Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Million Dollar Coupon Scam - The Robin Ramirez Story

Episode Date: September 24, 2025

The Robin Ramirez coupon scam was a large-scale counterfeit coupon operation based in Phoenix, Arizona, led by Robin Ramirez and her associates.

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And home girls, she's got a business mind. And she really, really wants to make a lot of money, even if she has to break a few laws to do it. And one day in 2007, she gets a pretty clever idea. What if she prints a fake coupon that looks exactly like a real one. and she uses it to get a little discount for herself. Just one coupon, not that big of a deal. And so she does it, and the fake coupon works. She gets a discount on whatever she was trying to buy, so cool.

But then she realizes, nah, what if I go bigger? Getting a little discount is cool and all, but that's not enough for Robin. She starts thinking, nah, I don't want one discount. I want a lot of little discounts. That could add up to like thousands or even millions of dollars. And on top of that, she wants to sell those discounts to other people. And so, boom, she gets going on this scam. So here's how it all works.

She does it a couple of different ways, but one of the ways she does it is she'll like, for example, call up a dog food company, and she'll say, my dog ate your food and it made him sick. And the company will say, oh, we're so sorry, ma'am, let us make it up to you by giving you a coupon for some free dog food. And Robin's like, all right. Then she'll take that coupon and she'll contact some shady print. company in Europe, and she'll get them to replicate it and reprint the coupon in bulk. So now she has a bunch of counterfeit coupons that look just like the real one. Then she starts a website and she puts all these fake coupons up for sale, and she'll sell

them to the general public. And the general public has no idea that these are fake because, you know, the coupons actually work. Like if someone buys a fake coupon from Robin's site and uses it in the store, it tends to work. Like the store accepts them, which is a pretty creative idea. I'm not going to lie. But anyway, she does all this and her website starts taking off and it gets really popular. I mean, people all across the U.S. are spending lots of money buying counterfeit coupons from her.

Coupons for all kinds of shit like food, coffee, laundry soap, diapers, stuff like that. And several years pass. And her scam is still going. And it's going well. And these counterfeit coupons start making their way into circulation, and businesses start losing money because of it. Not like small businesses, but like the big ones, like Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Hershey, businesses like that. Because at the end of the day, she's mostly ripping off the massive corporations who issue out these coupons. And yeah, it's easy to think, oh, Ray, it's just a coupon scam.

How much money could Robin this mom from Arizona possibly be making from this? she is making a metric fuckload of money from this. According to her, she's pulling in about $300,000 a month. In fact, she's doing so much business that she has to bring in two other women to help her with the operation.

She's doing so much business that they have to rent a whole ass second house called a stash house to store the massive supply of fake coupons she now has. So there are like tens of thousands of coupons in the stash house along with their money counting machines. Because if you're making that much money, you got to have money counting machines.

But you know what else you got to do when you're making that kind of money? You got to spend it on a bunch of bullshit, which apparently Robin does. She goes out and she buys herself sports cars and a bunch of guns and a new RV and a boat. And to make sure that no one sees all her new stuff and gets suspicious, she hides all of it in an airplane hanger that she's renting. And so all of this is going really well for Robin. She's making money. She's living a baller life. It seems like she's never going to get caught.

Until. Of course she's going to get caught. I wouldn't be making this video if she didn't get caught. So here's the problem with scams like this. Eventually, the party being scammed notices that they're being ripped off. And in this case, one of the huge corporations notices. So let's say hypothetically, the person buying the counterfeit coupon from Robin's site will then go and use it at a grocery store or wherever.

And let's say that coupon's for like tampons or something. And so they buy the tampons with the coupon, and the grocery store will then send that coupon that they just got to the tampon manufacturer, and the tampon manufacturer will reimburse the grocery store a certain dollar amount. Now, the problem is that now the manufacturer is suddenly getting a bunch of counterfeit coupons, coupons where the barcodes aren't matching up. But the tampon manufacturer is,

still expected to pay out the grocery store a certain dollar amount. And so, you know, Tampax or whoever is over here losing money. Now, at some point during a routine audit, one company, Procter & Gamble, notices all these counterfeit coupons for their products in circulation. And so they finally decide to do something about it. They're going to try to hunt these counterfeiters down. And the thing about a big company like Procter and Gamble is they have the resources to do it. So they hire a bunch of private investigators and they say, go out and find where these coupons are coming from and who's doing it. And the investigators are like, all right. And so these private investigators, they get to work. And pretty quickly, they track the fake coupons to Robin's

website. And they don't know much about the site other than it's likely run by someone in Phoenix, Arizona. And so they take this information to the police in Phoenix. And I'm sure the police are like, what do you want to the fucking coupons? What do you want to do about it? But then the private investigators lay out the whole case and the scale of the losses and stuff and so now Phoenix police are investigating but they too don't know much about this mysterious website or who runs it however police start looking at this site and they notice that it has what's called a wall of shame because Robin is apparently a very petty person apparently any time a site member ever questions the validity of

the coupons or any member who's ever gotten into it with Robin, she will post that member's name and their home address and their personal information to the wall of shame, which is just a page on the coupon site. So basically she'll docks them. Like I said, she's petty as fuck. And so police, they're looking at this wall of shame and they're immediately like, you know, we could just contact these people. I mean, we have their information. I bet they'll be willing to tell us a lot about this site. And so after talking with a bunch of disgruntled former members who got doxed, they're able to get a ton of information about the site,

and eventually they learn that the whole thing is being run out of a PO box in Phoenix. And so police set up surveillance around that PO box to see who comes and checks it. And they stake this box out for like two weeks, and eventually Robin shows up. And they watch her, and they low-key take a bunch of pictures of her, and they get her license plate numbers so that they can look her up. And now that they know who she's, she is, they follow her around and they gather a ton of evidence against her. And so, bam, they arrest

Robin. Here's her mugshot. And also, bam, they arrest the other two women working with her. Here's one woman's mugshot, and here's the other. And so police end up raiding their houses and the stash house and they find $40 million worth of fake coupons. They also seize like dozens of bank accounts and 21 vehicles. Like, damn, these women live in large. But anyway, but anyway, the two women helping Robin took plea deals and they only got probation while Robin took a plea deal and she got two years in prison. Which that actually feels a little light. Like I feel like I should have got longer.