The Jordan Harbinger Show - 685: Steve Rambam | The Real Life of a Private Investigator

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Steve Rambam (@stevenrambam) is the founder and CEO of Pallorium, Inc., a licensed Investigative Agency with offices and affiliates worldwide. [Note: This is a previously broadcast episode from the vault that we felt deserved a fresh pass through your earholes!] What We Discuss with Steve Rambam: Prime bank guarantee fraud: what is it and how does it work? Why is the US a “Garden of Eden” for bad guys in general? How Steve's TV show Nowhere to Hide came to be. Why Steve's business doubled within two years following a bogus arrest. Are there scam lists, and are you on one? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/685 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our interview with Freeway Rick Ross, the crack empire kingpin gone good? Catch up with episode 121: Freeway Rick Ross | Life in the Crack Lane here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. The FBI had taken him under their wing, had gotten his criminal record submarine, then he had been arrested a bunch of times, had gotten him a new driver's license and passport and everything you could think of under the name of Franz Joseph on Hobsburg-Lotheringen, and let him scam and lie and steal and enmesh himself in the criminal underground just so long as he would throw them a bone from time to time. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger.

On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists, entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional journalist-turned poker champion Fortune 500 CEO or organized crime figure, and each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, we've got episode starter packs. The starter packs are collections of top episodes organized by topic. These help new listeners get a taste of everything we do here on the show. Topics like

persuasion and influence, disinformation in cyber warfare, China, North Korea, scams, crime, cults, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today, one from the vault. We're talking with Stephen Ram Bam. This guy's a little, he's a little salty. It's like a great. Pretty private eye. O.G. Private Eye. He's been a private investigator for nearly 40 years. He's a Nazi hunter. I'm not kidding. I mean, how cool is that, I suppose, right? He speaks at hacker conventions talking about privacy and anonymity. That's how I came across him in the first place. Among other topics, whenever I call him, he's always working on something, I will say

marginally insane. In this episode, we talk a little bit about fraud, but also we get into how fraudsters think some of the advanced frauds and crimes, financial stuff, not like high market white-collar crime, but conmen ripping off companies and the mindset behind fraudsters in their games, as well as how we can protect ourselves. Some of the stuff, yeah, I'm wondering how people fall for it. Other stuff, it's so complicated. I really can see how anybody, I mean, even companies that do their diligence, how they could fall for some of this. Of course, some wild tangents in this one, as expected. So enjoy this episode from the vault with Stephen Ramban. First of all, tell us a little bit about your background, because you don't just go look on monster.com ago.

I think I'll be a private investigator. Is that what your job title you'd consider it to be? I'm a director of an investigative agency, but yes, I spend quite a lot of time in the field, and I am certainly, before anything else, my day job is being a private investigator. And you're correct. You don't get an office with a pebble glass door and a legy secretary and puff your, you're a private investigator. It requires quite a lot of training, quite a lot of experience. In fact, to get licensed. You have to actually prove the experience to the various states that you want to be

licensed in. It's rather difficult. In New York, for example, you have to have three years of experience above the rank of patrolmen. You've got to have sworn character affidavits. You're fingerprinted, your photograph, the state checks you out, the FBI runs your prints. And for every license that you want in every state, you have to go through this again. If you want to do protective work, for example, guarding your witnesses, that's a separate license. If you want to carry a firearm, that's a separate license. If you want to serve process, that's a separate license. It is not for the faint of heart. You really have to wade through a bureaucratic swamp. Wow. Yeah. And that's great, because most people probably stink at this job. It's probably a tough

job to be good at? Not most people, not most people, dishonest people. If you are an ethical private investigator, the first thing you do is you say to yourself and you say to others, this is what I'm good at, this is not what I'm good at. Any private investigator that is the equivalent of a general practitioner who really claims that they can handle it all is a big fat liar. I mean, you have people who are good in homicide investigation that stink at missing. There are people who are great at accident reconstruction who wouldn't know how to debug a room if their life depended on it. You know, there are specialists and for very good reasons. I specialize in very large part in missing persons and in international investigations.

