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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. From Wondery, I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And this is a special episode of Scamfluencers. And just a programming note, we're taking a two-week break after this to dive into more scams. We'll be back with a brand new season starting August 29th on Wondery Plus and September 5th on The Public Feed.
As you all probably know by now, we've come to learn a thing or two about con artists, fraudsters and grifters. And the people who fall for them. We've seen how deception, susceptibility and, of course, a dash of influence can create the perfect scam storm. But no one understands this better than Evan Ratliff, the host of Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios' latest production, Persona.
Over the past few years, Evans uncovered the story of a con artist who pulled off an extraordinary scam that spans 40 countries, hundreds of targets, and dozens of suspects. It's the elaborate and winding story of global menace Gilbert Chigley. Chigley duped some of the world's most powerful people into handing over their fortunes, evaded the law for years, and even became a Robin Hood-like hero to many in the process. The best scams are irresistible.
I don't mean irresistible to hear about. I mean to the person being conned. A good scam isn't a single event in time, like a robbery. No, a truly great con is a story, one that taps into the listener's greed or loneliness or vanity. To run this kind of scam, you have to invent a whole imaginary world and then put your mark inside it. Make them a part of it, so they're playing a role, inhabiting a new persona, just like you are.
It was a fairy tale.
But it was real. I'm Evan Ratliff, and this is the story of Gilbert Schickle, one of the greatest con artists of all time. A man who took tens of millions from some of the richest people on the planet. He said, I am Gilbert, and he opened a bag, and there was two million euros. And became a fugitive, a legend, even a hero. You know what is the nickname of Gilbert Schickle? The professor. A lot of people try to do what he did. But Gilbert Schickle is a professor. He's the professor.
Today, we're joined by Evan, and we're excited to dig deeper into the world of scams and unpack the details of one of the most bizarre operations of all time. Hi, Evan. Thanks for joining us. Very lovely to be here.
So this story really begins with you coming across a French article 17 years ago and becoming obsessed with it, which I'm really impressed by your focus on something for that long. But you weren't even fluent in French. So how did you find the article? And then what about it was so compelling?
I should say I didn't all 17 years I didn't spend reporting this. It was it was very on and off for me. I don't actually know how I found the article, to be honest. I have the article. It's from Liberation. It's from October of 2005. And I printed it out, which is a real relic of like art.
early internet era. I printed it out and I still have the copy of the printout and I am not fluent in French, but I did take six years of French in high school. So I could kind of, I probably translated it word by word, I think using a dictionary. I'm not sure there was no Google translate didn't even exist then. So however I came across it, maybe there was an English reference first. Um,
I translated it, and then there was this particular element of the story, which is a woman who is scammed into handing over 300 plus thousand euros in cash in a bathroom in a cafe in Paris. She arrived at the restaurant, entered, and walked to the bathroom down a small hallway. She went into the stall, locked the door, and waited.
Moments later, there was a knock on the stall door. Then a woman whispered the password. Brevet. Madame G. cracked open the door and handed over the bag without getting a glimpse of who took it. And I feel like that detail...
stuck with me and I could never let it go. The idea that someone could scam someone into just putting that much money in a bag and giving it to someone else in a bathroom of a cafe, I just couldn't get over it. And I would pull the article out and think about it and maybe look into it a little bit over the years before I ended up reporting it.
Wow. Yeah. I mean, that makes total sense because I feel like all these kinds of scams, you're like, how did that person get to that point of, you know, handing over cash in a bathroom? And I guess I'm wondering, just going on the note of this primary source being in French and all your sources being French, I mean, did you ever feel a disadvantage to not really be able to get into these primary sources that are written in other languages? And how different...
Was it for you to report this over, you know, these countless other English language stories you've done? Well, it certainly felt like a disadvantage. I mean, that's one reason I didn't do it for many years was that I was intimidated by the fact that a lot of it was going to be in French. I was a little bit embarrassed that I don't know French better despite having taken six years and then dropping it for many, many years. So I was resistant to start reporting it for that reason.
as it turned out, I can get the gist of a lot of French reading okay. But that said, it was still extremely intimidating. In fact, in this story, there were primary sources in Turkish, in Ukrainian, in Polish, in Hebrew, all of which were much worse for me than the French. So it
It was very, very difficult, but somehow the fact that it was also multiple languages was sort of helpful. It made it a requirement that we were going to have to use translators anyway. So I've worked with translators a lot over the years in international stories, both live translation and document translation. And I have to say...
