Scamfluencers - Golden Age of Scammers: An Interview with Evan Ratliff

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Ever wonder why it feels like we’re in the golden age of scammers? In this special episode of Scamfluencers, hosts Scaachi Koul and Sarah Hagi sit down with fellow journalist Evan Ratliff, the host of Persona: The French Deception, to discuss our culture’s rabid obsession with conning. They dig deep into Ratliff’s investigation into Gilbert Chikli, the prolific con artist whose bold telephone scams netted more than $50 million, and discuss how influence can make — and break — a scammer.   Support us by supporting our sponsors!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, Prime members, you can listen to scam flensers ad-free on Amazon music. Download the app today. From Wondry, I'm Sachi Cole, and I'm Sarah Haggi, and this is a special episode of scam flensers. And just a programming note, we're taking a two-week break after this to dive into more scams. We'll be back with a brand new season starting August 29th on Wondery Plus and September 5th on the public feed. As you all probably know by now, we've come to learn a thing or two about con artists, broadsters, and grifters. And the people who fall for them. We've seen how deception, susceptibility, and of course a dash of influence can create the perfect scam storm. But no one understands this better than Evan Ratliffe, the host of Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios'

latest production, Persona. Over the past few years, Evans uncovered the story of a con artist who pulled off an extraordinary scam that spans 40 countries, hundreds of targets, and dozens of suspects. It's the elaborate and winding story of global menace Gilbert chicane.

She gradually duped some of the world's most powerful people into handing over their fortunes, evaded the law for years, and even became a Robinhood-like hero to many in the process. The best scams are irresistible. I don't mean irresistible to hear about. I mean to the person being conned. A good scam isn't a single event in time, like a robbery. No, a truly great con is a story, one that taps into the listener's greed, or loneliness, or vanity. To run this kind of scam, you have to invent a whole imaginary world, and then put your

mark inside it. Make them a part of it, so they're playing a role, inhabiting a new persona, just like you are. If you think about it, that's the art part of being a con artist If you could make a story so enticing that the listener lives inside of it and doesn't want to leave You don't even have to steal their money They'll just give it to you Well, the fairy tale, but it was real I'm Evan Ratliffe and this is the story of Gilbert Schickley, one of the greatest con artists

of all time. A man who took tens of millions from some of the richest people on the planet. He said down in Gilbert and he opened it back and there was 2 million euros. And became a fugitive, a legend, even a hero. You know what is the nickname of Gilbert Schickley? The Professor. A lot of people try to do what you did. But Jirbershiki is a professor. He's the professor.

Today, we're joined by Evan, and we're excited to dig deeper into the world of scams and impact the details of one of the most bizarre operations of all time. Hi, Evan. Thanks for joining us. Very lovely to be here. So this story really begins with you coming across French article 17 years ago and becoming obsessed with it, which I'm really impressed by your focus on something for that long. But you weren't even fluent in French.

So how did you find the article and then what about it was so compelling? I should say I didn't, all 17 years I didn't spend reporting this. It was very odd and off for me. I don't actually know how I found the article, to be honest. I have the article, it's from Liberation, it's from October of 2005, and I printed it out,

which is a real relic of like early internet era. I printed it out, and I still have the copy of the printout. And I'm not fluent in French, but I did take six years of French in high school. So I could kind of, I probably translated it word by word, I think, using a dictionary. I'm not sure. There was no Google translate didn't even exist then. So however I came across it, maybe there was an English reference first, I translated it. And then there was this particular element of the story, which is a woman who is scammed into hand to go over 300 plus thousand euros in cash in a bathroom in a cafe

in Paris. She arrived at the restaurant, entered, and walked to the bathroom, down a small hallway. She went into the stall, locked the door, and waited. Moments later, there was a knock on the stall door, then a woman whispered the password, Ove. Manipje cracked open the door and handed over the bag, without getting a glimpse of who took it. And I feel like that detail stuck with me and I could never let it go. The idea that someone could scam someone into just putting that much money in a bag

and giving it to someone else in a bathroom of a cafe. I just couldn't get over it. And I would pull the article out and think about it and maybe look into it a little bit over the years before I ended up reporting it. Wow, yeah, I mean, that makes total sense because I feel like all these kinds of scams are like, how did that person get to that point

of handing over cash in a bathroom? And I guess I'm wondering, just going on the note of this primary source being in French and all your sources being French. I mean, did you ever feel a disadvantage to not really be able to get into these primary sources that are written in other languages? And how different was it for you to report this over, you know, these countless other