I can assure you that the average PI is smart enough to admit to himself that he shouldn't go to Wisconsin without a local contact, let alone Gambia. Yeah. Yet our people who today claim that they can do anything, including international investigations, and the truth is they really can't. Wow. So what do you specialize in then in that case? International investigations and missing persons. And by missing persons, I mean all types of missing persons from the traditional missing kid to fugitive retrieval, you know, colloquially known as bounty hunting to fraudulent death claims overseas where somebody will go overseas. The person will disappear, supposedly fall into a river or volcano or off a ship or something like that. And the family will say, oh my gosh, Uncle Harry's dead. Give us his half a million dollars.

I've done some real hardcore missing person stuff, Nazi war crimes investigation where I had to actually find the Nazis before I tricked them into. talking to me. And before they died, because they're all old as hell. Well, it's 25 years ago, and they were not alive. They were quite proud of having been mass murderers. You know, that was quite an adventure. Who contracted that type of thing? Is that like Simon Wiesenthal Center type stuff? A, the Simon Wiesenthal Center does not actually hunt Nazis. Oh, okay. Despite what the people who've given them half a billion dollars believe. Yeah. Second of all, that's pretty much rule number one of PI work, you don't reveal your client. I figured as much. But hey, you know, I'm a talk show host. I got to ask the questions regardless of whether or not they're

supposed to be answered or not. Sometimes a non-answer is more interesting than the answer. Ah, for PI's too. Ah, that's a good point. Just for talk show host. But the other thing that I specialize in is what's called sophisticated financial frauds and frauds of all kinds, which I have to tell you for the past 20 years has been quite a growth industry. No PI that does fraud investigation will ever go hungry. Really? Yeah, yeah. It's just one of those things that it's easier now to trick people out of their money

than to actually make money for yourself. Well, for some people it is. For some people, of course, yeah. I've caught some remarkable fraudsters. I mean, people who were smart and capable and organized, and it really occurred to me that these were people who were doing it because that's what their particular character was. They couldn't sit in an office. They couldn't do anything else. They had to do this because these are people that frankly could have

excelled at anything. These are guys that if they put in 30 years into some legit career, the way they did into becoming the best fraudster on the planet, they would have been a Fortune 500 CEO, no question about it. Ah, interesting. What's the most complicated or what are some of the most complicated fraud? that you've seen. Like, what are some of the more involved things that would qualify somebody to be an awesome businessman if they weren't so black hat? Oh, my gosh. Selling frauds to large businesses, being so good that you can survive some level of due diligence and sucker a hungry, careful, experienced business into giving you a brokerage fee of a half a million dollars.

and then afterwards getting away with it, not leaving away for this company to pursue you. Wow, and just making it look like something fell through that was beyond your control and still entitles you. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. It wasn't my fault. I gave you the standby letter of credit.

I gave you the contact to buy the discounted debentures, a funding confirmation to fund the new, factory that you want to build in boobawanga, whatever, and you just didn't properly take advantage of it, or you didn't generate the other stuff that's needed for this deal to go through. So sorry, you know, best luck to you. And sometimes these guys are so good that they actually managed to take the guy for a second go-round. Wow, that's incredible.

But I can see where it would be easy enough to get fooled twice, especially if it's like, wow, this poor guy went through all this trouble, well, at least he got his fee. Meanwhile, this guy is in cahoots with the whole fake organization. Right. And let me tell you, a lot of it is, if you've ever seen the movie The Sting, a lot of it really is like that. There's this high-level international, I'll call it a consortium of fraudsters where you have all over the world, you have really good scam artists that are in a loose association with each other. So for example, if you do what used to be called a prime bank guarantee fraud, now it's called a funding

scam, where the roper, the guy who contacts the sucker, is in your hometown. Let's say you're in San Francisco, right? So you are a guy who needs a funding source, or you're a guy who's looking for an investment. And you bump into a guy in a bar or a club or somewhere in San Francisco, and you start just out of the blue talking to, he says, this is amazing. This is what I do. Look, I will hook you up with a broker in Chicago who can take care of this for you. So he passes you on to a guy in Chicago. And the guy in Chicago says, okay, well, I represent so-and-so in London, who's associated with one of the top prime banks in London. They pass you on to this guy in London indirectly who has contacts

with London's top prime banks. Anytime you hear the word prime bank, run like mad in the other direction because it's a fraudster term. There's no such thing. And in fact, these scams are known in the law enforcement community as prime bank scam.

Okay. So then that person, you've now gone through from San Francisco to Chicago to London. The guy in London generates a bank document for you from Bank to Gang Nagara in, which is a real bank, by the way.