Google Translate is pretty incredible. Like, it's not, you would never use it for your final, final translation, but you can feed documents into it and get the gist, a very, very strong gist of what is being said. And so we could glean a lot of the meaning from documents really quickly. And then we had this unbelievable team of producers and translators who would then go through and make sure if we were using something, it would be correct. Evan, I don't think you have to feel too bad about not being fluent in French after Google Translate.
What was it? Six years. I did 13 and I can't say anything. Never mind translate an article, but OK. What was the core question in your mind when you were looking into the scam? Like, I feel like when Sarah and I look at these stories, there's always something that we're like we have to know. So I'm wondering what's the thing that you just had to know?
I think for this one, the question I started out with was not actually the question I ended up on, but the one I started out with was just a very straightforward kind of, how did he do this? Like, how did this person get on the phone and convince people that he was first the president or CEO of a bank or company and second, convince them, the same person, that he was a secret agent and then extract this money from them. And then...
There was a sort of second part of it, which is that how did he come up with the idea and how was it able to spread all over the world? Because by the time I was years into it, it was everywhere. I mean, people were copying it and they were doing it in other countries and other languages. And so it was sort of this dual question of like, how did he do it?
How did it spread around the world? And then he did it all again, allegedly. So it was kind of like, how is this guy even still out there to be doing this? There were a lot of kind of how questions that were driving the reporting initially. What questions kind of remain about Sheikli himself? Like, you know, he is such a mysterious figure. There's so much there about him. Did you figure everything you wanted to out?
I definitely did not figure everything out that I wanted to know about Schickley, even about the scams, even about how they were investigated, despite the fact that we had access to an unbelievable collection of police documentation on it. I think the biggest question that...
emerged in the reporting that I didn't have at the beginning was, was he actually the person who was the mastermind behind what's called the Le Drian scam, the scam in which they impersonated the French defense minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian. And that was a sort of a given in the investigation and the trial and the convictions. And the deeper we got into it, the more that question became a bigger and bigger mystery, even all the way up till the end. And
I'm still left with it. We'll see how people feel about the ending. You know, I have my own ideas about what probably happened, but it's in the end, it turned out to be way more difficult to substantiate who was really behind it than everyone had made out.
by the time we got into it. What did you know about Sheik Lee and these sorts of scams when you started sort of the reporting journey? I'm curious what you wanted to get out of telling this story. I mean, when I first learned about it, it was new. Like, he had basically invented this thing. So that was part of what was so attractive about it was that no one had really done this before in this way. This method, this sort of fake CEO, fake president method of scamming people on the other side of the world. And...
Then by the time I started reporting it, I was in a little bit of a different place because it was more than 10 years later. I had actually done a lot of scam stories. And what really interested me is like, where's the...
Where's the complexity here? Like most of these stories, they all kind of sound the same. If you hear the basics of them, all scams sort of sound the same. And you end up in the same places and describing them in the same ways. But if you can get deep enough in them, they all have these complexities, whether it's the human complexities of the people who were victimized or something about the way the scam works. And so...
What I really wanted to do was kind of like try to get inside that complexity and the kind of messier side of it, which I didn't feel like I could do all the way up until we started reporting in 2019 when there was there was just another turn in his story that had not existed prior to that. How did the story end up differently than what you imagined at the outset?
I mean, the first was just this mystery that sort of developed for me. So the story that the prosecution told in 2020 about Gilbert Schickley was in many ways the same story that he told about himself for years, which was he was a genius. He invented the president scam. He is this larger than life character who's capable of talking anyone out of anything. And therefore,
if someone impersonated the defense minister of France and stole tens of millions of dollars, it must be him. And I kind of thought that too. And the narrative that we found, regardless of whether he, you think he's guilty at some level or not guilty, it just didn't remotely match that. Like that's, that's not at all what the police investigation actually found. So that was one thing. And then a second one was just, if you look at kind of big,
big time scams like this or any sort of big organized crime around the world, global organized crime, there's this money laundering element where they use shell companies to move money really quickly around the world. That's the way scammers and organized crime move their money. And one of the things that we discovered along the way was just that some of the victims of the scam who were these incredibly wealthy, prestigious people were also using shell companies to move and hide their money around the world. And they're
There was this sort of strange parallel between the victims, which is not to say that the victims deserve to be scammed in some way, but it's just became very interesting that they were sort of like living in these parallel worlds outside of, you know, the financial system that like you or I might use on a daily basis.