English language stories you've done? Well, it certainly felt like a disadvantage. I mean, that's one reason I didn't do it for many years was that I was intimidated by the fact that a lot of it was going to be in French. I was a little bit embarrassed that I don't know French better despite having taken six years and then dropping it for many, many years. So I was resistant to start reporting it for that reason. As it turned out, I can actually, I can get the gist of a lot of French reading, okay? But that said, it was still extremely intimidating. In fact, in this story, there were primary sources

in Turkish, in Ukrainian, in Polish, in Hebrew, all of which were much worse for me than the French. So it was very, very difficult, but somehow the fact that it was also multiple languages was sort of helpful. It made it a requirement that we were going to have to use translators anyway. So I have, I've worked with translators a lot over the years and international stories, both live translation and document translation.

And I have to say, Google Translate is pretty incredible. It's not, you would never use it for your final, final translation, but you can feed documents into it and get the gist, a very, very strong gist of what is being said. And so we could glean a lot of the meaning from documents really quickly. And then we had this unbelievable team of producers and translators who would then go through and make sure

if we were using something, it would be correct. Evan, I don't think you have to feel too bad about not being fluent in French after... Well, is it six years? I did 13 and I can't say anything. Never mind translate an article, but... What was the core question in your mind when you were looking into the scam? I feel like when Sarah and I look at these stories,

there's always something that we're like, we have to know. So I'm wondering what's the thing that you just had to know? I think for this one, the question I started out with was not actually the question I ended up on, but the one I started out with was just a very straightforward

kind of, how did he do this? Like, how did this person get on the phone and convince people that he was first the president or CEO of a bank or company and second, convince them the same person that he was a secret agent and then extract this money from them. And then there was a sort of second part of it, which is that how did he come up with the idea and how was it able to spread all over the world? Because by the time I was years into it, it was everywhere.

I mean, people were copying it and they were doing it in other countries and other languages. And so it was sort of this dual question of like, how did he do it? How did it spread around the world? And then he did it all again, allegedly. So it was kind of like, how was this guy even still out there to be doing this?

There were a lot of kind of how questions that were driving the reporting initially. What questions kind of remain about Sheikli himself? Like, you know, he's such a mysterious figure. There's so much there about him. Did you figure everything you wanted to out? I definitely did not figure everything out that I wanted to know about. Pshikri, even about the scams, even about how they were investigated, despite the fact that we had access to an unbelievable collection of police documentation on it.

I think the biggest question that emerged in the reporting that I didn't have at the beginning was, was he actually the person who was the mastermind behind what's called the La Driaan scam that this scam in which they impersonated the French defense minister Jordi La Driaan and that was a sort of a given in the investigation and the trial and the convictions and the deeper we got into it the more that question became a bigger and bigger mystery even all the way up till the end. And I'm still left with it. We'll see how people feel about the ending. You know, I have my own ideas about what probably happened,

but it's in the end, it turned out to be way more difficult to substantiate who was really behind it than everyone had made out by the time we got into it. What did you know about Sheikli and these sorts of scams when you started sort of the reporting journey? I'm curious what you wanted to get out of telling this story. I mean, when I first learned about it, it was new. Like, he had basically invented this thing. So that was part of what was so attractive about it was that no one had really done this

before in this way, this method, this sort of fake CEO, fake president method of scamming people on the other side of the world. And then by the time I started reporting it, I was in a little bit of a different place because it was more than 10 years later, I had actually done a lot of scam stories. And what really interested me is like,

where's the complexity here? Like most of these stories, they all kind of sound the same. If you hear the basics of them, all scams sort of sound the same. And you end up in the same places and describing them in the same ways. But if you can get deep enough in them, they all have these complexities,

whether it's the human complexities of the people who are victimized or something about the way this scam works. And so what I really wanted to do was kind of like try to get inside that complexity and the kind of messier side of it, which I didn't feel like I could do all the way up until we started reporting in 2019 when there was just another turn in his story that had not existed prior to that. How did the story end up differently than what you imagined at the outset? I mean, the first was just this mystery that sort of developed for me.

