Scamfluencers - Matthew Cox: Main Character Syndrome

Episode Date: October 28, 2024

Matthew Cox wanted to prove his haters—especially his dad—wrong, so he goes into real estate in Florida and quickly gets involved in “light fraud.” That quickly expands to very real fraud and soon Matthew is on the run, stealing identities and opening illegal bank accounts all across the South. His grit and determination run so deep that, when he’s eventually caught and sent to prison, he executes the perfect scammer pivot: using his story to platform himself as a true crime host.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to scamfluencers early and ad free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple podcasts. A heads up to our listeners, this episode contains references to abuse. Sachi, you're not only a podcaster, but you have appeared in many documentaries as a talking head. How does it feel when you watch or listen to yourself later on? It doesn't feel good. It feels like that episode of The Simpsons when Homer falls behind the bookshelf and then he ends up in like a different dimension.

Yeah, you know, I avoid it as much as I can because I shouldn't be seeing myself that way and I also shouldn't be seeing you that way, you know? I am best neither seen nor heard. Yeah, well, we do have the luxury of avoiding having to watch and listen to ourselves unless we absolutely have to. But I'm gonna tell you about a scammer who turned his scammy life into true crime content multiple times. And no, that did not stop him from continuing to grift. times and no, that did not stop him from continuing to grift.

It's 2024 and Matthew Cox is making a reaction video. Matthew runs a YouTube channel called Inside True Crime, where he interviews convicted criminals about what landed them in jail. His videos have clickbaity titles like Credit Card Scammer Reveals His Secrets and Insane Crime Stories from a Career Criminal. As far as YouTube setups go, Matthew's is pretty slick. It's a table with two big mics in front of a dramatic red wall and two cameras that allow him to get multiple angles.

Matthew is pretty slick himself. He's in his mid-50s with shiny black hair that's graying lightly at the temples and the pinch sculpted face of someone who's maybe had some work done. Today, he's with his friend and occasional co-host, a middle-aged bald guy named Zach. The two are sitting down to watch an episode of Dateline from 2007. The episode is about a series of crazy mortgage scams, and it has all the hallmarks of the true crime content Matthew's fans want to see. Host Keith Morrison's distinctive outfits and ominous narration, plus plenty of embarrassing

early 2000s photos of the criminals. But as they watch, Matthew keeps pausing the episode to complain. Because the subject is Matthew himself. Matthew has a long criminal past, but that isn't a huge revelation for his hundreds of thousands of subscribers. In fact, it's a big part of why the YouTube channel is successful in the first place. He's actually got a 26-part series on his channel where he recounts his history in painstaking detail. But even though he's open about his past,

there's something about the Dateline episode that is clearly uncomfortable for him to watch. It's not because he's ashamed of what he's done, it's because Keith and the Dateline team got to tell their version of his life. Matthew cringes at the old photos of himself rocking a shaggy haircut, goatee, and a much rounder face. He grimaces as Keith describes past Matthew as a heartless criminal mastermind. Eventually, present-day Matthew has to watch his past self try to justify his crimes. During a sit-down interview, past Matthew told Keith that he used to believe his scam only ever

hurt the big banks. Those were the types of things that I would tell myself that helped me sleep better at night. And it still didn't work. I still didn't sleep very well. Now those are pretty convoluted rationalizations. Yeah, well, I was taking a lot of the annex that helped. The shift in sound there is when Matthew goes from the actual Dateline footage to him watching it. To hear him tell it, Matthew is more of a roguish underdog, a hero who outwits idiotic cops

while juggling a bunch of crazy demanding girlfriends. And that's not the version of him people saw on Dateline. a hero who outwits idiotic cops while juggling a bunch of crazy demanding girlfriends. And that's not the version of him people saw in Dateline. Matthew's outlaw saga relied on telling stories, baking documents, creating characters, and even convincing a string of girlfriends to help him with his fraud. But in the process, he sidelined the other characters

left suffering in his wake, and he uncovered an even bigger scam, profiting off of getting the last word. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack. And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it. It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with.

Listen to The Best Idea Yet on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts. Kill List is a true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those whose lives were in danger. Follow Kill List wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more exhibit-see true crumb shows like morbid early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus. From Wondry, I'm Sarah Haggi. And I'm Saatchi Cole. And this is Scamfluencers. Matthew is one of the most self-aware scammers we've ever covered on this show.