I'm so curious also because, you know, this is a story where you had to travel around the world for it. What was the biggest challenge when uncovering like the full story of these scams? The biggest challenge is just getting people to talk. You just need a lot of time to work on people, to get people to talk, to find the different angles. And it's a little bit counterintuitive, but I think
I think one way generally that you don't get to the bottom of scam story is by talking to the scammer. Like it's great if the scammer will talk to you, but, you know, con artists are generally like they're not reflective by nature. I mean, they're also liars. Exactly. Fundamentally. And they're not really sitting there ready to tell you, well, you know what? I'm done with it. And here's why I did it. You
you know, generally they're just looking for the next angle. And that next angle is probably you and how they're going to tell the story through you. So my method is usually to try to gather as much massive amount of information around them and then triangulate it. So from the cops, from the victims, from whoever, and you're just kind of vacuuming up everything you can learn about the scam and then trying to like play that information off each other and try to figure out what, what really happens. Yeah. But,
But then in these types of stories, the victims are embarrassed to have given away their money. So they don't want to talk. And we had a list of like 150 targets of the scam. And almost all of them either ignored us, didn't want to talk to us, hung up on us, yelled at us for even contacting them. And in that way, we were kind of like Gilbert Schickley. We're just like calling these people over and over, just like, please, will one of them pick up and talk to us?
And then but usually you could get the investigators, usually the cops who have cracked some scam really want to talk about it. And that was the unique challenge of this one was that a lot of the most of the investigators, particularly in France, did not want to talk about it. And this itself was somewhat of a mystery. I would rail against it for months and months. Like, why don't they want to just brag about what they did?
And then when we got the police files and we started reading the police files, I don't know why they didn't want to talk. I can only speculate. But one possible reason is that most of the things that they got, they just totally lucked into. Like there wasn't this sort of like gumshoe police work that led to the convictions that happened in the case. And I wouldn't want to talk about it either if I were them. I feel like we've realized that with some of our episodes where we're like, I guess they did a reverse Google image search. Well,
Well, speaking of information, one of the big pieces of unraveling the story had to do with this treasure trove of documents about the scam and the investigation called the Tiger Dossier. So I'm curious how you approach digging into this big archive. Just as a reporter, it seems daunting. It was daunting. It took us months and months to even make our way through the thing. I mean, it was this at first when we got it, we just couldn't believe our luck. And
And then it sort of settled in, how are we possibly going to look at these like 25,000 pages? We created a system that involved a bunch of spreadsheets about each of the archives that keep track of where things are. So that was sort of the
actual nuts and bolts daily reporting of it was like, you take 50 and I'll take 50. And we'll at the end of the week, we'll check out our spreadsheet and then we'll take 50 more. Oh, my God. And I'm guessing so much of that is like pretty boring information. So boring, not just boring, but like completely irrelevant, because what they would do is they'd find like a bank account and it had a payment from someone and they'd say, oh, what about this guy? And then they'd spend
20 documents looking into that guy who actually turned out had nothing to do with it. But you have to go through each one and he's got his phone records and his bank accounts and his here's his girlfriend, here's where he lives. And then all of it was absolutely for nothing. Oh, wow. You don't really think of the randoms who are like involved in these dossiers without even knowing it. Yeah.
So given the reveal in the final episode, are we ever going to expect a deep dive into Sammy Tuel and his brother? I mean, were they the actual ones involved in the ultimate French deception, in your opinion? Well, I have to speak about this very carefully. As far as the French court system is concerned, he's innocent. I think one reason why I wanted to investigate him and investigate his role in it was that there was actually evidence
it appears a lot more evidence against him than there was against Gilbert Schickley, which isn't to say that Sammy Tweal was the mastermind behind it or even involved. The French police said that his bank accounts showed evidence of money laundering and other things, but again, he wasn't charged. So the point was more to illuminate the way they treated Schickley because of his reputation, because he was viewed as this world-famous scammer who they were finally going to catch. And so they had this other guy, and they had a bunch of, again,
against him and they didn't end up charging him. So that part was interesting to me. All right. Well, because my next question was going to be like, are you tired of the story yet? And I guess what about it is still fascinating to you after all these years? I'm not tired of the story. Actually, this story has so much to it. I think I probably will keep looking into the story. I mean, as soon as I get on something new, I'll probably be newly obsessed with that and not paying as much attention. But the
The thing is, when you have as much as many documents as we do, like we know that we miss things in them. Clearly, we miss things in the French police, miss things in them that we found. And so there's this this this impulse to kind of like keep going back to it and trying to surface one more connection. And I'm sort of susceptible to that.