So the story that the prosecution told in 2020 about Gilbert Schickley was in many ways the same story that he told about himself for years, which was he was a genius. He invented the president scam. He is this larger than life character who's capable of talking anyone out of anything. And therefore, if someone impersonated the defense minister of France and stole tens of millions of dollars, it must be him. And I kind of thought that too. And the narrative that we found, regardless of whether you think he's guilty at some level

or not guilty, it just didn't remotely match that. That's not at all what the police investigation actually found. So that was one thing. And then a second one was just, if you look at kind of big time scams like this or any sort of big organized crime around the world, global organized crime. There's this money laundering element where they use shell companies to move money really quickly around the world.

That's the way scammers and organized crime move their money. And one of the things that we discovered along the way was just that some of the victims of the scam who were these incredibly wealthy, prestigious people were also using shell companies to move and hide their money around the world. And there was this sort of strange parallel between the victims, which is not to say that the victims deserve to be scammed in some way, but it just became very interesting that they were sort of like living in these parallel worlds outside of, you know, the financial system that like you or I might use on a daily basis. I'm so curious also because this is a story

where you had to travel around the world for it. What was the biggest challenge when uncovering the full story of these scams? The biggest challenge is just getting people to talk. You just need a lot of time to work on people, to get people to talk, to find the different angles. And it's a little bit counter-tuitive, but I think one way, generally,

that you don't get to the bottom of a scam story is by talking to the scammer. Like, it's great if the scammer will talk to you, but, you know, con artists are generally, like, they're not reflective by nature. I mean, they're also liars. Yeah. Exactly. Fundamentally. And they're not really sitting nature. I mean, they're also liars. Yeah, exactly.

Fundamentally. And they're not really sitting there ready to tell you, we know what, I'm done with it and here's why I did it, you know. Generally, they're just looking for the next angle and that next angle is probably you and how they're gonna tell the story through you. So my method is usually to try to gather

as much massive amount of information around them and then triangulate it. So from the cops, from the victims, from whoever, and you're just kind of vacuuming up everything you can learn about the scam, and then trying to like play that information off each other and try to figure out what really happens. Yeah.

But then in these types of stories, the victims are embarrassed to have given away their money. So they don't want to talk. And we had a list of like 150 targets of the scam and almost all of them either ignored us, didn't want to talk to us, hung up on us, yelled at us for even contacting them. And in that way, we were kind of like Gilbert or Shickley.

We're just like calling these people over and over. Just like, please, well, one of them pick up and talk to us. And then, but usually, you could get the investigators. Usually, the cops who have cracked some scam really want to talk about it. And that was the unique challenge of this one was that a lot of the, most of the investigators, particularly in France, did not want to talk about it.

And this itself was somewhat of a mystery. I would rail against it for months and months, like why don't they want to just brag about what they did? And then when we got the police files and we started reading the police files, I don't know why they didn't want to talk. I can only speculate, but one possible reason is that most of the things that they got,

they just totally looked into. Like there wasn't this sort of like gum shoe police work that led to the convictions that happened in the case. And I wouldn't want to talk about it either if I were them. I feel like we've realized that with some of our episodes where we're like, I guess they did a reverse Google image search. Well, speaking of information, one of the big pieces of unraveling the story

had to do with this treasure trove of documents about the scam and the investigation called the Tiger dossier. So I'm curious how you approached digging into this big archive, just as a reporter, it seems daunting. It was daunting. It took us months and months

