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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Scamfluencers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple Podcasts. Sachi, I don't know about you, but my Instagram feed is really insufferable right now. Everyone's on vacation somehow, like everyone's in Spain or Italy or the south of France, and it is...
really pissing me off. It's so obnoxious and I'm so jealous. Well, I know this is the time of year when I find out that I hate a lot of my friends. Also, when you find out they're kind of rich. Yeah. Why didn't they invite me? Actually, you know who it makes me think of? The ultimate vacation influencer,
our boy, Hush Puppy. Remember how he couldn't stop posting travel photos and flexing all of his cars and clothes? Well, in honor of summer travel season, we're going to air a rerun of our two-part series, The Billionaire Gucci Master. We'll be back with brand new episodes on July 3rd on Wondery Plus and July 10th on our public feed. Happy summer!
Sachi, I have a question for you, and I'm scared to hear the answer. Oh, boy. Have you ever been hacked? No, I've never been hacked. I'm very careful about my online security. And I would say to anybody listening to this, don't try. Don't try it. Also, you're not even going to like what you see. It's dark in here. Okay.
Do you know how, like, in the movies, they make it seem like you have to be this extreme coder, super computer genius, and that's how you hack? Yeah, like Sandra Bullock in The Net. She's like, I'm in. Yes, or Angelina Jolie in Hackers.
Well, that's actually not true. And the scam we're going to talk about proves that all of these movies are kind of wrong. So I'm going to tell you a story about a guy who took a very basic email scam and wrote it to fame, fortune and infamy.
Okay, Saatchi, I want to start by showing you a video of this jet-set influencer getting arrested. His name is Ramona Boss, aka Hush Puppy, and the arrest takes place in June of 2020 in this luxury penthouse in Dubai where he lives. And lucky for us, the Dubai police produced a whole video about it and hired some British guy to narrate it.
It's one of the most insane official government videos I think I've ever seen. And the police actually spent weeks making this fancy video after the arrest. They really wanted the world to know about their successful operation.
The Nigerian Instagram celebrity who was arrested on multiple fraud charges for crimes committed in different parts of the world boasted about his wealth and expensive possessions on social media, claiming he is a successful businessman. All right, this is a really strange video. There's like cops in full SWAT combat gear. They're bursting into this really expensive looking apartment. It's a
It's a montage of this hush puppy guy's Instagrams, him with money on private planes, really fancy cars, expensive outfits. God, this looks like a Michael Bay movie. What am I watching? It looks like the beginning of those music videos from like the late 90s, early 2000s. This is like when P. Diddy was like, all my music videos are going to last eight minutes. Yeah.
And Hush Puppy's arrest is actually part of a massive global operation. And the police are able to find Hush Puppy only because he lives a double life as a cyber criminal and a celebrity influencer. He comes from nothing, makes it to the top of the world, and ultimately will be brought down because he just can't stop posting luxury thirst traps. From Wondery, I'm Sarah Hagee. And I'm Sachi Cole. And this is Scamfluencers.
Saatchi, this story is nuts. It's about a guy who is living a double life and he was crazy successful at both of them. To all the world, he was a very sincere Instagram influencer posting about fashion and style with millions of followers. And by night, he was part of some of the most sophisticated cyber scams of the century. And it took like several governments working together to bring him down.
This is episode one of our two-part series, The Billionaire Gucci Master.
Back in the early 2000s, Ramon is a teenager growing up in Lagos, Nigeria. And though he's just a kid, he's already kind of a businessman. He scours thrift stores in Lagos suburbs for brand name clothes and then takes them to fancier neighborhoods and sells them to tourists at a markup. Ramon's from a working class family that's barely scraping by. And when I say scraping by, I mean they are truly struggling.
One of Ramon's sisters actually dies of typhoid because his family couldn't pay her medical bill. That's actually really sad. Ramon's got a knack for the resale business, and he loves clothes. But it isn't really enough money to live on, so he has a side hustle at the cyber cafe at the end of the street. Saatchi...