He started flouting the law as a way of getting revenge on a world he felt didn't take him seriously. He went on the run, committing bank fraud all across the South. But he couldn't outrun the law forever. And after prison, he executed a perfect scammer pivot, using his story to platform himself as a true crime host. I'm calling this one Matthew Cox Main Character Syndrome. It's the mid-1990s in Tampa Bay, Florida,

and Matthew Cox is in a rough place. According to his version of events, he recently got laid off from a gig as an insurance adjuster, and he's been working construction to make ends meet. But he's still barely paying his bills, and his credit card debt is piling up. He's 26 years old with a very 90s goatee, and he parts his shoulder-length black hair

right in the center. Luckily for Matthew, his girlfriend has recently started working for a mortgage broker, and she puts him in touch with her boss, who quickly gives him a job. But Matthew has some obstacles to overcome in this new industry. Like he has severe dyslexia. As a kid, it was so hard for him to read and write that by the fourth grade, he was put into school for children with learning disabilities.

According to Dateline, one of his high school teachers told him he should pick a job where he could work with his hands since he'd never be smart enough for anything else. — I know this is weird, but I feel like there are so many men who get told this by teachers at some point, and they have like tremendous trauma and sadness around it for the rest of their lives. Yeah, totally. It's like you're only good for this one thing that we're telling you is stupid when it actually isn't. It's totally necessary, but it's completely undervalued.

Yeah. And Matthew's home life growing up was complicated too. His father worked in insurance and had what one reporter calls upper crust aspirations. He was always driving the latest BMW and constantly spending money to keep up appearances. He also had some pretty intense issues with alcohol. According to Matthew, he was verbally abusive and a nasty drunk. Matthew says his family never expected him to graduate high school and that even as an adult, his father acted shocked that he knew how to read. But despite all these roadblocks, Matthew was still a bright and creative kid.

After finishing high school, he went to the University of South Florida where he studied art and became interested in painting and sculpture. After graduating with a BFA, he tried a few different jobs, but none of them paid enough for the lifestyle he really wanted or felt he deserved. And he's been struggling ever since. Now, several years later, there's no guarantee this mortgage job will pay off either. Matthew's basically working on commission. After getting trained, he manages to find a potential client, but he still has to collect

a ton of information in order to apply for her mortgage, bank statements, tax records, and even a history of her rent payments. It takes him a month to put it all together. Then, he brings a paperwork to his new boss. She's a classic Florida blonde named Gretchen Zayas. Everything checks out, except for one tiny detail. Matthew missed the fact that his client was once 30 days late paying her rent. This one slip up is enough for a bank to reject her.

And if that happens, he's gonna have to scrap all his hard work and start over from the beginning with a new client. Here's Matthew on his YouTube channel telling his version of what Gretchen did next. She pulled out a bottle of whiteout and she gave it to me. She goes, if I was you, I would white out the 30 day late,

make a copy of it, stick it back in the file, send it to underwriting and the loan's gonna close. I went, whoa, whoa, whoa. I said, that's bank fraud, isn't it? A wonderful detail that proves that a lot of scammers know exactly what they're doing when they do it. Well, at this point, Matthew is behind on his bills. He needs this gig to work out. So he takes Gretchen's advice and the loan goes through.

Matthew proves his skill as a broker and pretty soon he's working on his next deal, which also needs some creative adjustments to go through. Before long, he's forging all kinds of documents, from bank records to pay stubs, in order to secure loans. To him, it seems like a victimless crime. His clients get to buy houses, and he gets paid. Things run smoothly for a while, but in 1999, around four years after he starts working for her,

his boss Gretchen gets caught by the FBI for, you guessed it, mortgage fraud. She pleads guilty, gets sentenced to a month in prison, and eventually files for bankruptcy. But none of this is going to slow Matthew down. In fact, he is just getting started. Not long after Matthew's boss is convicted of fraud, Scott Cugnaw is doing something that you and I both know can be pretty unpleasant—reading a friend's unpublished novel as a favor. Scott's in his late 20s with an egg-shaped head and a bland, business-y smile. He works for a bank, so he doesn't usually have work friends asking for his opinion on

their art. But Matthew Cox isn't your average real estate guy. Whenever Scott comes to his office, Matthew shows off his latest paintings and drawings. So it probably doesn't shock Scott when Matthew asks him to check out another creative project, his novel. Matthew's been showing the book to lots of people he knows,

asking for constructive feedback. The book is called The Associates. It's about a guy named Christian Locke who sounds a lot like Matthew. He's a mortgage broker with dark hair and a tan who went to USF and has a taste for outies. The only difference is that Christian is 5'7", a whole inch taller than Matthew.

Oh, and he also is a brilliant criminal mastermind. In the book, Christian commits millions of dollars of fraud. When the FBI catches on, he escapes by abandoning his silver Audi in a parking lot and hopping on a cruise to the Caribbean with a suitcase full of cash. There's something so mortifying about reading your friend's novel and slowly realizing it's them working out their emotional problems and you can see so clearly all their anxieties and insecurities on the page. Yeah, it's usually pretty obvious, but Matthew disputes that the Associates is about him. He says that people overstate how much he and Christian have in common.

