, if you were going to buy Bitcoin as an investment or because you did cryptocurrency, there's no reason to use a Bitcoin ATM and actually start feeding cash into it because they're taking 25% off the top. And so all the victims were just little old ladies getting ripped off by frauds.

Like it was 100% of the usage. We had interviewed a guy, right? who was a guy he um he collected money and well they they they they um stack them with cash and then they go and they get cash that goes in all right so um or load them with cash so he and he said there's this he was this one ATM machine that was a for a Bitcoin he explained it to it's a Bitcoin ATM blah blah I was like oh you can get cash I was like okay he was but I was getting the somehow I was getting the cash out he's like but they never knew how much cash was in this thing.

Somehow or another, and he worked for, you know, Loomis or something. And so he was like, like, I would go and I'd give it to them. Like they never, like they would never say, hey, go get this much. They'd say, hey, go find out how much is in the machine. Tell us. And he said, so I kind of felt like they don't even have any clue. Like it was, they don't, he's like sometimes I'd get the money. Sometimes I'd get.

And he did something. Like he got some of the money. Gave it to them. They never questioned. He left some money, something like that. And he felt like, honestly, I don't think they know how much money's in these things. He goes, so one day I go and he stole what? 10,000, 10 or, yeah, like 10 grand, took it. And then when they asked the, when they got

the report, he just said there was nothing in the, or maybe a thousand, whatever, very little money, there was nothing in it. He said, so I took the money. He said, I went on vacation with my girlfriend. We went down to Miami. He said, I bought our boobs, went on a vacation. Money will spend, yeah. Bleu the money in like four or five days. Right. Came, got back to work and you've been there for like a day or two, and they call them in the office and they go, what's, what happened with such and such? She's like, oh, I don't know. Oh, and you're like, what are you talking about? They're like, look, we really can't prove anything right this minute, but you know, and we can't, he said something like, we can't fire you, but we can make you so unhappy here.

You'll want to leave. And he was like, they were like, where you just leave? He goes, oh, I'll just leave. So he quit. They never charged him. So then the, the video comes out. I do the video. And then after I do the video, he starts, he texts me and he's like, hey, bro, I've been thinking about this.

Because guys in the comments are like, did this guy just admit to, like, fraud? like a bank fraud like this he's like I you know what I was never charged for this like I'm a little worried about this and then he he had a well then we had to blur out his his face start big can you get rid of my name can you blow out my face can you and you kept coming back you know I was like look we can do this with but I was like I'm not going to take the video down we had this conversation yeah yeah like I told you I'm going to put the video up you understand it's like ah they're not going to do nothing they're not do then and then once it came out there were so many people in the comment saying is this guy nuts right he's going

be indicted. Yeah. That he was like, yeah, bro, can you please, please blur out my name? Can you this? Can you this? Can you that? I was like, okay. So we did all that.

But yeah, that's the first time I heard about the, those Bitcoin machines. Yeah. He clearly, clearly they do keep track. Oh, anyway, you'd be crazy not to. I mean, they're owned by big corporations at this point. I mean, I'm listening to him thinking, I don't know. Yeah, it doesn't seem like a good plan. Yeah, but the senior citizens who fall for these things, it's interesting to me how, how they don't

want to believe that they were ripped off. And so what's funny is that. I've had lots of clients who are the sons and family members of the victims of these romance scams are like, listen, my dad's ripped, he's been sending money to a woman, you know, in Ukraine that he thinks, you know, his 30-year-old woman can, and they won't listen to me. Can you go? And so I've gotten very good at doing an intervention with the senior citizens and kind of laying it all out for them, that this is a fraud, which is weird because I'm a stranger.

There's no reason why they would believe me more than their son or their brother or the people in their lives. that they've known forever, but they do. Well, they still remember when their son was eating, you know, clay. Yeah, but I show up with a suit and tie with my credentials and kind of lay it all out for them and tell them they've got to stop doing it. And that, you know, here's some of the people who are committing these frauds and that I've been investigating these things for years and years and you've got to stop.

