Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - She Will Scam You - The Dawn Bennett Story

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

Dawn Bennett was a Washington, D.C.–based luxury sportswear entrepreneur and former financial advisor who built a glittering public persona while secretly running what prosecutors later described as a multimillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. Through her company she marketed high-end alpaca and vicuña apparel and promised investors sky-high returns, claiming their money would fund inventory and expansion, but instead she used much of it to bankroll an extravagant lifestyle that included designer goods, jewelry, and personal expenses.

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If you're 45 or older and at average risk, ask your health care provider about the Coligard test. Colagard is available by prescription only. Learn more or request a prescription today at colagard.com slash screen. Remember that strange con woman who wanted to avoid getting arrested? So she cast some sort of magic spell using cow tongues in a jar? Now the woman's name is Dawn, and Dawn is 44 when this story starts, and she's living in Maryland. And Dawn's got a lot going for her.

She works at a major investment firm helping clients invest their money, and she gets paid pretty well. But, for whatever reason, Dawn isn't satisfied. She wants to make even more money. So one day in 2006, she takes steps to do that. She quits her job and she starts her own investment company. And immediately, things seem to be going okay. She's actually able to get a few of her clients to move over from her old firm. But it's apparently not enough.

Because Dawn doesn't have a ton of clients, so she isn't managing as much money as she used to. And this feels like failure to her. So she decides to do something about it. And she low-key starts inflating her numbers. She tells people that her firm manages about a billion dollars in assets and that they rank among the top 1% investment firms in the world, which is all bullshit, but people don't know any better.

And this actually works. And she starts pulling in a ton of new clients. Then in 2009, she submits these. made up numbers to Barron's, a major financial magazine. And they end up featuring her, and she gets ranked fifth on the list of top 100 women financial advisors. And being featured, blows Dawn and her company the fuck up. And suddenly her name gets traction in the investment world, and Dawn takes full advantage of this free publicity. She launches her own radio show on AM radio, and there she talks about the massive returns all her clients are supposedly getting and how she's making

them all rich. And all of this continues to work because people actually believe her and her listeners begin investing their money with her. So now Dawn is getting paid left and right. And her firm is managing around $400 million in investments, which is a large and very respectable amount of money to manage. However, it's still not a. enough for Dawn. Because she feels like she has to lie to people now and tell them that her company is now managing about $2 billion in investment assets so that they think her company's more successful than it actually is. And people fall for it. Many of the people who listen to her radio show are retirees or elderly people. And they don't know any better. They see Dawn as this genius investor

who's managing a ton of finances. Now, here. Here's where she runs into a problem. When you lie at this scale, eventually you need results to back up the numbers. And Dawn just doesn't have results like that. So in order to try and get some results, she starts placing her client's money into some extremely risky trades. Yet she'll tell them that she's investing conservatively and that their investments are safe. And so, as you can imagine, it doesn't take too long before things start. to go wrong for her. Soon enough, the trades go bad and her investors start losing money,

like a lot of money. One guy invests about $1.1 million with her in her company, and she loses 920,000 of it, which sucks for that guy, but Don doesn't seem to care because she's about to get into something even bigger. In 2010, she takes some of the money that she's making off these people and she starts her own luxury sportswear website that sells a bunch of extremely expensive sportswear like $13,000 golf bags, $700 ski hats, stuff like that. But here's the thing. She tells her investors that it's a much bigger website than it really is. And of course she tells them that it's an opportunity to make some serious money. She shows them fake financial statements claiming that the website is thriving and pulling in millions of dollars and all they have to do is invest in it and they

could all be so rich. And once again, this works. People actually believe her and they start investing money into her stupid website. Now in reality, her website is not that big. It's actually losing money, as you can imagine. Ain't no one trying to buy a $700 ski hat. And so this site is somehow losing millions of dollars. But Dawn isn't being honest with her investors. So they're still investing. And then she decides to turn all of this into one big Ponzi scheme, where she'll use new investors money to pay off old investors. And if that isn't bad enough, she also uses a lot of that investor money to fund her baller-ass lifestyle.

She owns two pin houses, multiple expensive cars. She owns more than 700 pairs of designer shoes along with belts and purses to match. She spends more than $100,000 on cosmetic procedures. She also leases a luxury suite at the Dallas Cowboys Stadium for $500,000 a year. Oh, but here's the weirdest one. I guess she's really into astrology, because of course she is. She spends $141,000 on astrological gyms. Whatever the hell that is.

$141,000. on some rocks. And while she's spending all this investor money, her scheme keeps growing and growing. And by this point, Dawn has taken about $20 million total from her investors. But as it turns out, investors, they don't like losing their money too much. And some of them, who had lost money, they get super pissed off. And they decide to go and report Dawn to the F-I-N-R-A, which is a, an organization that regulates investment firms. And so soon the SEC gets involved, the Securities Exchange Commission, and they start investigating Dawn and her firm. And without a doubt, they quickly discover that she has been inflating her assets and lying to her investors. So in 2016,

the SEC finds her $650,000 and they ban her from the securities industry. Here's the thing about Dawn, though. She is not one to just give up, and she has no intention of listening to the SEC, or anyone else for that matter. So she keeps going. She keeps funneling investment money into her luxury

sportswear website, because she is determined to stay rich. And honestly, she might actually get away with it. This episode is brought to you by Beneful. Dogs of the world, lend me your ears, snoots, and little toe beans.

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apart. Because one day, an 80-year-old woman decides that she wants to invest with Dawn. So she goes to her bank to wire $32,000 to Dawn's company. And a bank employee there notices the details of this investment, and they're thinking, something feels off about this. I mean, the whole thing feels very shady. So the employee decides to look into Dawn's company, and that is when she discovers that Dawn had previously been charged with fraud by the SEC. So the bank immediately reports all of this to the SEC again. And soon the FBI gets involved, and pretty quickly the feds realized that Don had gone right back

to doing what she was banned from doing. Meanwhile, Don's investors find out that she's under investigation again, and they start calling her and asking for all their money back. The thing is, she doesn't have enough money to pay everyone back, because that's how Ponzi schemes work. That's why they fall apart. And so she starts ghosting everyone and making excuses as to why she's unavailable. But here's the weirdest part.

She also turns to spiritual protection to help her get out of trouble. And she spends about $800,000 to get 200 Hindu priests in India to perform some hocus pocus rituals, which are meant to block the SEC investigators from uncovering the truth about her. Not only that, but she also starts practicing hoodoo rituals. And the one ritual in particular is called the shut up spell, where she buys cow tongues, slices them open, and stuffs pieces of paper inside, each one with the name of an SEC officer investigating her. Then she casts a spell on them and seals them up in jars.

I guess this is supposed to stop them from investigating her. Well, this clearly doesn't work, because once the feds get enough evidence against her, bam, they arrest her. And I can't find her mugshot, but here is what she looks like in real life. And ultimately, Dawn goes to trial, and she's found guilty, and she gets sentenced to 20 years in prison.