What do you remember about cyber cafes? I feel like they were a bit before our time. I do remember using them with some frequency in India. Yeah, and they are huge in Nigeria in the early 2000s. So Ramon's usual cyber cafe is like a cramped storefront with walls lined with tables and boxy old computers. And inside, young guys are bent over the keyboards, typing furiously. Ramon's best friend, Pak, waves him over to an empty spot.
And Ramon uses his hard-earned thrifting money to pay the owner for an hour of internet access. Then he logs on to a new website that just arrived in Nigeria, Yahoo. Yahoo! Yeah, I do remember getting a lot of news from Yahoo and spending maybe too much time in Yahoo chat rooms. Oh yeah, did a lot of that.
Well, Ramon's known as a Yahoo boy, so it's a slang term for young Nigerians using cyber cafes and free email addresses to run scams. And we don't know exactly what scams Ramon was running then, but he may have started with one of the most popular and easy cons. They're called confidence scams. That's where a scammer talks to someone in chat rooms over email or whatever and strikes up a friendship.
Maybe they even pretend to fall in love with them. And then once he's earned their trust, he'll ask for money.
Okay, sounds a little like catfishing, but all right. Yeah, I mean, it was catfishing before the term even existed. And it's mind-blowing how much money these scams can bring in compared to other jobs in Nigeria. So a ton of young guys are getting in the game, including Ramon. And he is really, really good at it. In fact, Ramon's about to graduate from basic confidence scams to something a little more technical and a lot more lucrative.
Fast forward about a decade to 2013. Ramon's sitting with Pac and their friends, not in a cyber cafe, but on the patio of a swank restaurant in Lagos. Their days of buying internet by the hour are over. Now they have smartphones and laptops. The last 10 years have been good to Ramon. He has a real disposable income now, so he's buying swag like Versace high tops and Louis Vuitton man bags. And he's starting to go by a new nickname, Hush Puppy.
His new email is rayhushpuppy at iCloud. You don't know where Hush Puppy came from, but I personally find it very cute. It is cute. And as the technology has advanced, so have Ramon's scams. He's moved on from pretending to be a boyfriend to pretending to be a business to scam other businesses. It's called a BEC scam. That stands for Business Email Compromise.
Ramon pretends he's an employee of a legit business, like a bank. Then he sends an email asking someone to make an account transaction with him. All right, well, this sounds like a pretty classic email scam. Like, I feel like my spam inbox is full of requests like this. Yeah, and scamming businesses instead of people means Ramon's making bank transactions.
That night on the restaurant patio, he's splashing out. Phones are out and everyone's taking pictures. Ramon poses. He might post something later to this new app. Have you ever heard of it, Sachi? It's called Instagram. Yes, I'm very popular there right now. But
At the time, it was like a new app, right? Yeah, and as these guys are busy enjoying their time, snapping photos, a few police officers walk by on the street, and they hide their phones fast. There's actually a special police task force cracking down on the Yahoo Boys.
The task force is called SARS, Special Anti-Robbery Squad, and their tactics are brutal. They point guns at young men just walking down the street. Anyone in Nigeria who carries a cell phone or a laptop is at risk of getting arrested, or worse. SARS is really notorious for harassing, extorting, assaulting, and even killing people, basically at random.
Jesus. So all you need to get in trouble is just to be like a young man standing around with a phone. Yeah. And Ramon's tired of constantly watching his back. He hates that he can't just openly flaunt his wealth. So in early 2014, Ramon makes a tough choice. He decides to move somewhere where he can continue scamming without having to be afraid for his life.
Ramon's heard Malaysia's a safe haven for grifting. It's easy to get student visas, and there's better internet than Nigeria. And the police don't really have the resources to go after them. Ramon's about to step into a whole new life in Malaysia, one where the scamming opportunities are boundless. And he'll make a new persona to match.
In Ramon's first year in Malaysia, he transforms into an influencer. He starts posting on Instagram as Hush Puppy, and Saatchi, he is honestly so good at it. He's a good-looking guy with close-cropped hair, a neat beard, and the playful half-smile. And he isn't just some slob wearing expensive shit. He has actual style. He's an early adopter of the designer Virgil Abloh, five years before Abloh got hired by Louis Vuitton.