But as Scott reads, he notices the parallels right away. Matthew may not be an international man of mystery, but he is not shy about committing fraud. Over the past few years, Matthew has built a reputation around Tampa as the go-to guy for document forging in the mortgage industry. Scott has seen him make things like W-2s

and social security cards appear out of thin air. This is all absurdly illegal, but Scott doesn't think it's a big deal. At this point in the housing bubble, the mortgage industry is basically the Wild West. It's full of what Matthew calls light fraud. In fact, Scott is so unbothered by Matthew's techniques that he actually uses him as the broker on his own mortgage. Obviously, that means Scott has to give Matthew access to all of his info, like his social security number, bank accounts, etc. as the broker on his own mortgage. Obviously, that means Scott has to give Matthew access

to all of his info, like his social security number, bank accounts, et cetera. And yes, this is definitely gonna come back to haunt him. You know, Sarah, if I thought someone was committing what they're calling light fraud here, I probably wouldn't give them access to all of my personal information. Yeah, I feel like light fraud

just kind of leads to regular fraud. And in the spring of 2001, roughly a few months after reading The Associates, Scott goes to visit Matthew at his firm. But when Scott shows up, Matthew is nowhere to be found. One employee tells Scott that Matthew just left because he and a few of his coworkers are running from the cops. The police showed up to the office with a warrant and Matthew escaped out the back door.

They say he literally hopped a fence trying to get away. For what it's worth in his commentary video, Matthew also says that this didn't happen. None of that happened. Jumped over the back fence. I can't get over a fence. I'm five foot six. Have you ever heard a man so ready to admit that he's actually five foot six? No, this is literally the first time a man has said, I am five foot six and not five

foot nine. And Zachi, I am over five foot nine. All of these men are five foot six. I can tell you that much. But fence or no fence, Scott's not exactly surprised to hear that Matthew is running from the law. After all, Matthew literally wrote the book on mortgage fraud, and his main character syndrome is about to get even worse.

Matthew is arrested after the fence jumping incident. At this point, he's forged enough documents that practically anything could have gotten him caught. But it turns out he just picked the wrong target. He forged the signature of a home appraiser who turned out to be a former deputy sheriff. This guy was obviously not pleased and he called the cops. In court, Matthew pleads guilty to conspiracy and grand theft and gets three years probation. He also loses his broker's license. All of this might've stopped a lesser scammer,

or at least slowed them down. But Matthew just finds a new workaround. He isn't supposed to be able to work as a broker anymore, but he sells his firm to a friend who hires him as a consultant. That lets him keep his foot in the door and get around the ban. Now, Matthew can use his knowledge of the mortgage business to really refine his scamming technique.

And the scheme he figures out next is one he'll use for years. It's elaborate, sprawling, and honestly, pretty creative. Matthew creates what he calls synthetic identities, fake people he can use to apply for real loans. He does this by showing up at the Social Security office playing the role of an exhausted new father. He brings along forged birth certificates and immunization records for fake children with mostly generic names like Brandon Green or James Red. And then he tells the clerks that when the baby was born, the midwife forgot to sign the Social Security paperwork. Since he that when the baby was born, the midwife forgot to sign the social security paperwork.

Since he's got all these other documents, the clerk lets it slide and gives his non-existent child a new social security number. He uses that number to apply for a credit card in the fake person's name. After six months of paying off the card, he's created a new identity with a perfect credit score. Is this light fraud?

You're not stealing a living person's social security. You're not taking a real person's credit score. I mean, you are creating people that don't exist. So I'd say that's like bigger than light fraud probably. And after he builds up credit for this fake person, Matthew puts together a bunch of fake papers to make them seem even more legit. Pay stubs, bank statements, and anything else he can think of.

Matthew also makes up fake banks to confirm his assets. Like, he calls one the Southern Exchange Bank of Clarksville. In his novel, Matthew actually describes some of the techniques he uses to do this. Sachi, can you read this paragraph? Yes, it says, quote, Christian realized the name and address portions of the Florida ID and driver's license could be easily sanded off with 220-grade sandpaper. He could then print the new borrower's name and address on the computer in the identical Florida ID fonts, go to Kinko's,

make a transparency of the new name and address, and paste it over the altered ID. The result was a virtually perfect ID. Yet again, Sarah, a beautiful example of somebody who could have maybe done something with themselves if they took all of the energy they were using on a scam to do something legitimately. Well, he is putting his fine arts degree to good use, but the next phase of the scam is where he uses his other area of expertise, real estate. Once he's got one of these fake identities set up, Matthew uses it to buy a cheap house, usually in a depressed part of town.

Then he draws up phony appraisal documents that say they're worth way more than what he originally paid. Using these documents, he takes out a loan against the artificially inflated value. And once he has the money, he just stops making payments on the loan. Eventually, collections agencies start calling. And what Matthew does next might be the wildest part of his whole scheme.