And here's, we've got to change your phone number. We've got to change your email address so they could stop getting a hold of you. And, yeah. Well, I think we talked about that. Like, if you're more susceptible to fall for a scam after you've fallen for a scam. Right. Oh, yeah, exactly. And that's why these lists are so valuable, these sucker lists.

I had one guy who basically deprogrammed him so he's not going to give any more money. This one was a lottery scam, but same type of idea where he was being told he won the lottery and needed to pay advanced fees to get the funds released. And so I deprogram him. You know, old guys guys well and almost 100 years old. And he's not going to talk to him anymore. Take him to the Verizon store. We change his phone number. Bad guys cannot get a hold of him.

The bad guys ordered a pizza to his house and had the pizza delivery guy hand their phone to him and say, and then he's like, yes. And it's his buddy saying, hey, I'm from the lottery. We had to deliver you a pizza because we couldn't get a hold of you. Can we get your new number? And he gave them the new number. This poor pizza, they invested $12 on like a, you know, Little Caesars or Domino's pizza to go to this guy's house and deliver him a pizza. And to hand and told the delivery driver to hand the cell phone over to him and so they could begin manipulating him as we had to start all over again. Oh my God.

Yeah. It's a yeah. And I got a call from a woman named Sally the other day who had given up a bunch of money in an investment romance scam and she wanted to know if the guy was for real. You know, same type of story. He was a sailor and he was in some other country and he couldn't get out. And I said, Sally, listen, I'm going to save you the money. This isn't real. I've been investigating these things for 30 years.

it's just not real and she's like and she's like how dare you how dare you say this about my boyfriend you didn't know investigating whatsoever and you're sure he's not real i i'm 100% sure there's no there's not a you know it doesn't make sense for you to give me money to tell you something that i can just tell you for free right now and so she hung up on my ear because i was such an a hole to her because i'd be smirged her boyfriend's name even though she was calling me because she wanted to have this checked out yeah well i mean next time you say you know what this i cut me a check for 3,500 I'll get right on this. It's always the ethical dilemma, right?

Is that they want me to investigate it. I'm happy to investigate it and kind of give them the evidence like I did with the Wikiwatchy case. But if someone calls me and something is just transparent, I'd feel bad taking money from them just to tell them what they already know. The common denominator in these romance scams is the idea that the bad guy, the boyfriend or girlfriend in the other end, has some excuse why they're not willing to video chat with you.

Right? There's always, you know, sometimes they'll do a video chat that'll last for like five seconds. The lighting's bad and all that. There's some technological ways that the bad guys are now getting past that. But as soon as someone calls me and says, well, I've been seeing a guy that I met online overseas, I go, stop. Have you had video chats with them? They're like, no, he works in a DOD facility and he can't. So that's the first thing I look for. Because if you're going to be, if you truly have a soulmate in Ukraine and she's that gosh darn good looking, you're going to want to have as much

face time with her on face time as possible. And so that's a seems to be the common denominator. And I think the bad guys are looking at workarounds right now, but they're all pretty lame at this point. The problem is, yeah, I was going to say the problem is that I saw something the other day, I don't know what, TikTok or whatever, it was a, it was where a, like a vice president contacted somebody in the bank and said, I need you to wire money out of this account to here. Yeah. And she said, and she thought right away, this is fishy. Like, this is fishy like this guy you know I've never spoken with him before he's randomly called he is like the vice president and whatever he she says you know what she said I'd like to

talk to you I'd like you to come talk to me in person he says listen I can't I'm out of the office I'm at the whatever at the home office today he said how about we FaceTime no no how about we do a Zoom call he said as a matter of fact he said he says something like like I'm gonna go ahead and have like any name like two other people be on the line too so you know I I understand you're questioning this. I understand it's suspicious. I'll have them on the line, too. So he has, like, two or three people do a Zoom with her that she recognizes, and he has a