He's rocking threads from all the big Euro fashion houses. Prada, Gucci, Versace. And there's a lot of Versace. So much of it that in January 2015, Hushpuppi posts a video from the Versace store in Kuala Lumpur. He's sitting at a gold table and opening a gift that the store gave him for being one of their top customers. $20,000, okay? $20,000.
What is a new echelon of wealth? To be so rich that people just start giving you free things. Yeah, and he gives himself an incredible new nickname on Instagram. The billionaire Gucci master. His captions are all about hustle culture, though he never specifies exactly what his hustle is.
But it's clear that whatever Hush Puppy's doing, he's getting paid. I love when people talk about the hustle. Those are people who are not working. I feel like we all kind of follow those people on Instagram and they're always doing really expensive shit, but you don't really know what their job is. But you just kind of assume that they just have money somehow. Yes. It's very Lady Doth protest too much.
And as Hushpuppi's follower count blows up, people start arguing on gossip blogs about where he gets his money. By this point, he's a celebrity in Nigeria. He's even name-dropped in Living Things, a song by Nigerian hip-hop star, Nice. Hushpuppi, Timini. Investor, BJ, Timini. Mova, Timini. Junior Wives...
The song is kind of a scammer anthem. It shouts out a ton of Yahoo boys, making them into folk heroes. And Nigeria's National Broadcasting Commission actually bans the song, saying it promotes fraud. Then, Tumaya, a Nigerian singer with more than 700,000 YouTube subscribers, releases Teleperson. It's a song about people who live lavishly and wear Gucci, but...
who blow all their money on designer fits instead of investing. And if it's not clear that they're basically subtweeting Hush Puppy with the lyrics, they make it a lot more obvious in their music video. Sachi, you have to take a look. ♪
Well, first of all, this song is a banger. No skips. All slaps. And in the video, there appears to be a very sweet little fluffy doggo with a...
Like a bedazzled necklace that says Gucci Dog. It's clear that this is supposed to be Hush Puppy. I guess this song is just one big burn. But again, it's a banger. Well, that song has more than 14 million views. Teleperson also name checks Momfa, another Nigerian influencer Hush Puppy became close with.
In 2017, three years after Hushpuppi moved to Malaysia, Momfa actually convinces him to join him in Dubai. Momfa says he can raise his game there. And that's when Hushpuppi moves into the Palazzo Versace, where rent is $10,000 a month. Normal. Penthouse, rooftop.
Palazzo Versace. By this point, he's got hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and designers invite him to travel to fashion shows and drink champagne at VIP events. But he's still not satisfied. Being mentioned in songs is cool and all, but Hushpuppi's not interested in background fame. He wants to become notorious.
Hushpuppi knows courting controversy is one of the best ways to get more followers. So not long after moving to Dubai, he decides to go on the offensive against some of the biggest musicians in Africa. Starting with Davido, the Nigerian rapper and music producer and self-proclaimed coolest kid in Africa.
And DeVito might be right. He's one of the biggest stars of Afrobeats, a genre that dominates Africa. DeVito has 24 million Instagram followers, 2 million followers on Snapchat, he's the most followed African musician on Twitter, and his YouTube channel has more than a billion views. In the spring of 2017, Hush Puppy hears a rumor that DeVito couldn't pay his bar tab at a swanky nightclub in Lagos.
So Hush Puppy decides to troll him. He goes to the club and parties hard. Then he posts his own bar tab on Snapchat to let his followers and DeVito know that he dropped $27,000 at the club in one night. I'm always curious when stories like that come up when someone's like, I spent $50,000 on bottle service. And I'm like, how? Well, DeVito takes the bait.
He posts a very impressive bank statement on Snapchat showing that he could totally cover a bar tab. In the influencer game, everyone wins. DeVito gets to prove he could cover more than a bar tab, and Hush Puppy gets the attention of DeVito's millions of international followers.