Okay. I thought you were just really, really creative with you. It's like a joke. Yes, I know. I figured I better tell you that in Indonesia. So you are going to take this bank guarantee, which is essentially a standby letter of credit, and you are going to use it to buy bonds. But the bond dealer never shows up because he's part of the scam. They give him a piece of the action to just disappear. And then finally it comes back to you one day before the deadline for the letter of credit to expire. And he says, I can't get this for two more weeks, but in two weeks I can have it. I'm not going to take your money. I've refunded

your money. So then the original scammer comes back to you. And he says, well, I'm sorry, you only paid for an LC, a letter of credit that's good for 40 weeks. There's two things you can do. We can either let this ride for one more day and I'm sorry, you've lost your money, or or we can renew it for another 40 weeks for 50% more. So if you're a big enough sucker, you give them another $200 to $500,000 more, depending on what you originally paid. And I can assure you the bond guy never shows up. Or if you realize you've been snookered, what do you do now?

You go to the guy in San Francisco, you didn't give him any money. The money went to the guy in Chicago. The guy in Chicago says, I didn't deliver you a document. I passed you on to a guy in London, England. Right. I just referred you. Yeah. The guy in London, England says, if you're saying this document isn't legit, I'll certainly check it.

Or if you're saying there's been a problem, I'll certainly check it. But it sounds like you didn't perform your end of it. So then you go to the cops. What cops do you go to? You go to San Francisco Police Department? No detective in the San Francisco Police Department. Department is going to want this case. Too complicated, too confusing. Sounds like you need to find a civil remedy. Right. This is a business dispute, not a crime. But let's say magically,

you find the one cop in 10 million local cop that will take this case. Or let's say you go to the FBI and they don't ignore you like they ignore everyone who's not a congressman. Right. Where did the crime occur? Did it occur in San Francisco? did it occur in Chicago, did it occur in London, did it occur, was it a fraudulent bank document in Indonesia? I mean, are all of these other people suckers also, and there's some big master criminal issuing fake bank documents in Indonesia? It is a nightmare to investigate. It's a nightmare to get courtroom quality, introduceable evidence, and it's a bigger nightmare to actually put your hands on somebody to prosecute.

You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Stephen Ram Bam. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing folks for the show, it's because of my network. I'm teaching you how to do the same. Well, not necessarily for booking your show, but generating a network. It's our free course, six-minute networking. It's over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

The course is naturally about improving your networking and connection skills, but also inspiring others to develop a personal and professional relationship with you. it'll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker. That's Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And by the way, most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to that course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Steve Ram Bam.

And of course, at the end of the day, even if you did get all that stuff in order somehow, nobody really has an interest in helping you unless you're going to pay probably more than you lost because the victim of this crime is some rich investor guy. so that there's no public or anything. Well, fortunately, that's not true. This type of scam can usually be cleaned up for about 30 grand. Oh, really? Yeah, the question is, the question is getting your money back.

That's the issue. Yeah, sure. You can hire a lawyer for 30 grand, and then you come back and you say, C-I-1, I'm morally right, and they go, great, well, we're not giving you your money. It's in Indonesia, maybe. That, frankly, is worthy of a whole other show that you should do. Sure.

About actually collecting debts. It makes me nuts when I watch these legal shows on TV. And you see at the end of the trial, the poor widows and orphans have gotten a $5 million judgment against a big mean scrooge of a defrauder. And the woman jumps up crying, hugs her lawyer, her lawyer's big beaming smile. They never show what happens next. Now you've got to find the fraudster. Now you've got to find the fraudster's assets. Now you've got to seize the fraudster's assets.

If the fraudster is in a state like Texas, you can't take his house, you can't take his car, his truck, you can't take 30,000 from his bank. I mean, there's so many things that you can't do. The truth is, you know, a judgment is very often not even worth the paper it's written on. Interesting. Yeah, I can see that. This is a country that is the Garden of Eden for bad guys, for financial fraudsters. I mean, for bad guys in general.