He finds newspaper articles about car crashes and alters them so that the victims have the same name as his made-up homebuyers. He sends them to the collections agencies with a letter from a fake sibling saying the buyer's in a coma and can't make their payments. The bank gives up and puts the property into foreclosure. Then Matthew is free to move on to his next target. According to The Atlantic, Matthew runs a scam dozens of times, taking out millions of dollars in loans. He'll later tell a reporter that at least 12 colleagues

knew what he was doing. But not only did they look the other way, some actively joined in. And, when he gets caught by people outside his immediate circle, he just pays them off. Matthew says this happens all the time with mortgage underwriters, the people who essentially fact check all the details of a person's credit history. When they catch Matthew in the act, he just takes them out to lunch and sends them gift cards and pretty soon, things go back to normal. Obviously, he's doing this for the money, but Matthew is motivated by something deeper too.

He reportedly tells an ex that, quote, I'm going to prove to the world that I'm better than they think I am. But his story is still missing one thing, the perfect accomplice. Luckily, Matthew's about to meet his match. And once they get together, the two of them will go on the ride of their lives.

I'm Tristan Redman and as a journalist, I've never believed in ghosts. But when I discovered that my wife's great grandmother was murdered in the house next door to where I grew up, I started wondering about the inexplicable things that happened in my childhood bedroom. When I tried to find out more, I discovered that someone who slept in my room after me, someone I'd never met, was visited by the ghost of a faceless woman. So I started digging into the murder in my wife's family. And I unearthed family secrets nobody could have imagined.

Ghost Story won Best Documentary Podcast at the 2024 Ambys and is the Best True Crime nominee at the British Podcast Awards 2024. Ghost Story is now the first ever Apple Podcast Series Essential. Each month, Apple Podcast editors spotlight one series that has captivated listeners with masterful storytelling, creative excellence and a unique creative voice and vision. To recognize Ghost Story being chosen as the first Series Essential, Wondry has made it ad-free for a limited time only on Apple Podcasts. If you haven't listened yet, head over to Apple Podcasts to hear for yourself.

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Follow Criminal Attorney on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Criminal Attorney early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. And I feel like I, like I In November of 2003, Rebecca Hawke gets a message on match.com. Rebecca's got strawberry blonde hair,

thin eyebrows and a toothy smile. She's sweet and easy to talk to, a real people person. The message is from a guy named Matthew. His profile says he works in real estate, and it's also got some photos of his art. Rebecca's impressed. She'll later tell reporters that he seems, quote, sensitive and successful. Rebecca's in her early 30s, and she's been through a lot.

She was just 19 when she had her son, and she's been married and divorced twice. Now she's a single mom bouncing around the country with her son, working dead-end jobs. Her last one was in Las Vegas, where she racked up almost $8,000 in debt playing video poker. Then she got fired by her boss for forging checks

in his name and ended up having to file for bankruptcy. She's just moved to Tampa with her now 13 year old son to try and get a fresh start. But she's working at a Greyhound racing track and things are still pretty bleak. So it's a nice surprise when Matthew picks her up for their first date in his Audi. He's charming.

He tells her he owns his own business and that he's got 20 people working for him. He actually brings her to his office so she can see for herself. Then he takes her out for sushi. Afterwards, they go back to his place. He lives in a gorgeous triplex apartment where the walls are covered in murals he painted. Rebecca is smitten. But on their second date, he takes her to the movies where they go see Matchstick Men. It's a Nicolas Cage movie about two con artists. When they walk out, Matthew is keyed up.

He tells her that the stuff they were doing in the movie was small potatoes compared to what he's done. And then he just straight up tells her he's on probation for mortgage fraud. That is not even the worst date that I have been on this calendar year. Well, this would be a deal breaker for most people, you included, I hope. But Rebecca knows all about the power of second chances. She tells herself that it's been a few years since he committed those crimes.

Maybe he's changed. Plus, she's lonely and Matthew is ambitious artistic, and intense in a good way. Over the next couple of weeks, their relationship moves at warp speed. Matthew pulls out all the stops. He buys Rebecca diamonds and a Rolex, and he tells her he's going to put her son in private school and that he's going to buy her a condo. Matthew's her prince charming, and he's fully swept her off her feet. What she doesn't know is that meeting the man of her dreams

is going to mean leaving everything else in her life behind. In late 2003, Rebecca gets a call. It's Matthew, and he's absolutely freaking out. He says some of his coworkers have been getting calls from a reporter at the Tampa Bay Times. They're planning an expose on Matthew's shady business practices. Matthew's already been arrested once and he's still on probation. Any new attention is going to put him at risk with the law.