And Hushpuppi's not done feuding. A few months later, he goes after Fino, another superstar Nigerian rapper with over seven and a half million followers on Instagram and nearly half a million YouTube subscribers. Hushpuppi accuses Fino of wearing fake Patek Philippe watches. Sachi, do you want to read Fino's response? Yes, I absolutely do. He says...
We not on the same level, mate. You live and die for Gucci. I live and die for my people. The hunger is different here, man. All right. I kind of I dig that. It's classy. It's a classy response. That is a classy response to something very stupid. But why does Hushpuppi want all of this attention? Like he's still scamming, right? So why would why would he be like, come look at me?
Okay, yes, he is still scamming. And the more he trolls Nigerian celebrities, the more his haters fire back with burns that are honestly a little too accurate. Sachi, will you read this post from Casey, who is another Nigerian singer-songwriter? Yeah, I can. He says,
What do you do for a living? What is your talent? How do you make your money? What brand do you represent? Ha ha ha.
That's so mean. Like if somebody said this to me, I would simply die. But then he says, we need to start asking questions and the EFCC needs to start paying more attention to detail. So the EFCC is Nigeria's agency that investigates financial crimes. So having someone tag them in a post about you if you're an international scammer is truly not ideal. Yeah.
Yeah, it seems like a bad plan. It's like when people, like, tag the FBI. Okay, well, here's the thing. Hushpuppi talks a big game about his haters. But I think some of this beef really sticks with him, especially Fino's comment about caring more about Gucci than his people. A few months later, he responds. On its face, it's kind of tone deaf. A photo of him chilling in a hot tub on the Greek island of Santorini.
But there's a two-part caption titled, Letter to the Ghetto Kid. And honestly, it's kind of deep. You have to take a look. Okay, well, I just got to say already, this is not starting great. First of all, this is way too many words. The other thing about this, Sarah, is that he posted two separate photos with different captions. Yeah.
you know, sort of creating one incredibly long life story essay. He says,
I don't know. I mean, honestly, this is like very like hustle culture. He's like saying the right words, but they're just empty. And he's standing around in like a Gucci tracksuit. Yeah, it's coming from a real place, but he's a scammer. And he's like, they don't care about you and they don't expect anything from you. But he's also made his fortune ripping people off. Yeah.
The post does hit a nerve. Messages of support pour in from his fans, and obviously Hushpuppi's a world away from the kid hawking secondhand clothes. But his lavish displays of wealth aren't just raising questions with the haters. They're also setting alarm bells off with the FBI. And pretty soon, the feds realized all the evidence they need to nab him is right there on his Instagram.
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Abigail's the CEO of a small business interest group, and she stands out in stuffy business meetings with her red hair, big blue eyes, and boss bitch vibes. Her office is a few blocks from the waterfront of Grand Harbor. Malta is perfectly picturesque. But this morning, Abigail sees right away that something's wrong.
She's flooded with calls from small businesses all over Malta. They're all having the same problem. Their point-of-sale machines aren't working. Here she is talking about that day to the BBC.
The first four hours when it started, it was complete chaos. The machines that aren't working are the ones that go through the Bank of Valletta. But that's a huge problem because the Bank of Valletta is one of the oldest and biggest banks in the Republic of Malta. Almost half of the country's financial transactions go through that one bank. Here's Abigail on the BBC again. Malta is very, very dependent on the bank. It has so many clients. Everyone has accounts there.
And soon, it gets worse. ATMs all over the island are malfunctioning too.
Bank of Aletta ATMs. The bank's app isn't working either, and when Abigail checks, it looks like the entire Bank of Aletta website has been taken down. The mood flips from confusion to chaos in Malta. Shop owners, unable to run customer credit cards or reach the bank by phone, just start turning people away. Abigail starts hearing that people are abandoning their grocery carts in line because they can't pay for their food.
Abigail is freaking out. She and her colleagues are scrambling to figure out what the hell is going on. But no one can reach the bank because at that very moment, a cybercrime machine is draining millions of euros from the bank of Aleta. And a certain Nigerian influencer is at the center of it all.