And I have to tell you, as a private investigator, it's not that I'm pumping up the PI profession. But the fact of the matter is that PIs fulfill a critical role in the justice community. There are a million instances, probably literally a million, instances every year where people fall between the cracks and issues and incidents fall between the cracks and law enforcement can't pursue them or just won't pursue them because they have to do law enforcement triage, they're not going to go pursue a guy in a nonviolent crime where some big company's been hurt when they've got four murders of rape and a bank robbery sitting on their desk that they're still working on. So it really is, you know, cop triage. I mean, private investigators grab these guys, bring them to justice, recover the money, private investigators, find missing kids, you know, put bad guys in jail, get

innocent people out of jail. There are countless things that are not done or can't be done by law enforcement that P.I. step in on. And this is one of the biggies. Going after fraudsters is one of the biggies. Excellent. The fraudster has nothing to sell except for one thing, himself, his charm. He is selling himself. There is no real product that's going to be handed to you by the fraudster. What he's selling is his ability to bamboozle you. Now, a lot of this is psychological judo. The sucker out there is somebody who is predisposed to looking for something for nothing or really wants to believe that they're in on some secret obscure banking program run by the Illuminati or something line. I mean, just some ridiculous, obscure program that nobody knows about, but because they've

lived a good life somehow they've tripped over them. Rex Stout, the guy who wrote all the Nero Wolf books, had a great line. He says, you can't take somebody for a ride unless they've already got a ticket in their pocket, or at least they've been checking timetables. And it's really true. These people that get suckered more often than not, they've got a little bit of the hustler in them, too. Now, I'm not going to tell you that completely innocent, completely decent people don't get hustle. They do, but those are typically what's called affinity frauds. They get screwed by a member of their own family. Or I'm doing a case right now where there's an Orthodox Jewish guy who has taken about 100 Orthodox Jewish families. He's a member of this tightly knit community,

and they believed him. This guy wouldn't screw us. We can try. trusted. So they gave him money. You see a lot of church affinity frauds, including where the pastor of the church is the bad guy. Give 10,000 or 15,000 to the building fund, and the building fund turns out to be for his house in Aruba. There's a famous case from about a year ago where a blind person took a bunch of blind people. Wow, that's depressing. Well, it kind of is, I guess. Or you've got I figure, hey, this blind guy really reentered society, didn't he? Yeah. Wow. But affinity frauds where there's already some connection between the bad guy and the

vix and the victims, that's very, very common. And that's where you see the people who are really decent people getting screwed. Yellow Kid Wheel, Joseph Wheel, during the 20s and 30s. He was the guy that the movie The Sting was based on. and everybody he hustled and everybody he took was already halfway towards joining in on that scam. You know, people who were trying to cheat on their taxes, people who believed that they were getting a tip on a racehorse. He took $8 million doing that back in the day when people lived on less than $1,000 a year. So you investigate this stuff.

How did you get into this in the first place? I mean, it kind of goes in line with what you were saying. You got to have a little bit of the hustle in you. You just decided to help people instead of screwing them out of their money. Oh, I would make an excellent fraudster. I would cut out a lot of the middlemen. I would already have three or four identities of my own. And I would say, let me call Bob, and I would be Bob.

Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately for me, I don't know, but fortunately for everyone, probably me included, I'm not predisposed in that direction. I had a job overseas. I was rather good at it and came back to the U.S., started doing mostly missing persons and witness location and fugitive location. That was something that I was already experienced in at that point. And then I learned about all of these various frauds and got extremely interested in it, went out, got a business degree, took the training to become a certified fraud examiner, which is a very, very important credential. and dipped my toe in the water, and now it's a big part of what I do.

It's probably a third of what I do. You want to talk about, for instance, this is a great story. All right. There was a guy by the name of Joseph Myers. Joseph Myers was a mental patient in Detroit, Michigan. Joseph Myers got out of the mental institution, didn't really have much he could do for gainful employment.

So he decided to be a criminal. When he got arrested for a big, big charge, He was smart enough, just smart enough to say, maybe I shouldn't just be a criminal. Maybe I should be an informant. So the FBI lives and dies on a few things, and it's not good police work. They live and die on the fact that they have an unlimited amount of money so they can pay for anything. They live and die on forensic stuff. They really do have a very fine lab and tech guys, but especially they live and

on informants. They have thousands and tens of thousands of informants. And their top informants, the guys that they keep going back to time and time again and who bring them new cases all the time are called top echelon informants. An attorney, a former prosecutor, came to a client of mine because he had been arrested and he has no idea why. He was arrested for money laundering. and a guy by the name of Franz Joseph von Hopsburg Lothringen.