So he asks Rebecca to leave Tampa with him and go on the run. They've only been together for a month at this point. But Rebecca was already planning on dropping her son off at her mom's house for the holidays, so she could skip town without leaving him alone. Then again, if she becomes a fugitive, she might never see her son again. That prospect is heartbreaking, but Rebecca is all in on Matthew. She decides to go with him. A few days before the article runs, she says goodbye to her son at the airport in tears. He goes off to

stay with her parents, and Rebecca leaves town with Matthew. For what it's worth, Matthew later says that actually, Rebecca insisted on coming with him and not the other way around. I mean, either way, she left with him willingly, right? Like, he wasn't kidnapping her, so she dumped her kid with her mother and ran off with this man who was bragging about his frauds being larger than Nicolas Cage's. You're right. Either way, they take off. The Tampa Bay Times' exposé runs a few days later.

The reporter discovered that several deals involving Matthew's company, Urban Equity, also relied on non-existent buyers, fake documents and insanely inflated home prices. Once the piece is published, the cops put out a warrant for Matthew's arrest. But it's too late. He's already gone.

Rebecca and Matthew decide to go to Atlanta. But once they're on the road, Rebecca quickly realizes that her sophisticated Prince Charming has no plan. He's barely ever been outside of Tampa, let alone Florida. Maybe this isn't going to be the Bonnie and Clyde fantasy she'd imagined, but there's nothing she can do about it now. Once the couple arrives in Atlanta, Matthew immediately gets to work doing what he does

best, creating new identities. Rebecca becomes Grace Hudson using a stolen social security number and a fake Florida state ID with her photo on it. Matthew uses a ton of different identities, but one of them is a little closer to home, his old work friend Scott Cugno. Remember how Scott hired Matthew to set up his mortgage back in Tampa? Because of that, Matthew already has all of Scott's personal information. He makes himself an Atlanta driver's license under Scott's name and uses it to buy, among other things, a brand new silver Honda element.

By early January 2004, with their new identities in place, Matthew and Rebecca are ready for their first big scam as a couple. It's a classic for Matthew, taking out loans on a fake mortgage. To get the info they need, Rebecca responds to an ad in the paper about a house for rent in the Atlanta suburbs. She gets in touch with the owner and signs a lease as grace. Then Matthew gets to work. First, he goes to the county clerk's office and looks up the details on the landlord's mortgage.

Using that information and the seal from a notary stamp he ordered, he cooks up some fake documents saying that the mortgage is paid off. He also uses one of his fake social security numbers to open up a credit card in the owner's name. Once all the paperwork has settled, Matthew uses it to take out new loans against the property, which nets him and Rebecca over $300,000. By March, they're spending it. They get a dog, take some trips, and they spend about $12,000 on plastic surgery for Rebecca. She gets a tummy tuck, liposuction, and breast implants at Matthew's suggestion. Sachi, can you read what Matthew later tells a reporter from The Atlantic about their lifestyle at this point?

He says, fraud on the run, it's not a full-time job. You're working five or ten hours a week maintaining some scam and your life just turns into rock climbing and skydiving and going on vacation. That sounds really hard. Well, by May, just a couple of months later, they start to feel the heat. The feds still haven't tracked them down, but they've reportedly started to freeze some of their fake bank accounts. And local news articles are popping up in Atlanta about suspicious mortgage thieves

in the area. To take some of the pressure off, Matthew and Rebecca take cash out of their accounts that still haven't been frozen. They withdraw $5,000 at a time and move money into new accounts in North and South Carolina. Then they set out on the road again, planning to repeat their scheme in a new state. But this time, the authorities are breathing down their necks and they're about to get help from a surprising source. Around the time Matthew and Rebecca are fleeing Atlanta,

Alison Arnold is at her house in Tampa Bay, tossing and turning. She's had trouble sleeping for the past few months, ever since the Tampa Bay Times published its expose on her ex-boyfriend, Matthew Cox. More articles about his scamming came out after the police put out a warrant for Matthew's arrest. And while none of them have mentioned Allison by name,

she knows one thing that no one's reported yet. For a few months, she was Matthew Cox's accomplice. Just like Rebecca, Allison is small and blonde with a bright, friendly smile. When she met Matthew about a year ago, she was a young mother trapped in an unhappy marriage and drowning in debt. But Matthew gave her money

and told her he'd help her get a divorce. Allison quickly left her husband and went to work for Matthew's company as a loan processor. You might think that means that Matthew likes preying on single moms, but Matthew denies this. In a YouTube video, he says, quote, In this period of time, I dated at least 10 to 12 girls. A couple of them had kids.

I love that his defense here is that he was too busy running around town in order to have targeted single moms. Yeah, I don't really buy it, but for a few months things were good between Allison and Matthew. Allison will later tell reporters that they spent a lot of time going to the movies and that Matthew loved watching, quote, anything with criminal activity like the Italian job and Catch Me If You Can. According to Allison, Matthew told her about his schemes pretty quickly after they started dating.

Allison believed Matthew when he said that he was committing victimless crimes by stealing from banks instead of people, and that insurance would cover the balance. He was like Robin Hood. So naturally, she joined in. In one instance, she collected almost $400,000 in loans against a single property. But after about nine months, things got really bad.