More than 3,000 miles away in Dubai, Hushpuppi is watching deposits roll into bank accounts he's set up all over the world. A grand total of about 13 million euros. And all that cash is coming from, you guessed it, Malta's Bank of Aletta. Hold on. I mean, I know we talked earlier about how, like, a lot of these scams are kind of simple, but this sounds really elaborate. So how did he pull all of this off? That is an excellent question.
In the year and a half since Hush Puppy wrote about his humble beginnings from a hot tub in Santorini, he's continued scamming and living large in Dubai. But he's also hooked up with a powerful new crew of cybercriminals.
The head of this operation is a Canadian grifter named Galeb Alomari. He's in his 30s with prominent ears and a neck beard. And his nickname is Big Boss. And he is a big boss. Galeb runs an international crime syndicate, which now includes Hush Puppy. But ultimately, Galeb is a cog in a way bigger scheme, cooked up by a group of North Korean hackers.
Okay, I am loving the Canadian representation in this truly international tale. I know. It always comes back to us.
And these North Korean hackers are some of the most prolific cyber criminals in the world. They're the ones who broke into Sony. Do you remember that, Sachi? Oh, God. It was so embarrassing. They released all of these like internal emails from all their executives. And like it led to like a lot of drama because they saw these execs like insulting their own talent and their own movies. Yeah.
Yeah, and Hush Puppy's boss, Galeb, has worked on other bank heists with North Koreans. But this time, they're doing things a little differently. Sachi, you have to pay attention here because the Maltese heist is a bit complicated. Here's how it works.
First, the North Korean hackers email the bank. They pose as European regulators and ask for access to the bank's payment systems. You know, just to check them out. Kind of like routine maintenance. Then, bam, they're in. Once inside the bank's system, the hackers transfer money to international bank accounts set up by people like Hushpuppi. In this heist, Hushpuppi and the people he works with have to set up accounts ready to accept 5 million euros each.
They're spreading out the stolen money to avoid raising alarm bells. Okay, so it sounds sort of like personal tax shelters almost. They're just trying to like move money around enough so that nobody really sees it. Yeah, it's like technically small amounts of money kind of thing, comparatively to how much money a bank has, right? So the night of February 12th, 2019, the North Koreans withdraw huge amounts of money from the Bank of Valetta and no one notices.
It goes so well that Galeb tells Hush Puppy that they're going to keep pumping. The next day, they take out more money, but this time people do notice. And within 30 minutes, the bank shuts everything down. That afternoon, Hush Puppy gets a text from Galeb. Galeb says the game is up. The bank pressed recall on most of the stolen funds. He sends a link to a local news story about the heist. And Hush Puppy just writes back, damn.
That really reminds me of that meme. I don't know if you've seen it where like somebody sends this guy like a whole chunk of text and he replies back like, sorry if that happened to you or congratulations, I'm not reading all that. Yeah, honestly, it's kind of like how I text my friends and they get really mad at me.
You do text like that. I hate it. So even though the bank got wise, the hacking team still walked away with 3 million euros. Hush Puppy celebrates by buying himself a new Bentley. He poses with it wearing head-to-toe Fendi. Unbelievable. And with this heist, Hush Puppy officially joins the scammer big leagues. And his North Korean friends have already zeroed in on their next target.
A few months later, in June 2019, Hush Puppy arrives at the Dubai airport, the exclusive part of the airport for people flying privately. The ultra-modern lounge has bright orange chairs and a matching orange pool table. It's completely empty. Hush Puppy whips out his phone and starts posting to stories. This life is too good to be real. I'm coming in private jets. Paris, stand up. A real one is coming through. Don't play it.
Hush Puppy's friendly with Virgil Abloh, who by now is artistic director of Louis Vuitton. And the fashion house is flying him to Paris for Fashion Week. They're putting him up at a luxury hotel down the street from the Arc de Triomphe and setting him up with lunch at the Louvre.