to even make our way through the thing. I mean, it was this, at first when we got it, we just couldn't believe our luck. And then it sort of settled in how are we possibly going to look at these, like, 25,000 pages. We created a system that involved a bunch of spreadsheets about each of the archives that keep track of where things are. So that was sort of the actual nuts and bolts daily reporting of it. It was like, you take 50 and I'll take 50 and we'll So that was sort of the actual nuts and bolts daily reporting of it. It was like, you take 50 and I'll take 50 and we'll, at the end of the week, we'll check out our spreadsheet and then we'll take 50 more.

Oh my God. And I'm guessing so much of that is like pretty boring information. So boring. Not just boring, but like completely irrelevant because what they would do is they'd find like a bank account and I had a payment from someone and they'd say, oh, what about this guy? And then they'd spend 20 documents looking into that guy

who actually turned out and nothing to do with it. But you have to go through each one and he's got his phone records and his bank accounts and his, here's this girlfriend, here's where he lives. And then all of it was absolutely for nothing. Oh, wow. If you don't really think of the randoms who are like involved in these dossiers without even knowing it. Yeah.

So given the reveal in the final episode, are we ever going to expect a deep dive into Sammy Toulin's brother? I mean, were they the actual ones involved in the ultimate French deception in your opinion? Well, I have to speak about this very carefully. As far as the French court system is concerned, he's innocent. I think one reason why I wanted to investigate him and investigate his role at it was that there was actually, it appears a lot more evidence against him than there was against Gilbert Schickley, which isn't to say that Sammy Twill was the mastermind behind it or even involved.

The French police said that his back account showed evidence of money laundering and other things, but again, he wasn't charged. So the point was more to illuminate the way they treated Schickley because of his reputation because he was viewed as this world famous scammer who they were finally gonna catch. And so, they had this other guy, and then a bunch of them, it's against him,

and they didn't end up charging him. So, that part was interesting to me. All right, well, because my next question was gonna be like, are you tired of the story yet? And I guess what about it is still fascinating to you after all these years? I'm not tired of the story. Actually, this story has so much to it. these years? I'm not tired of the story. Actually, this story has so much to it.

I think I probably will keep looking into this story. I mean, as soon as I get on something new, I'll probably be newly obsessed with that and not paying as much attention. But the thing is when you have as many documents as we do, we know that we miss things in them. Clearly, we miss things in them. The French police miss things in them that we found.

And so there's this impulse to kind of like keep going back to it and trying to surface one more connection, and I'm sort of susceptible to that. Hey listener, it is Jason Bateman. We've been fortunate to attract so many a list guests to our smartless podcast, but we've never put together a line up quite like this. I'm talking about Will Ferrell, Conan O'Brien, Kevin Hart, Mark Cuban, Jimmy Kimmel, Matt Damon, and more available four weeks early and ad free on Wondery Plus.

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from Brooklyn to Los Angeles. You can listen to these episodes four weeks early and add free with 1-3 plus, find 1-3 rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep. Find one rep Conan O'Brien, making a legendary appearance on Smartless. Picture this, the iconic Conan O'Brien, Puffy Red Hair and all, joining forces with me and Jason Bateman and Sean Hayes. It is just, it's a recipe for podcast perfection exclusively on One Re plus.

We're taking you on an unforgettable journey behind the curtain. We're pulling back the veil on the world of late night and giving you an inside look into the mind of a true legend. Our episode with Conan is the second of 10 special episodes exclusive to One Re plus. These episodes are the full recorded interviews

from our smart list tour that was filmed in front of thousands of our biggest fans from Washington, DC to Los Angeles. You're not gonna want to miss this conversation with Conan? You can listen to these episodes exclusively and add free with 1-3-plus, find 1-3-plus in the 1-3-App or on Apple Podcasts. Evan Serran and I talk about this all the time. We feel like we are in the golden age of scammers.