Wow. The Duke of Austria had introduced him to a guy who turned out to be an FBI agent, by the way, got him in all kinds of bogus trouble, and then disappeared. My client, the law firm, representing this former prosecutor, now defendant himself, said to me, the key to this is finding out who the heck is this Habsburg prince, find them and question them and see what the hell the deal is and background it was a tough case after about four weeks of solid investigation what did i find out that franz joseph von hobsberg lothringen was the aforementioned joseph myers mental patient and the fbi i had taken him under their wing had gotten his criminal record submarine that he had been arrested a bunch of times

had gotten him a new driver's license and passport and everything you could think of under the name of Franz Joseph on Hobsberg-Lotheringen, and let him scam and lie and steal and enmesh himself in the criminal underground just so long as he would throw them a bone from time to time. Wow. Not just wow, but what a damn disgrace for what is in theory the nation's premier law enforcement agency to be involved in. And let me tell you, this is not so uncommon.

Most of the people that get arrested as a result of these informants, most of them are genuinely innocent. Their only mistake was having shaken hands with one of these guys. That's basically the core of FBI informants. They go out, and as soon as they touch you, you're dead. And it's a horrible thing for me to say as an investigator. I'm not anti-law enforcement. I mean, quite the opposite. These people are my colleagues and my comrades.

You know, if a guy from the DEA or the CIA or the Secret Service or the IRS, CID, or the marshals or whatever, calls me up on the phone and says, do me a favor, I do it instantly. But the FBI are really a whole different ball of wax. After I found out all this information on the prints, as we call them, the FBI got really, really mad. and they served me a subpoena for my file, which is absolutely illegal. You don't get the subpoena a defense investigator. It's attorney work product. It's protected. The same way you don't subpoena the attorney's file.

So a federal magistrate quashed their subpoena literally in, I think it took five minutes. So they got really, really mad. They waited until the trial judge went on vacation, and they busted into a conference, the Hope Conference. In front of 2,500 people, they came in with a raid team, you know, the guys with the heavy weapons and the jackets that say FBI, and they hold me out of there in handcuffs. And everybody there was like, oh, thank God it's not me. I mean, probably a hundred people who were in the audience were cops and investigators who had come to hear me talk. So I believe me, there were more legal guns in there than the

once the FBI had many, many more times. My friend Bob Kolakowski was involved in the case with me. He's a retired cop out in Detroit. And I thought this was gonna destroy me. I thought it was gonna destroy my career. You know, there's a dirt bag that writes for the Washington Post by the name of Brian Krebs, who wrote the whole story up and refused to write that the charges would drop

because it wouldn't have read that interestingly. And I thought that I was screwed. I mean, when the Washington Post says you're a criminal, Well, I mean, they got Nixon, so you must be a criminal. Not only did it not ruin my business, but I probably had in the following year 100 or 200 law firms calling me up and wanting to hire me saying, geez, we've never had a PI that would go to jail to keep the file secret.

It's like, well, you know, let's not test this again, but yes. So, I mean, my business two years later was double what it had been. And Bob says, you know, if you could get arrested, that every five years you'd be a billionaire. Yeah, no kidding. That is amazing. You know, they thought it was going to ruin your career, too. But the thing they didn't realize is the more persona non-grada you are,

according to any sort of official body, the more cred that gives you at any hacker conference. Well, hackers are my friends, and we learn a lot from each other, but they are not my usual clients. My usual clients are other investigators or insurance carriers or for that matter, law enforcement agencies.

Yeah, I don't mean that you'd get clients directly. Not looking for street credit hacker conferences. No, but it gets your name out there all over the web as the guy, as legit. That's absolutely true. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Stephen Ram Bam. We'll be right back. Thank you so much for supporting the show and, of course, for listening to the show. If you want to check out the sponsors,

we put all the codes and the discounts and the URLs are all in one place in one page, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. That page is now searchable. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on our website on any page as well. So please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Steve Ram Bam. Why do you speak at hacker conferences like $2,600 and Hope then? I speak on things of mutual interest, like keeping information open and privacy issues.

certainly IT security issues. And I mean, now that I'm doing the TV stuff, which... Yeah, tell us about your show. Well, it almost didn't happen. I mean, I had to make a career decision. I'm still not 100% sure I made the right decision, but, you know, I'm working on it. You know, I did a ton of undercover stuff over the years.