And of course, he's got amazing seats for the Louis Vuitton menswear fashion show. The show is being held on the street of the Ile de la Cité, right behind the Notre Dame. Hush Puppy sits right in front of the orchestra that's playing while models walk along cobblestone streets. Some of the models are actually rappers, musicians, professional skateboarders, and even an Arsenal football player.
Hush Puppy is now undeniably cool. He's at the center of not only fashion, but culture. When he's not front row at an international fashion event, he's partying in Dubai with international superstar Wizkid, or he's washing his legs with champagne at a pool party with Nigerian rapper Mr. P, or he's going to a Nigerian politician's birthday party, or he's
He's attending Davido's brother's wedding and making it rain on the groom with $100 bills. I don't know how else to say it, Sachi. Hush Puppy is a big freaking deal. I mean, clearly. Like, he is a popular guy. And he's clearly well-liked in some sense. Yeah.
I mean, I think if you're going to be that rich, you should be popular. Yes. I mean, he is doing one thing right. And back at the Louis Vuitton show, Hush Puppy is waiting for the show to start when he gets a message from Galeb. They're texting about their new scam. This time, they're targeting an English Premier League team.
I know you don't care about sports, but you have to realize this is a crazy big deal, Sachi. I mean, I don't care about sports, but I do understand that this is a big deal. It's a huge deal because this is the only sport that everyone in the world watches.
And Galeb tells Hush Puppy that they might net 100 million pounds. It's the same tried and true scam. Hackers send emails to the team claiming to be legit authorities. Then they get access to their bank funds and funnel that money to Hush Puppy's receiving accounts. Their scams are ambitious, but they're also getting sloppy.
After the Louis Vuitton show, Hushpuppi waits to hear if he's going to get Premier League riches. Then, Galeb texts him saying there's a problem. He can't send money from the UK to Hushpuppi's accounts in Mexico. He says they keep finding out. The football heist is another bust. So, Hushpuppi and Galeb decide to take a different approach with this next scam, which happens to be their most audacious one of all.
By this point, four months after his trip to Paris, the highlights of Hush Puppy's fabulous life all appear online. Being hand-fed by Salt Bae, hanging with famous footballers and rappers, and of course, going big each year on his birthday.
For his 36th birthday in October 2019, Hush Puppy spends the afternoon celebrating in the Burberry VIP lounge. He's surrounded by friends and Nigerian preacher and radio personality Daddy Freeze. Hi guys, I'm Daddy Freeze, godvina of the Free the Sheeple movement and leader of the Free Nation in Christ. Daddy Freeze is in his 40s and he's got a popular YouTube channel. So Freeze holds his iPhone up, recording everything.
So it's Hush Puppy's birthday. We're at the Burberry VIP lounge and we're celebrating at Ritma. So chilling with Daddy Freeze reminds Hush Puppy of home. So he invites him to come over a few days later and tour the Palazzo Versace. Hush Puppy welcomes him with a glass of champagne. All right, champagne in Versace glasses. Click, click. Cheers. To the good life.
Hush Puppy shows off his lavish penthouse, his sneaker collection, the rooftop pool. He's playing the generous host and Daddy Freeze is eating it up. But there's one door that stays shut. The door to the room packed with laptops and burner phones. Headquarters for Hush Puppy's cyber operations.
There's just something really funny about the words, the headquarters for Hush Puppy cyber operations. I know, it sounds like a Nickelodeon Junior show. Yeah, like this sounds like a teen spy show. Like, what jam is Hush Puppy going to get into next, Hagi? Well, the whole time they're touring the place, Hush Puppy keeps checking his phone. He's waiting for a text from Galeb because their most recent heist went down today.
For this one, they're swindling $1 million from a New York law firm. Hushpuppi wants confirmation from Galeb that the money was deposited in his account. So far, it's radio silence. So Hushpuppi sends a text. Sup, bro? Money came in? Ha!
He sits down for dinner with Daddy Freeze and a few others. Then Hush Puppy's phone buzzes with a new message. It's from Galeb. Hush Puppy excuses himself and goes into the room with all the laptops to read the message. Galeb says the money went through. They're a million dollars richer. But Hush Puppy wants a receipt.