According to Allison, Matthew had started to become controlling. He only gave Allison enough money to pay her bills and essentially made her dependent on him for everything else. He also became meaner. He told Allison that she was pretty in a quote trailer park kind of way and that she needed breast implants to be truly attractive. Matthew denies the financial allegations and he says that he doesn't remember making the trailer park comment but admits that it is the kind of thing he would say.

So things between Allison and Matthew were already rocky by the time he started to hear that reporters were sniffing around his business. In November of 2003, around a month before the Tampa Bay Times story broke, he asked Allison to leave her son behind and go on the run with him. Allison said no, so Matthew bailed on the relationship. By the way, this was the same month he met Rebecca on Match.com. So there's some overlap between these two cursed relationships, sounds like. Yes, overlap in both intensity and timeline.

Great. And since then, Allison has tried to put the relationship behind her. overlap in both intensity and timeline. Great. And since then, Allison has tried to put the relationship behind her. But she knows it's only a matter of time before the cops figure out she was involved. Every moment she spends waiting to get caught is like being in prison. So, within a few months of Matthew dropping her and fleeing Florida, Allison goes to the FBI. She tells him everything about her time with Matthew and pleads guilty to conspiracy to

commit bank fraud and identity theft. By September, she's sentenced to 24 months in prison and ordered to pay back $300,000. Allison's conscience is finally clear, and the information she's given the Feds has brought them even closer to catching Matthew and Rebecca. But there's one thing Allison knows that Rebecca is about to find out. Just how quickly Matthew can discard his partners. By July of 2004, Rebecca is starting to freak out. Law enforcement hasn't figured out her and Matthew's real names yet, but the Secret Service

has put out wanted posters with their faces on them. Fun fact, Sachi. Did you know the Secret Service was founded to stop counterfeiting? They're the main agency overseeing credit card fraud and identity theft. I didn't know that, actually. I really thought they were just for the president. I did too. Well, at this point,

Rebecca thinks she might have made a big mistake. Because not only are there faces out there, her sensitive, generous Prince Charming is also starting to look more and more like a frog. He refers to other people as commoners. He also spends a ton of time and money trying to improve his appearance. Like, he puts lifts in his shoes.

He takes constant trips to the tanning booth. He even gets plastic surgery on his chin, nose, and torso. But he also starts telling Rebecca that she's ugly and not his type, even after she got plastic surgery for him. She even catches him going back on Match.com. Put him under the jail. This is the worst thing he's done. It's so mean, and sometimes the two of them watch the HBO prison drama Oz at night. Matthew tells Rebecca that it shows what prison is actually like, and that if he ever goes there,

she'll end up going with him. The possibility of jail time is starting to seem more real for Rebecca and more terrifying. One day, after they pull off another scam in North Carolina, the local news runs apiece on them. Matthew says they have to move again, but Rebecca's completely exhausted and overwhelmed. Besides, she misses her son. She hasn't seen him in months. She recently found his MySpace page and she's been visiting it four or five times a day

just to look at his pictures. Late one night, Rebecca tells Matthew that she wants out. According to her, Matthew gets angry and then violent. She says he throws her on the floor and chokes her. A neighbor knocks on their door. Matthew tells Rebecca to shut up or they'll get caught. And this is a moment Rebecca realizes how bad her situation really is. Her friends and family don't know where she is and no one around her knows her real

identity. She thinks that Matthew could actually kill her and get away with it. Here's what Matthew says about that possibility in his Dateline reaction video. I don't want to say it didn't occur to me, but I didn't go with it. I don't think this is funny. No, I don't know why they're laughing about it.

Statistically, she did have a real likelihood that she would have gotten hurt by him too. Yeah, things are really bad, but Rebecca and Matthew are both wanted, so it's not like she has anywhere else to go. So, she stays with him for eight more months. And the two head to Houston in March 2005. But once they're there, the couple has another big fight. They scream and throw things at each other.

The next morning, Rebecca takes a shower, and when she steps out, Matthew is gone. She knows he's not coming back. Matthew has taken the dog, but he does leave her with six figures in cash, stuffed in a duffel bag. Using some of the techniques Rebecca's learned from him, she makes a fresh start and sets up a new life with a new stolen identity. She moves into a $600 a month apartment under the name Rebecca Hickey

and starts driving a Volkswagen. She dyes her hair, gets a waitressing job at a cocktail bar, and enrolls in cosmetology school. She also gets back in touch with her family, who haven't heard from her in 18 months. About a year later, in the middle of a class, she's teasing out a mannequin's hair when a group of five Secret Service agents burst into the room and arrest her. Her classmates are in shock. But Rebecca is oddly calm. She's been expecting this. Can you read what she later tells reporters