And when you decide to do a TV show, obviously, unless you're a moron, you have to realize that you're not going to be doing much undercover in the future. So I made that decision that I was going to dump the undercover stuff, except for real, you know, short-term undercover pretext investigations where you show up and you play your role and you get the information on the spot. You don't go back for a second bite of the apple.

I agreed to take the show and Discovery ID said, all right, we'll do a deal with you. The first season needs to be mostly reenactments. You get to do some real stuff, but a lot of the witness interview, and things like that, we're not going to put it on air. And I said, that's great because a lot of the people, you can't actually show their faces. So season one, and the show is called Nowhere to Hide, season one went really, really well.

We were number one, four nights and number two, two nights. Which is okay, because one of the nights we were only number two was Super Bowl. Doesn't disturb me that that drew off a lot of viewers. So now we're filming season two, and we're doing a lot of live stuff. A lot of live stuff. And I got to tell you, these are some of the craziest cases I've ever worked. There's a rock and roll, funkadelic guy, real famous guy from the 70s. If I told you his name, you wouldn't believe it.

We had to track him down and get his DNA to prove that his daughter was legally an American. She was about to get it out of the U.S. She had lived here a whole life. She had four kids born in America, married to an American guy, Social Security number paid her taxes. her kids are finally grown. She takes her first vacation with her husband, takes a cruise to Canada, comes back in, and the immigration people say, where do you think you're going?

She says, well, home to North Carolina. No, you're not. You're not an American. What are you crazy? And they say, well, you know, we see Canadian, Canadian. If your dad was an American, we don't know who he is. You know, we will parole you to the U.S. for 90 days. You can get your paperwork together.

no big deal, this happens a lot. And by the way, this happens probably 10,000 times a year. People who've always thought they were Americans trying to come back into American being told, get lost. Wow. Obviously a pretty horrible, horrifying thing for them. They interview her, and they ask her a trick question. They say, have you ever voted? She says, of course I voted. I'm a proud American. They say, well, you committed a felony by voting. Now you're not eligible to be a paroled citizen. Oh, my God. It was a nasty trick. So now the only thing that she could do was find her father,

proved that her father was an American citizen, and then they would have to give her citizenship. And we had to find the father. So that's one great episode, crazy case. Yeah, man. I mean, I thought my audio problems were stressful. Let me tell you, another one is a great fraud case. This poor woman, she's on the internet,

and she gets a pop-up on Facebook. look, hey, I've been looking at your profile. I mean, you look kind of cute or whatever. Whole romance scam starts. She never meets the guy. And on the phone and on the internet, this guy romances her and proposes to her. And he's supposedly a guy in the Army. He's in Afghanistan.

He's getting ready to go home on leave. And bit by bit, he suckers her into sending more and more, more money. And this is just a nice woman who's looking for romance, looking for love, looking for a husband. She's 41 years old. She's getting a little nervous about, you know, is she going to die alone? This guy scams her out of a ton of money. You know, I need a phone sent to me. I need this. I need that. I have to pay $1,500 into the Army for a past debt before they'll let me go on leave, send me money for a ticket. finally she was about to wire $2,300 to this guy, and Western Union stopped it. And they said, we notice a fraud pattern.

We just want to counsel you. And normally, you know, be like, what the hell are you doing messing with my business? That's cool. They did that. Well, it really, in this case it is. It's kind of troubling that they watch the transactions. It's definitely a privacy issue. But in this case, it paid off because she said, said, you know, they told her this doesn't look right. We see this all the time. She called me

out of the blue, and she said, am I being suckered? It took me less than two days to find out that this was a Nigerian scam. It's called a 419 scam. Well, this isn't technically a 419 scam, but it is a Nigerian scam. Organized that in Nigeria. That's where all the money was ending up. By looking at the fraudsters, I was able to see that they had hit more than 50 other women. Oh, wow. Oh, this is going to be a big case. This is about to be a big case. If it hadn't already been solved, I wouldn't be talking about it.

FBI are not my favorite people, but they're the right guys for this. We're going to probably involve them. We're going to certainly involve, you know, the military police, their criminal investigative division or whoever else is responsible. We're going to round up these guys. And also, there's a lot of people who are being suckered as money transmitters. not only do they charm these women, but so you're a sucker. Where are you going to send your money to without the fraudster being identified? Right.