He asks to see a screenshot of the account. And Galeb says his flight just landed in Atlanta. His Wi-Fi signal isn't strong enough to send a screenshot yet, but he will ASAP. Hush Puppy waits for the screenshot. And he waits and waits and waits.
Finally, he pockets his phone and goes back to dinner. He has guests and he doesn't want to be rude. What Hush Puppy doesn't know is that Galeb isn't just suffering from bad Wi-Fi. When he got off the plane, he walked right into the arms of the FBI. They've arrested him on charges of wire and bank fraud. Oh my God, is he going to flip? I feel like he's going to flip. Well, Hush Puppy takes Daddy Freeze down to the parking garage to show off a bright red Ferrari,
Freeze revs the engine, grinning like a little kid. Hush Puppy tries to enjoy the moment, but being ghosted by Galeb has him feeling kind of nervous. And he should be, because when the FBI took Galeb into custody, they confiscated his phone and laptop too. It's a treasure trove of data from one of the most notorious cyber crooks in the world. And it's going to lead the police right to Hush Puppy's doorstep.
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The day after Galeb ghosts him, Hushpuppi hears that his friend and fellow influencer, Momfa, was arrested in Nigeria, charged with fraud and money laundering. Hushpuppi's a little shaken up.
So a few days later, he posts an unusually compassionate caption. Sachi, could you please read part of it for us? I can. It says, Oof.
The other sign that Hush Puppy's getting worried? He logs onto Instagram and hits the edit profile button. He deletes his bio, which reads, the billionaire Gucci master, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, and changes it to something much more generic, real estate developer.
He might be looking over his shoulder, but it doesn't mean he's going to stop scamming. This lavish lifestyle requires a constant stream of new money. With his most reliable hookup for work, Galeb, missing in action, Hush Puppy's got to find a new crew, jobs that will keep the good times rolling and the police far, far away.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, FBI Special Agent Andrew John Innocenti is sitting down at his desk at the Bureau's field office. It's a towering building in L.A.'s Westwood neighborhood, not far from UCLA. That's where Agent Innocenti's team is based. He's been working at the FBI for the last four years, most of it spent trying to track down North Korean hackers.
And now, he's analyzing evidence from a recent arrest made in a totally separate investigation that started a few years back in Florida.
There was a group of bank fraudsters there who were preparing to impersonate a doctor so they could drain his bank account. But the person the fraudsters asked to impersonate the doctor was actually a police informant. So he obviously told the cops who was running the operation. And it turns out that big boss was a guy living in Mississauga, Ontario. His name? Galeb.
And police soon realized Gleb was a major fraudster. So Agent Innocenti's FBI unit was brought in and they connected the dots all the way to the North Koreans. Okay. So some small time crook in Florida brought them to the North Korean hackers. That is what you were telling me. It's
So random, but yes. So now in December 2019, Agent Innocenti is searching through Galeb's laptop and phone. He wants to figure out who else Galeb was working with. Like this guy in his phone saved as Hush. Agent Innocenti notices Galeb has a Snapchat contact saved as Billionaire Gucci Master.
That Snapchat account leads Agent Innocenti to Hush Puppy's Instagram page. And I can't even imagine what goes through his mind when he sees that one of the suspects in this massive international cybercrime ring is a dude with more than 500 public posts. And every post is full of expensive luxury goods, like the kind of material shit that money launderers love. I mean, that must feel like a real jackpot. Innocenti scrolls through Hush Puppy's Instagram, shaking his head.
He still has to prove that this guy is part of Galeb's criminal syndicate, and he's going to follow this lead wherever it takes him. And what Hushpuppi doesn't know yet is that the FBI is building their case against him by analyzing every like, every comment, and every hashtag.
As agent Innocenti is getting familiar with the billionaire Gucci master, Hushpuppi's in Abu Dhabi for the F1 Grand Prix race. The racing track is massive, built next to a marina where wealthy fans can park their gigantic yachts. While he's there, Hushpuppi celebrates reaching a big milestone, 2 million followers. He takes a moment to reflect and to figure out his next move.