They're fascinating and then they become celebrities. So I love scams because they make me feel better about myself, but I'm curious why you love scams. And why does it feel like everybody so obsessed with them right now are particular? I mean, right now there are so many scams and variety of scams. And I think a lot of them are just our age-old scams

that are being reinvented in the modern world in different ways. But I think there are truly unique things about our era, one of which is that you can just scan people on the other side of the world. So the idea that you can kind of reach through your computer and scam a company or an individual person who is from a different culture, who speaks a different language, is remarkable. And I think there are all kinds of interesting systematic and inequality aspects to that, which isn't necessarily why people love scammers. I think why people love scammers is that when you hear a scam story, you can kind of identify with the con artist and you can identify with the victim. Like with a con artist, you can sort of say,

oh, could I be that manipulative? Like you can be wowed by how good they are at it and say like, wow, what would it take to kind of just treat people that way? And how can you operate in society if you're that manipulative? And the other side is there's this sort of like Shaddon Freud impulse where you're sort of like,

wow, how could you be that gullible to fall for that thing? And I think, you know, we're sort of like, wow, how could you be that gullible to fall for that thing? And I think, you know, we're all a little susceptible to that. For my part, I think I really like scams that at least in the attempt to tell them they like illuminate some larger systematic issue. And so I'm interested in scams where there's some connection to some sort of larger question about the economy that this scam is sort of found its way into a niche outside the law that sort of shows, oh, this is what's happening on the other side of the law, that even is reflective of what's happening in our own systems, you know, someone who's basically a startup

founder, but on the other side of the law. What do you think about some of these scam artists who reach a kind of folk hero status? I mean, Shikli had that for sure, especially in Israel, among a certain group of people who, you know, his community, I think some people in this community really disliked him because he was giving them about reputation and other people in this community thought that he was the kind of Robin Hood figure who, you know, gave away his money and he was taking it from banks, so they were like, they're really gonna miss it. And I think it's like, it's hard not to get caught up in that,

especially if they're not targeting individual people. I think if someone's going, doing romance scams or something, it's really hard to view them that way. They're just destroying people. So that's different, but in this case, it's businesses, it's companies, or it's incredibly wealthy, the wealthiest people in the world who are getting scammed.

And the interesting thing in this particular case is that that was like Shickley's downfall almost. His downfall was that he became a folk hero. And then he got so much attention, and he courted so much attention that in the end when a big scam happened, they were kind of like, oh, it must be you. Like, you said it was you.

You said you were the best. And everyone said that. And so there's something in there about like, the way we're all implicated in like, elevating someone in this way, and including himself, you know. Mm, you know, it's funny because like, the one thing I feel like that's so hard for people

to understand is how persuasive these scammers are and how easy it is to be manipulated by them and how it gets so personal. And I feel like throughout this investigation, do you think you found yourself kind of relating to some of these victims? Yeah, assuming that people have made it to the end of the show. I think in terms of how the victims are made to feel, I think it's something that can get lost is how utterly devastating it can be to be scammed,

even when it's not your money. You know, if you're the person, especially this type of scam, was really like convincing someone that they've sort of like entered this fairy tale and they're like involved in something urgent and important and then just not just stealing the money from them, but also pulling the rug out from under them and suddenly revealing to them that they've been duped. It's totally devastating psychologically that people lose their jobs because they've

lost a company's money or a bank's money. And so we wanted to kind of like pull people into the scam and feel that folk hero aspect of it. And then kind of like give them the victim side of it and kind of pull them back and forth a little bit in terms of feeling that. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned the internet being like a newer factor in these scams that are so far reaching. I guess I'm wondering, what do you think about the intersection of like scammers and influence? Because like a lot of the ones we've covered

are people who, their scams are totally undone because they're just addicted to this attention and adoration and this power. So I guess what do you think about this as kind of their fatal flaw for a certain type of scammer? Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing about this as kind of their fatal flaw for a certain type of scammer? Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing that I have learned in doing these scam stories over the years, the bigger ones is how little they are about money.