conversation with her, and none of them are real. Really? What's he using? Using a facial thing that you can look like somebody, and somehow or another, either they were also using it. He was definitely using it, and she recognized him, and she wired the $250,000 or $200,000, whatever it was, she wires the money. Now, keep in mind, I saw this

on, like, TikTokers. I mean, that may have just been a bullshit fucking TikTok. Those things, they're called business email compromise cases. What happens is somewhere along the line, you know, you click on the wrong thing in your email, and now your email's compromised. Someone's reading your historical emails, and then they assume the identity on

phone calls or whatever. It's social engineering at that point to try to extract money from the company. With the Jacksonville Airport Authority lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a case I worked. But the filter That's something new. That's new stuff. And I've been hearing that in my romance scam cases a bit.

But I think it's kind of faky looking at this point. I don't know how good it is. I don't know. I mean, I see them on TikTok and they always mention it. But typically what it is, it's just making you look better. Like, it's not you. No, no, that's not true. Because I saw one the other day with a guy.

The guy, it was, oh gosh, he's, he was, it's the black actor that is in, Morgan Freeman. He's great. So the guy, it was a guy. like a white guy as Morgan Freeman talking to you as Morgan Freeman. And they show them side by side. And it was amazing. We call them deep fakes, right? It's going to make life very difficult for the FBI.

And it's going to provide a lot of ammunition for defense attorneys when we have, you know, a politician on camera taking a bribe. And they're going to say, the FBI just deep faked it to set up my guy. Right. You know, who are you going to believe? Me or your own eyes. Right. Yeah. I wonder, you know, I went, I mean, I saw that TikTok.

I wonder if this story is real. But then I've also seen all the other. ones too. I'm like, God, I don't know. If it's not real, if some guy was telling the story and it was bullshit, it will be real soon. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? I had one where the, the hot chick on the other end of the Zoom, ripping off the old man was wearing a COVID mask the whole time because she was, you know, so like her, her pictures were fantastic, but on the video calls, one of which I watched over his shoulder. I go, you think she's real video caller right now. She's got like a COVID mask on. You could just see her eyes. And, you know, she was clearly.

not the woman in the picture. Right. And there's no reason why she's wearing a COVID mask for a Zoom call. Listen, the technology is so scary. I saw some, well, well, this is still kind of scary. Is it was, I forget the name of the, it was self-driving, these self-driving taxis. They're pulling right up to your house. You get in the car.

Nobody's driving. It talks to you, put your seatbelt on, blah, blah, blah, and it drives off. Listen, they're doing it right now. Like I was telling Bozi, I was like, the scary thing is, is honestly, in two years, they'll be everywhere and they'll be amazing. Like right now, they're only a certain spot, certain cities, you know, like Chicago, L.A., that kind of thing. I just did my first drone surveillance in a private investigative case where, and... Did you do the drone?

Yeah, I hired a guy. But it was... Here's how naive I am with all this new technology and why I'm still playing catch-up. Like, I needed to establish what was inside this kind of compound in Florida. You know, we were looking for some cars that were... issue in a case. And so, and, you know, a walled compound. You could see, like, there was one side that didn't have a wall, but you couldn't get to it because you were looking across, like, potato fields forever. And so we, so I got a drone guy. And, and I said to him, I go, listen, I go, here's

what we'll do. We're going to dress up, like, construction workers, and we're going to stand on the side of the road, and you're going to have the drone, and we're going to look like we're doing surveying for, like, a road construction. And then we could be just on the other side of the tree line of this place. You can just fly above the trees, take the pictures we can get out. And he goes, you don't know what a drone does, do you, Tom? And I go, what do you mean? He goes, why don't we just go to the gas station a half a mile away? And I'll fly over there. We'll fly over the guy's house. We'll take pictures or everything, then fly it back to us. We don't need to dress up like morons on the side of the road. These things have a really good range. And gosh, darn it,