about this moment? She says, I was scared, but I felt this big relief. Like, you know what? Let's start it. This is the beginning of the end. Let me just get this done. Yikes. I know it's really sad. And like Alison before her, Rebecca tells the Secret Service everything about all their scams and all about Matthew, his habits, the way he organizes his schemes, she even tells him about his love

of vanilla lattes from Starbucks. She pleads guilty to fraud, identity theft, money laundering, and conspiracy, and is sentenced to six years in federal prison. The judge orders her to pay back more than $1 million. Authorities also seized the diamond ring and Rolex Matthew gave her and a motorcycle to put towards paying back her victims. They also put a bunch of Matthew's old paintings,

which Rebecca still has, on eBay. Her lawyers think they might be able to sell them to people who are interested in criminals and scammers, and they can use some of the profits to pay off Rebecca's debts. Matthew spent over two years manipulating Rebecca, but she was watching him that whole time too. Pretty soon, all that information will finally lead the feds right to Matthew's front door. Hey, this is Nick. And this is Jack.

And we just launched a brand new podcast called The Best Idea Yet. You may have heard of it, but we're so excited about it, we're popping into your regular scheduled programming. Again. It's all about the untold origin stories of the products you're obsessed with and the people who made them go viral. Like did you know that Super Mario, the best-selling video game character of all time, only exists because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye?

Or Jack, that the idea for the McDonald's Happy Meal first came from a mom in Guatemala? From Pez dispensers to Levi's 501s to Air Jordans, discover the surprising stories of the most viral products. Plus, we guarantee that after listening, you're going to dominate your next dinner party. So follow the best idea yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to the best idea yet early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus. It's just the best idea yet. By November of 2006, Matthew's been wanted by the Secret Service for two years. For the past six months, he's been on their most wanted list. Two of his former girlfriends, Rebecca and Allison, have both fully flipped on him.

And there's more media attention on his story than ever before. Fortune magazine recently ran a full-length article about him that lays out his history with Allison and includes detailed quotes from Rebecca. At this point, he's living in Nashville under the name Joseph Carter. He's staying in a bungalow with his new girlfriend, a single mom, surprise, surprise, and her son.

But later that month, he's finally caught. It's not because of an elaborate sting operation or diligent police work. It's because of a 60-year-old woman who Matthew's girlfriend hired as a babysitter. She just thought there was something off about him. She did some Googling and found the Tampa Bay Times article about him.

And then she called in a tip to the FBI. How many episodes of this show do we do where we talk about how you would be able to figure this stuff out if you just Googled the new people that enter your life? Let this be a lesson to everyone listening. If you meet anybody, you should at least do a cursory Google search. This is a 60 year old babysitter who was like, something is not right, I'm going to Google this guy, and she figured it out very quickly. Anyway, the Secret Service tracks him down in Nashville,

and they show up while his girlfriend is dropping her son off at daycare. By the time she gets home, Matthew's face down on the ground, in handcuffs with a ring of six agents surrounding him. The agents search his house and find all kinds of forged documents, driver's licenses, and birth certificates. Sachi, check out this picture of just a tiny selection of his fake IDs. Boy, we have Joseph Marion Carter Jr., Corbin Blair Thomas, Philip Daniel Morgan, Gerald Scott Cuomo.

Wow. He's got IDs from Alabama and Tennessee and Florida. Yeah, it's what you see in a spy movie. This is the amount of fake IDs Jason Bourne has. And once he's in custody, Matthew is forced to confront all the charges he's racked up over the past three years. It includes mortgage fraud, bank fraud, and identity theft. Originally, there were reports that he's facing over 400 years in prison, but he takes

a plea bargain. And in November of 2007, he gets sentenced to 26 years. He's ordered to pay just under $6 million to his victims, as well as forfeit another $6 million in assets, though Matthew himself has estimated that he stole more than $15 million overall. The judge who sentences him says that, quote, "'The scope, complexity, and nefariousness of Cox's fraud are breathtaking.'"

A US attorney tells a press that, "'His crimes resulted in years of unresolved litigation, a trail of over 100 victims, and millions of dollars in losses that cannot be recovered. About a year after his arrest, Matthew is sent to the Coleman Federal Correctional Institution in Tampa. For any other scammer, this might be the end of the story, but there's one more chapter left for Matthew. The feds take almost 12 years off Matthew's sentence thanks to his cooperation with the FBI.

He gives up some of his former accomplices and even helps them catch other scammers by giving them tips on how to identify forged real estate documents. Aside from being an informant, Matthew starts taking on another job while he's inside, writing a memoir. He later says that writing a new version of his own story forced him to understand his actions more fully. He sees now how his upbringing and childhood turned him into the person he became. He just figured it out. It took me scamming so many people

and stealing millions of dollars to realize my mom screwed me up. Mm, it's definitely mom's fault, yeah. As he works on his memoir, Matthew's fellow inmates start coming to him with a request. They want him to write about their lives. This gives Matthew an idea. He knows that production companies will sometimes option true crime stories for TV shows or movies.