Like, they're not actually about money at some point. Maybe they are at the beginning, but this sort of the typical thing you would say with a criminal and a crime story is like, oh, a drug dealer, well, you made $10 million, like why didn't you just retire? Why didn't you just quit and live off your money? Or you live made $100 million or whatever. And that seems like it applies to these scammers too.

Why don't they just quit? They did it, you know, shickly did it. But then it doesn't apply because there are these like compulsions at work, which sometimes are the same compulsions that lead people to want to get attention and You know go out on social media go into the media and brag about their scams or like be very visible But they aren't really driven by money in the end So like money is a part of it But that's not really the reason why they're doing it. Which is why they never quit

They don't quit because they're after something else, which probably can never be satisfied. Are there any common misconceptions about the victims of scams or even about scammers themselves? I feel like we hear some of them in the show, like people send us DMs and they have lots of opinions about people who got got. But what do you think? Yeah, everyone has always has opinions. And I mean, for me, one of the big ones is that the people who get scammed are gullible. You know, that's, I mean, it's very easy to see them as gullible

that they just fell for a trick, you know, a trick like a street scam where someone comes up to you and it's like, my car ran out of gas. You know, I need 50 bucks and there's gas station around the corner and you fall for that. You're like, I'm so dumb, like I didn't interrogate that. But like the reality is, our impulse is to trust people. And in these big, elaborate cons,

these are not people who just fall for any old thing. They are actually like oftentimes educated professionals or people who are successful in their careers or they might be unbelievably wealthy and successful. But what happens is the talent of the scammer is to create these set of conditions to cause that type of person to ignore what they're seeing right in front of them. What their initial feelings are about what they're receiving, they cast them aside. And that is the genius of a good scam. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've definitely fallen for the,

oh man, like my car broke down, got 40 bucks. Give me your number, I'll pay you back. Because I'm also like, they're not seeing for 40 bucks, they're probably good. Yeah, me too, but also you might say like, if they're willing, sometimes I'm like, if they're willing to like put on this show, I talk this up in this way, even if it's not true,

I don't know, they kind of earned it like a performer. That's exactly right. You know, it did a great job. Yeah, it's happened to me too many times. Sarah and I always have this problem where when we talk about different scam artist stories, one of us will get Stockholm Syndrome and start to have like a disproportionate empathy for that. So I'm curious, like as you report on this, how does your empathy change, has your sympathy

change for the scammer? Do you develop a weird kind of fondness? I mean, maybe I'm just telling tales at a school and me and Sarah are very sick. And no, to go to the hospital, but here we go. I personally think it's okay. I mean, criminals are human beings by their nature unless you're going to scam by some automated system.

There's a human being there, and it's okay to have empathy for human beings when you come to understand more about them I mean there's a guy in in persona who who we call Lucian is Romanian guy who got caught up in committing a scam A little bit like against his knowledge and against his will at the beginning but then kind of stayed with it and He's an incredibly fascinating person to me and interesting and amazing at telling his own story Which is not to say that he is blameless and I mean he wouldn't say he was blameless

But I think he also ended up in a horrible Bulgarian prison and I feel like It's okay to have empathy for that and it's even okay to say wow that scam is unbelievably clever Like it's just very very smart And the person behind it is incredibly creative. I don't, I think you can do that without saying the people are blameless or scamming's okay or I don't care about the victims. Like, I think that you can hold both those ideas in your head. Yeah, that's good to hear.

So we're not crazy. I'm like, okay, I feel a little better. I'm like, okay, I feel a little better. Actually, one of our upcoming seasons of scam influencers is someone who, you know, very well, Hashpuffy. Hashpuffy. And you've written two insanely viral deep dives about the Nigerian fraudster turned global influencer for Bloomberg. And the story, I guess, it started like a bidding war in Hollywood. So what I'm wondering is, how did you first hear about him

and what made him such a compelling character to you? So I heard about Hushbuffy, the way everyone else did. Hushbuffy was a classic, like, one day international story. So he got arrested in Dubai. It was this big raid in Dubai. And he got sent back to the US and it was sort of like, it was on CNN. And it was, it was all raid and Dubai. And he got sent back to the US and it was sort of like, it was on CNN and it was all over the news. Because he's an Instagram influencer.