What they do is they find these small businesses, for example, we found one that they're using in Michigan. And they say, we want to go in partnership with you. We're looking for businesses that are there in the U.S. that can handle our business, that will be responsible for shipping stuff, that will receipt money for us, so that we know it's actually been received because a lot of people lie to us. They've sent international wires. If you will receive money for us,

we will let you keep 15% of this money. Well, I'll tell you, so many lawyers have been suckered with this, which kind of makes me, you know, laugh up my sleeve a little bit, guys, but it's not nice. A lot of them are decent, you know, sole practitioners who can't afford either the monetary loss or the disgrace.

But what happens is, you know, you've obviously never gotten in, mesh than one of these frauds. No. Thank God. But let me tell you, here's how it would work. They would tell you you're going to be getting $10,523 from Bob Jones. After you get that, deduct 15 percent, send the rest onward to us.

And there are people, private people, law firms, businesses, whatnot who do this. And after they've receded, God knows how much, they send it on to this guy. And these poor guys are now responsible for every person. Many of us. Oh, man. Oh, yeah. So there's two victims for the price of one. Because they basically wash the money by letting somebody else take the secondary risk on top of it.

By the time they've sent this money to Croatia or Latvia. Anyway, it's somebody overseas. They've got a way to receipt the money. They receipt the money. And then, puss, they're gone. Wow. There is no fraud that can survive real due diligence, real investment. real investigation. Let's talk about Bernie Madoff. If I was investing in Bernie Madoff and I investigated him,

I would have never given him a penny. Why? Two things. First of all, every year the stock market went up, down, up, down, big wild swings, but every year somehow Bernie Madoff managed to report 8, 9, 10, 11 percent earnings. The stock market didn't affect him. He was literally bigger than the stock market. Not possible. Not possible. I can tell you I was doing a fraud case with a guy from the SEC because the SEC was involved because of issuing of unregistered securities, fake bonds. The guy came to me, and this is way before Madoff was arrested, he says, I know that you're involved in the Jewish community. You ever hear this guy Bernie Madoff? I heard and said, yeah, I've heard the charities, you know, invest through him. And he says, and he drew on a piece of paper,

He drew a line, and then he says, this is the stock market, up down, up down, up down. He says, this is Bernie Madoff. And for the past 10 years, and he drew 10 lines the same height. He says, I don't know how this is possible. So that's your first clue. The second clue was Bernie Madoff was doing hundreds of billions of dollars of trades, but his auditor was a guy with a small two-room office in a mini-mall in upstate New York that wasn't there three days a week.

Oh, my gosh. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you look into the Bernie Madoff scenario, if you look into how he was able to do this, you'll go WTF. How is this possible? It's not. Every fraud can be busted by basic due diligence.

I mean, I had a wonderful couple called me from Montreal two weeks ago, and they were being told to wire $15,000 to pay bank fees so that their friend could send them $13 million. I was unable to explain to them that there is no legitimate bank. This is Bank Agricol in Paris. There is no legitimate bank in the world that if there's $13 million sitting in the account, they're not going to just deduct the bank fees and send the rest.

Right, yeah, no kidding. But these people didn't believe it. So they sent the $15,000. And then they called me and they said, you know, we have. haven't received the money, we want you to go to Paris and collect it. And I said, there's no money to collect. It was just people who were suckers. They were being told that somebody had left them a ton of money and that the money would only go to them after they paid the banking fees. Unbelievable. And they fell for it. And I've got to tell you, this has done all the time.

People are desperate. Businesses are desperate. People need sources of funding. People need sources of funds. People need jobs. People need times are. still tough. Fraudsters are able to use this desperation against the very people who can't afford to be taken. People want to believe. You know what? Don't believe. Don't believe. If you don't know how to check something out yourself, hire a professional, hire a CPA, hire a forensic accountant, hire a forensic auditor, hire a private investigator, hire a certified fraud examiner, hire an attorney. I mean, if that person makes a mistake,

at least you've got somebody right there with money that you can actually sue. And that really is a consideration. Try to get a couple of third parties that are vouching for it that you can go after if you decide to invest. But mostly, you know, I'm not going to say, if it seems too good to be true, it isn't. because in the investigative community, we say,

if it seems too good to be true, the guy's an amateur. Yeah, the guy's an amateur. I mean, I got to ask you that there's one last thing. You know, I get these emails. I mean, my spam floor, I actually check my spam folder. Everybody gets these emails. But it's like, hi, I am Lieutenant Colonel Sanders from the USA Army, and I found gold bullion of $2 million.