if it wasn't amazing. Like the, I mean, I'm watching it through the viewfinder. And I look like a, you know, we're like looking at like a ghost. He's like 10 feet in the air, just flying around this guy's yard looking at looking at stuff and then we see there's a guy in the garage he gets up and points down these things

the drone was small the footage was insanely high definition and we got the footage back and the client was absolutely just thrilled with this like they'd never seen anything like

it and I'd never seen anything like it so you know it's just a matter of time before these things are delivering pizzas mm-hmm I was gonna say

have you came across kind of what you guys are talking like any AI deepfakes like that or even like the AI audio of like manipulating being somebody else's voice? I have not seen any big cases myself involving deep fakes or AI audio, but they're coming. I've also been out of the FBI since 2021.

And so in my private investigative cases are mostly just straight up financial crime, investment frauds and embezzlements and romance scams. But for sure, it's coming. I mean, this AI stuff is no joke. And this deep fakes stuff is insane. And it's going to, like I said, it's going to be a real difficult for the FBI. and Department of Justice to convince a jury down the road that this is real footage of a real bad guy

doing something really terrible as opposed to something that the government cooked up and with people's distrust of the government these days we're really giving ammunition to the skeptics. What are we doing? All right, we're ready. All right. Wait, wait, what's your black shirt?

Yeah, I know. My black shirt video got a lot of traction, actually. And the people were behind me, Matt. Oh, I said, I said, I said when in the thing, I said, wear whatever shirt you want to wear. And he said, he says, I'm thinking about going shirtless for the ladies. Boost your numbers. Your numbers with the dudes are too much.

Listen, we had a guy on, what's his name? Luke. First of all, he was just massive, massive. Fat or? No, no, I mean, just chiseled. And then when he sat down, like I remember thinking, God, his voice is deep. But then when I heard the tape, the video, I'm. I mean, it was deep.

Yeah. And Jess, and Jess hung out, hung around when she saw that he was coming. She hung around. Oh, interesting. You know what happened? By the way. Okay. You're back.

I'm back. Thank you so much for having me back. Like, I'm winning a triple crown coming back for the third time. And last video did really good. And then I see all your TikToks, all that TikToks, your Instagram. all the time. You mean the one at Simon Investigations? Yes.

Oh, that's the one? Okay. That one. Hey, I do have a question. Like, you're always like in the backyard. Well, no, sometimes you're in your house. But that's, like, your house, right? In the backyard.

Sometimes you're by the lake. You don't have, like, you didn't set up like an area or you just. I like to, I just switch it up, you know. I think I don't want to have the exact same background for every video. And so that would be silly. is a show. It's very different to do a 90-second monologue. And so, you know, my first couple videos were like just me with a white wall behind me. And my son, who has some video experience, said, that's not visually pleasing at all. Don't do that. Have something in the background.

And so I started filming in front of my library. And, you know, then I'll film three videos at a time and just turn the camera like 15 degrees. And it looks like a different background. Where are you coming up with all the stories? I start my day, every day, at work, going to the FBI and DOJ press releases. Okay. And take a look and see if any interesting cases that I find interesting. Right. The idea being that if I think it's an interesting case, then I'll, then, you know, perhaps my viewers will think it's interesting as well. And, but I don't stop at the press release. I then go into PACER, which is the federal court system online, and I take a look at the court documents because sometimes in the plea agreement and the charging documents,

whether it's an indictment and information or a complaint, there will be kind of interesting and salacious details I can throw in. And so that's, uh, that's how I do it. I spend probably 45 minutes researching the story, you know, probably 10 minutes at that point, writing my little script. And I film it in 10, 15 minutes. And it's just, it's like working out in the morning. Every day I just do a different one. Nice. That's pretty good. That's, uh, that's, that's easy. And plus, I mean, I've read, you know, the, um, the press releases. Some of the press releases are, some are so bad. They're terrible. But some are, some are good. Like, I've read some more it's like they give some great. Well, they give, yeah, they give detail. Right.