And Igerian Instagram celebrity who was arrested on multiple fraud charges for crimes committed in different parts of the world boasted about his wealth and expensive possessions on social media, claiming he has a successful businessman. He has millions of followers, borderline, real high profile celebrity in Nigeria, and interacting with, you know, all kinds of major, major pop stars, sports stars. He was huge.

And so when he got arrested, it was a big story. I happened to latch on to that story because I was interested in this type of fraud called business email compromise Which is actually in a way it's derivative of Joe bear chicly scam It's like it's a it's a more advanced version of the president's scam which you'll bear chicly invented So I was kind of interested in that but but business email compromise you can tell from even the name is like it's boring Like it's by its very nature. It's boring. it's not talked about a lot, even though it's huge, it's the biggest scam in the world, by far, cyber scam. And so Hushbuffy was alleged to have paid in business email compromise scams.

That was the allegation that he had secretly actually been making his money, not as an influencer, but in BEC scams, and then lavishing that money all over the world and living in a penthouse and Dubai and buying the nicest designer clothes and rolls' voices and flying on private jets, all paid for by these scams. But he also had this incredible, like, online persona that people were obsessed with and loved.

Penthouse, rooftop, Palazzo Vassaghi. And that combination, I mean, there are other scabs like that, but I've never seen anything like that. Like someone who is that out in the world, pushing themselves as an actual influencer, but in fact, is running a dark scam behind the scenes, many, many scams behind the scenes. Yeah, there was something very beautiful about the Hushbubby story,

where you're just like, why are you posting that? And he was also very good at Instagram. Yeah. Like, he was a legitimate influencer, which is the craziest part. That's what I love about him. He was good at it. And also, if you look at him closely,

it really shows you the extent to which, like, being an influencer, people who are not, you know, don't care about influencers would sort of say, like, oh, they're just famous for being famous, or they just take pictures of themselves. Like, it was work. He was working at influencing, and he was talented at it,

and he got better and better. And like, he was talented at it and he got better and better and like he was rewarded for it It just happens to me that he also was running massive money laundering operation that was unrelated to him being on Instagram See Stockholm Central He's amazing. Oh, God. That's a disaster. Evan, I wanted to talk to you about your scam performance that you did in 2009 for a wired article. So you went on the run as one does, and then you offered a cash reward of five grand for whoever found you.

Why? And also how did this come about? This idea came about because I wanted to write a story about people who fake their own death. And very interested in people who fake their own death, they still am. And the problem with that interest is that, if they're successful at fake their own death,

you can never find them because they succeeded. And they're off in the world being someone else. If they failed, the generally the story's like pretty short. Like they get caught really quickly. Sometimes they last 20 years or whatever, but it ultimately was like, I couldn't get those people to really talk about how it happened. So the idea was that, well, what if I did it and it was started as a kind of joke, what if I faked my own death? Obviously, I would rather not do that to my friends and family, but what if we did like a paired down version of that where I kind of went underground for a month

and tried to see if people could find me, and then we added the $5,000 element because we wanted to sort of see what ordinary people could do to find you. So incentivize people to look for me. I should say this was what, now 13 years ago, it was a completely different era of the internet and social media,

like Twitter was still very new and there was a kind of kindness maybe that was still pervaded online life, not total kindness, but like I would not do this now. The amount of insanity that you would engender by doing this now would probably be terrifying. But someone did find me at the time. Were there any tips that you sort engender by doing this now would probably be terrifying. But someone did find me at the time. Were there any tips that you sort of figured out on how to stay hidden that you didn't know before?

Yeah, I mean, the biggest one. I was trying to sort of restart as a under a new identity and get a job and reestablish myself in a new place. And the biggest thing is you just have to know how you're going to deal with money. I mean, I carried $3,000 with me for like a month, basically. Well, I was dwindling as I went in cash. And like, that's in and of itself, like, scary. But also, you can't transfer things and bank accounts or whatever. Like, you'll get caught instantly if you do that.