If you send me transportation costs, I can send you X. And I'm just like, how freaking stupid do you have to be to not see just all of this? Probably 10 people will send them the money. He'll send out 5 million emails and he'll pay somebody to send it out. And probably 10 people will send him the money, which is more than the average guy in Nigeria makes in a couple of years. Yeah, so it doesn't matter, right? And by the way, there are sucker lists, what used to be called trick books, sucker lists, scam lists, where if you've been taken once,

they go after you again and again, and then when you reach a certain scammer-determined threshold, then a second group of scammers comes in on you. Have you been defrauded? We can help. We can collect your money, and it's a new group of fraudsters. Right, because you're so angry,

then you're not thinking clearly, and you're like, you know what, I'll give you 10 grand just to screw these people over. Yeah. Right, and it's other fraudsters. which, by the way, it is very, very important that when you hire an investigator or a counselor or a lawyer or somebody, verify the license. There are guys out there pretending to be private investigators. It is a tough, rigorous thing to be a private investigator.

And there are dozens of people arrested every year who are fake PIs. It's actually a criminal offense. I mean, in California, where you are, I think they're raising it. from the top level misdemeanor to a felony. New York, it's being raised from an a misdemeanor to an e-felony thanks to a group called Aldenese, the association in New York. Make sure that you're not being suckered for a second time. Excellent. Thank you so much, Steve. Much appreciated. Thank you. Now, I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before we get into that, here's what you should check out next on the Jordan Harbinger show.

Tell me about the neighborhood where you grew up. South Central Los Angeles. Yeah. Well, most people played a game of Grand Theft Auto. Yeah. So I'm sitting on the porch and I don't know what I'm going to do. And my partner calls me and he's like, man, I got the new thing. And it was cocaine.

Cocaine was really, really expensive then. Yeah. You know, a gram of cocaine back then was like $375. Wow. So it was dozens of times more expensive back then than it is now. Like 300 times. Wow. And it's also the most expensive thing that you can.

thin your hand, it cost that much money probably. Maybe a watch. Yeah, absolutely. At that time, they said cocaine was more expensive than gold. How much money are we talking about here? I probably was making about $55,000 off of a kilo. I think you made up around a billion dollars in the 80s

in L.A. That's what I heard on the documentary. For two years, I made like $600 million. Not profit for me, but money that went through my hands. Before I started making a million every day, we was making $500 every day. Before we were making $500, we made $400. we made 400.

Before he was making four, we made two. Before he was making two, we made 100. So you scaled up to a million dollars a day? Yeah, yeah. I had days that I went through three million dollars in one day. How are you even counting that much money? Oh, you have money counters. Yeah.

And you have a team of girls that sit there and they count money all day. You know, you have a house, and this house would have like a slot in the door, and people would just come in and drop duffel bags through the door. So I wanted to know what was the difference between real business and the cocaine business. And what did you find? There's none. For more of Freeway Rick's story

as one of the biggest drug dealers of all time, including his ties to the CIA, check out episode 121 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. Always fun to bring these episodes back from the vault. You know, I can imagine him sitting on his farm or whatever in Texas with like a shotgun and the sheriff showing up and going, yeah, I don't think so, guys. Get this New Yorker out of my jurisdiction.

I just, I can see how the sheriff was like, Listen, man, I can't let you sit here operating straight up vigilante style. Like I said, Steve is a salty, gritty guy. 10 out of 10 would not mess with Steve Ram Bam. But, you know, just the fact that there are people like him out there where if you need something found or something done, there's just not a whole lot of people you can call that are going to be capable of doing that. When the cops aren't going to help you, you call a guy like Ram Bam and he's going to go

out and work for you and find the people that took your money or get it back or, you know, get arrested doing it maybe. It's like the A team without Mr. T. If you've got a problem and no one else can help, and if you can find him, maybe you can hire Steve Rambam. Links to all things, Steve will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Please use our website links if you buy anything from any sponsor or guest on the show. It does help support the show.

Transcripts are in the show notes, videos on YouTube, advertisers, deals, and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Again, please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram or connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using systems, software, and tiny habits, the same stuff I use every single day. That's our six-minute networking course, and that course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course.

Dig the well before you get Thursday. That's what I'm teaching you over there. Most of the guests on the show, they subscribe and contribute to that same course, so come join us. You'll be in smart company. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogart, Millio Campo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

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