And the problem is having been in that seat when I was the press spokesperson for the FBI, it's, you're kind of limited to what's in the official record. You can't include, like, the fun, sexy details. I would try to slip it in there, and I'd usually get dinged by the AUSA. And, but, but, yeah, so, but if I think they also leave out some of the more graphic details, which my viewers tend to enjoy. And so you can combine those in the court records as well. Yeah, yeah.

The trick is coming up with pictures of the bad guys. Oh, yeah. I mean, you're going to have to track them down. Yeah, because the FBI and DOJ have this really stupid rule that I had to live with for 30 years where they don't, it's against DOJ policy to release anyone's mugshot. It's blank, unless that person's a fugitive and you're looking for them. And so it's a dumb rule. I had to live with it forever. And the way I dealt with it with my reporters, I said, if you find the guy on Facebook, call me and I'll give you back channels a thumbs up or a thumbs down, whether that's him.

So you're not embarrassed. And so now I'm using, you know, AI to produce photos of what the guy probably looks like. if I can't find his picture online. And one time I put a picture of a guy up there who wasn't the guy. And he was like the mayor of a small town of the same name. And I got a call from his general counsel's office saying, why are you putting a picture of our mayor up on there as he's the guy who did the fraud? I'm so sorry I'll tear it down.

I was an honest mistake. I mean, you could always put any general, like you said, kind of a generalized picture up there and then just put the little black box like over their eyes or something. Yeah, I've done stuff like that. And the other issue, I'll be honest with you, is making sure you, get the ethnicity right right you know i mean i don't want to malign any you know one particular and everyone's so like racially sensitive right now and looking for a reason to complain that that i need to make that leap of faith you know if i'm going to put a fake picture up is this going to be a uh in african-american a white

person etc and so it's a it's a it's a it's a but people if i don't put a picture up of the of the subject everyone's going to be like well why why are you protecting him why aren't you putting that picture up. So, I mean, I was just, to me, you could probably just make it a general thing where even if it is the real guy, you put the bar, put the black bar over that way. It's just, you know what I'm saying? It's not that much. It's not a bad idea.

And if they're all like that. So some are the actual guy with the black strip over their eyes and some aren't. I mean, but whatever. I don't know. So, yeah, I was going to say, you know, it would have great details is if you could get the pre-sentence report. But the people have just been arrested. Yeah.

And they've just been arrested. You know what I'm saying? Like they don't really have, like you said. Well, some of like, different. cases that I do are in different stages. Oh, yeah, some of them are saying. Right, because, you know, the DOJ will release a press release, usually when the person's charged, and then when the person's convicted, and when the person's sentenced. So in the perfect

world, every case has three press releases. And so, and the stories I do, I'm just taking a look at what came out in the past couple days. Right. And to see what strikes my interest. All right. So let's, so we've got, we got, we got, what about the, the tango? You got the tango king. I'm going to tell you this. What is the tango?

Let's start from the beginning. Okay. And this story goes back to when you were probably in elementary school and I was in, back 19. You're in what? Let's see. Well, how old are you?

I'm 54. How old do you think I am? I thought you're a couple years younger than me. I'm 54. I'm going to be 55 in July. High school class of 88? 88? Okay, you and I both.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, all right. Well, same age. So the story begins in 1989. when we were both 19 years old. All right. And, you know, chasing girls.

I was probably a goodie two shoes. You were probably a young thug. In Chicago, there was a guy named Gilberto Granados. Hey, I appreciate you guys. Watch and do me a favor. Hit the subscribe button, hit the bell so you get notified. Share the video. Also, we're going to leave all of Tom's social media links.

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So that might be happening. Thank you very much. See ya.