And then the other thing is you just have to abandon everything. Like, you have to cut the cord. Otherwise, you're just leaving. Nowadays nowadays the surveillance abilities are so extensive like You're gonna leave something that if someone who's talented enough in finding people can see they will find you How did this inform your understanding of people trying to avoid being investigated or the police has it Change how you report out your stories? It has and that what it feels like a disadvantage to criminals and to some extent to all of us

because we are now subjected to a surveillance society is like an advantage to a reporter in some ways, not saying like spying on people, but like to give you a kind of trivial example, like people go on LinkedIn, like I have found so many people on LinkedIn, and it astounded me at first. I found a contract killer on LinkedIn

who I've been looking for. And he just had a LinkedIn profile and I sent him a LinkedIn message and he responded to it, you know, like the way that we've invested our lives into digital properties, and you can imagine, like, I didn't have like a subpoena to like contact LinkedIn and get it. I mean, you can imagine what law enforcement can do,

obviously, but like just your ability to kind of go find people is sort of incredible now, which now it sounds me when I can't find someone, which we couldn't sometimes for a person, we just couldn't find someone someone or they wouldn't respond. But yeah, that's the main thing. It's like people are leaving these digital trails everywhere. And if you are good at looking for them, like you can find an incredible amount without ever picking up the phone. I am so curious about this hit. I'm like, was he posting like inspirational

LinkedIn? Are you looking to hire one Sarah? Are you not? I just think it's linkedin is such a worse place in the world. It's the worst place in to imagine like a non inspirational person using it. Ernestly is insane to me. Okay, Evan, last question before we let you go.

What is a big scam that you haven't investigated yet, but you want to dive into next? Well, there are a couple I can't talk about because I want them to be mine, all mine. I don't want them to get them away. What's a non embargo? I will say in general that this will be obvious to anyone who pays attention to it,

that cryptocurrency is an extremely scam rich environment. It is one of the... What? I don't know, Chuck. Chuck. He's not me, crypto-scan. No, I'm joking. Whether or not even if you do or don't think crypto itself is a scam, it is produced the

most scams in the shortest period of time, then like the invention of paper money or something like it's... Yeah. It's just like you could throw a rock and hit a scam. And so I may throw a rock and try to hit a scam that hopefully it's like touches on some of the things that we've talked about here. Oh, I'm so excited. I don't understand anything about crypto. I'll stick with my real money, but I do want to know more. Evan, thank you so much for joining us. It was my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on.

Thank you very much for having me on. Hey, prime members. You can listen to ScanFluencers, add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen to Add Free with Wondery Plus and Apple podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.

This was a special episode of Scamful Insurs. I'm Sachi Cole, and I'm Sarah Haggi. Just a reminder, we're taking a two week break from Scamful Insurs. We'll be back with new episodes starting August 29th on Wundery Plus and September 5th on the public feed. In the meantime, if you need to get your scam fix and you haven't listened to Persona yet, you can now binge all eight episodes on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. This episode is a production of Lundery, Pineapple Street Studios, and Amazon Music. It was produced by Brian Taylor White. Senior producer for Pineapple Street is Henry Milofsky. Producer is Sophie Bridges. Associate Producer is Chris Nath. Production assistance by Natalie Pairt and a manual hapsis. Project management by Courtney Harrell. Persona's editor is Joel Lovell, mixing by Hannah Sprown.

Head of Sound and Engineering is Raj Makija. Executive producers at Pineapple Street are Jenna Weissberman and Max Linsky. Producers for Amazon Music and Wondery are Eliza Mills and Stephanie Walkney. Our Managing Producer is Candice Menriqueca's Ren. Our Audio Engineer is Sergio Enriqueca's. And our Executive Producers for Amazon Music and Wondery are Morgan Jones, Marshall Lully and Aaron O'Flayerty. Erin O'Flayerty.