So if someone's story feels like it has media potential, he makes a deal with them for their life rights. Then he basically starts doing journalism. He tells an Atlantic reporter he sometimes spends upwards of 100 hours talking to one person. He learns how to file freedom of information requests and uses his 15-minute prison phone calls to fact-check stories. Then, he writes a book on the inmate's life by sending handwritten chapters to a friend's mother on the outside who types them up. Matthew is released from prison in 2019 after more than a decade behind bars.

Once he's out, he sets up a website and of course, his YouTube channel. And he doubles down on pitching his stories. And his efforts pay off. In 2021, Deadline announces that Matthew is developing a podcast with a frequent This American Life contributor. It doesn't actually come out, but in February of 2024, he signs a deal with a company called Foundation Media to produce both a scripted and unscripted TV series based on his life. According to Matthew, his scamming days are done.

But whether or not that's true, he's definitely ready to turn a new page into the entertainment industry. Sachi, I speak for both of us when I say this guy was so exhausting. The funny thing about his scam is because it involves so many women and so much myth making. I feel like this episode was reading the worst hinge profile. The whole thing just felt like I was in

a terrible man's dating profile, and he's lecturing me about everything he learned in therapy, and he still sucks. I feel like we also deal with a lot of people who believe their scam is okay because it's within a corrupt system. And I do see how that mindset can go somewhere, but it's pretty clear he was kind of doing this all for his own ego. Like, he wasn't thinking like,

oh, let me help people who can't afford homes live somewhere, because everything's so unfair, I'll screw over banks. It's like, he was trying to have a lifestyle and a life that he never thought he could achieve. A lot of men, like, pull these scams because they're trying to get bitches, and he did not need to do that. Like, women were happy to participate in his bullshit, it seems, for a little while until he turned

and became an abusive monster. A lot of guys don't realize women will date any loser most of the time. Any loser with a pulse. Do you ever look around and see how hot you have to be to get the most average man in the world to acknowledge you? These women instead were going out with this freak who was like, I would rather take great pains to figure out how to fake Florida driver's licenses than just like get a real job

and try to do anything legitimately at all. Yeah, I mean, this one was very complicated for me because it is very easy to kind of disregard Rebecca as being like really stupid or whatever. But I feel like as it goes on, you kind of understand her desperation in this weird way. And also, with a lot of these like romance leaning scams, you don't quite realize how easy it is to be fooled by someone because you feel like you're in love with them and this guy's providing so much for you, and you have this history and a child and all this stuff.

Sarah, what lessons do you think you learned from a scammer who went meta with his scam? I think that there are certain people with a disease where like they can't help but really want attention and that's the kind of person we cover. But I think everyone wants to make content too badly. And this guy needs to just give up. It's out there. There's nothing more to understand about you. You're a shitty guy. You got off so easy for all the insane shit

you did. Like now you have to try and make movies and have a YouTube channel where you're reliving your past. I think I have learned that if you continue to provide people with material, with things to consume, stuff to look at, things to read, you can continue your scam even beyond its limits. I didn't know that that was an option. Yeah, for me, I feel like there's just this kind of thing where there's almost too much space given to people

like him who've committed crimes, but also know how to navigate the entertainment industry and form a new identity around someone who's rehashing their past and learning new things about themselves. But really, they're just using the bad thing they did to capitalize more. It's like, if you really learn something about screwing people over and screwing women over, you'll be so ashamed you'll never want someone to see your face again. You know what I mean?

Yeah, people should have more shame. Yeah, I think that's it. People should have more shame. I think that's it. Bring back shame! If you like scamfluencers, you can listen to every episode early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondry.com slash survey. This is Matthew Cox, Main Character Syndrome. I'm Sarah Haggye. And I'm Saatchi Cole. If you have a tip for us on a story that you think we should cover, please email us at scamfluencers at wendree.com. We use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were Jeff Testermans reporting for the Tampa Bay

Times and Bonnie and Clyde of Mortgage Fraud by Marcia Vickers for Fortune Magazine. Emma Healy wrote this episode. Additional writing by us, Sachie Cole and Sarah Hagge. Eric Thurm and Olivia Briley are our story editors. Back checking by Gabrielle Drolet. Sound design by Sam Ada. Additional audio assistance provided by Adrian Tapia. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesan Sync.

Our managing producers are Matt Gant and Desi Blaylock. Our senior managing producer is Nick Ryan. Janine Cornelo and Stephanie Jens are our development producers. Our associate producers are Charlotte Miller and Lexi Peery. Our producers are John Reed, Yasmin Ward, and Kate Young. Our senior producers are Sarah Eni and Ginny Bloom. Our executive producers are Jenny Lauer Beckman, Marshall Louie, and Aaron O'Flaherty for

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