An old friend, Kenyan entrepreneur Abdurahman Jama has reached out and he wants Hushpuppi to join him in an old school confidence scam. Like the web scams he pulled off in his early days as a Yahoo boy.
With Galeb MIA, Hushpuppi decides he can't be choosy, and he says yes. A good old classic scam. Aww. That sounds almost wholesome, you know, going back to your roots. Well, the scam is pretty bold. The victim is a business person who wants to build a school in Qatar, but the guy needs a big loan to do it. $15 million. They ask their money manager how to get that kind of money, and the money manager says, just
Just Google it. Okay. Great advice. Seems like a really bad money manager. Yeah. So the business person literally Googles how to borrow $15 million. And unluckily for him, he lands on a website for Jama's fake firm. Jama's hooked them, and now he needs Hushpuppi to come in and seal the deal. So Hushpuppi poses as Malik.
a banker working with Jama's firm. He messages the business person and says that if they want the loan, they need to pay something up front. And somehow, the plan works.
Their mark wires $100,000 to a Capital One account and another $230,000 to a Florida Wells Fargo account, which belongs to a luxury watch seller. A few days later, early in January 2020, a package arrives at the Palazzo Versace. It's a rose gold and titanium Richard Mille watch one hush puppy has wanted for ages. And now he has it, courtesy of the defrauded businessperson.
Hush Puppy wastes no time posing with the watch on Instagram. What do you think, Sachi? I mean, he's posing with the watch as if he has like a snake on his hand. Like he seems to almost be divorced from his limb. Yeah, Hush Puppy never looks that comfortable in his own skin. No, it seems like he's uncomfortable with his own wealth. But I mean, I guess it's a nice watch. Well, here's the thing. It's not just about the watch.
By depositing funds into this watch seller's account, the business person helped Hush Puppy and Jama wash the money so it can't be traced back to them. That is, unless someone in law enforcement is watching Hush Puppy's Instagram. Ooh, okay. The mark doesn't seem to suspect anything's wrong. So Jama and Hush Puppy decide to keep milking them for more and more and more.
But all's not well in paradise. One of Jama and Hush Puppy's business associates, Vincent Kelly Chibuzo, is fed up. He made the fake website and fake documents that convince the mark this is all legit. But he doesn't think he's being paid enough. He's been complaining to Jama and Hush Puppy for weeks, but they haven't done anything. He even threatened to go to the authorities, but Hush Puppy called his bluff.
Finally, he's had enough. He decides to take matters into his own hands. Vincent picks up the phone and dials the Marks number. His heart is pounding. And when they pick up, Vincent takes a deep breath and tells them that Hushpuppi and Jama are the fraudsters. Okay, well, I mean...
They are, right? Well, that's not all. He tells Lamarck that if he ever wants to build that Qatari school, that he should wire the money directly to him, that he's the one that can make it happen. But the business person isn't buying it. They turn around and tell Jama and Hushpuppi that Vincent is pulling a double cross. And Hushpuppi loses his entire mind. Hushpuppi will stop at nothing to get revenge, even if it means losing everything.
This is episode one of our two-part series, The Billionaire Gucci Master. I'm Sarah Hagee. And I'm Sachi Cole. We use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were Evan Ratliff's feature for Bloomberg and Jeff White's book, The Lazarus Heist. Paola Mejia wrote this episode. Additional writing by Sachi Cole and Sarah Hagee. Jen Swan is our senior producer.
Our producer is John Reed. Our associate producers are Charlotte Miller and Tate Busby. Sarah Enney is our story editor. Our senior story editor is Rachel B. Doyle. Additional research by Chisom Peter Jobe. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freesound Sync. Adrian Tapia provided audio assistance. Our sound design is by Jay Rothman.
Our executive producers are Janine Cornelow, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. If you like Scamfluencers, you can listen to every episode early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery 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 wondery.com slash survey.