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Evan, Saren and I talk about this all the time. We feel like we are in the golden age of scammers. They're fascinating and then they become celebrities. So I love scams because they make me feel better about myself. But I'm curious why you love scams and why does it feel like everybody's so obsessed with them right now in particular? I mean, right now...
There are so many scams and variety of scams. And I think a lot of them are just our age old scams that are being reinvented in the modern world in different ways. But I think there are truly unique things about our era, one of which is that you can just scan people on the other side of the world. So the idea that you can kind of reach through your computer and scam a company or an individual person who scams
is from a different culture, who even speaks a different language, is remarkable. And I think there are all kinds of interesting systematic and inequality aspects to that, which isn't necessarily why people love scammers. I think why people love scammers is that
When you hear a scam story, you can kind of identify with the con artist and you can identify with the victim. Like with a con artist, you can sort of say, oh, could I be that manipulative? Like you can be wowed by how good they are at it and say like, wow, what would it take to kind of just treat people that way? And how can you operate in society if you're that manipulative? And the other side is there's this sort of like...
schadenfreude impulse where you're sort of like, wow, how could you be that gullible to fall for that thing? And I think, you know, we're all a little susceptible to that. For my part, I think I really like scams that at least in the attempt to tell them they like illuminate some larger systematic issue. And so I
I'm interested in scams where there's some connection to some sort of larger question about the economy, that this scam has sort of found its way into a niche outside the law that sort of shows, oh, this is what's happening on the other side of the law. That even is reflective of what's happening in our own systems. You know, someone who's basically a startup founder, but on the other side of the law. What do you think about some of these scam artists who reach a kind of folk hero status? Yeah.
I mean, Shickley had that for sure, especially in Israel, among a certain group of people who, you know, his community, I think some people in his community really disliked him because he was giving them a bad reputation. And other people in his community thought that he was the kind of Robin Hood figure who, you know, gave away his money and he was taking it from banks. So, you know, they wouldn't, they're really going to miss it. And I think it's like,
It's hard not to get caught up in that, especially if they're not targeting individual people. I think if someone's doing romance scams or something, it's really hard to view them that way. You know, they're just destroying people. So that's different. But in this case, it's businesses, it's companies, or it's incredibly wealthy, the wealthiest people in the world who are getting scammed. And the interesting thing in this particular case is that
That was like Shikley's downfall almost. His downfall was that he became a folk hero and that he got so much attention and he courted so much attention that in the end, when a big scam happened, they were kind of like, oh, it must be you. Like, you said it was you. You said you were the best. And everyone said that. And so there's something in there about like the way we're all implicated in like elevating someone in this way and including himself, you know. Yeah.
You know, it's funny because like the one thing I feel like that's so hard for people to understand is how persuasive these scammers are and how easy it is to be manipulated by them and how it gets so personal and scary.
I feel like throughout this investigation, do you think you found yourself kind of relating to some of these victims? Yeah. Assuming that people have made it to the end of the show, I think in terms of how the victims are made to feel, I think it's something that can get lost is how utterly devastating it can be to be scammed, even when it's not your money.
You know, if you're the person, especially this type of scam, was really like convincing someone that they've sort of like entered this fairy tale and they're like involved in something urgent and important. And then just not just stealing the money from them, but also pulling the rug out from under them and suddenly revealing to them that they've been duped. It's totally devastating psychologically. People lose their jobs because they've lost a company's money or a bank's money. And so...
We wanted to kind of like pull people into the scam and feel that folk hero aspect of it. And then kind of like give them the victim side of it and kind of pull them back and forth a little bit in terms of feeling that. Yeah. I mean...
You mentioned the internet being like a newer factor in these scams that are so far reaching. I guess I'm wondering, what do you think about the intersection of like scammers and influence? Because like a lot of the ones we've covered are people who their scams are totally undone because they're just addicted to this attention and adoration and this power. So I guess what do you think about this as kind of their fatal flaw for a certain type of scammer?
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing that I have learned in doing these scam stories over the years, the bigger ones, is how little they are about money. Like, they're not actually about money at some point. Maybe they are at the beginning. But this sort of the typical thing you would say with a criminal in a crime story is like,
Oh, a drug dealer. Well, you made $10 million. Like, why didn't you just retire? You know, just why don't you just quit and live off your money or you live made $100 million or whatever. And that that you it seems like it applies to these scammers, too. Why don't they just quit? They did it, you know, Schickley did it. But then it doesn't apply because there are these like compulsions at work, which sometimes are the same compulsions that lead people to want to get attention and
You know, go out on social media or go into the media and brag about their scams or like be very visible. But they aren't really driven by money in the end. Like money is a part of it, but that's not really the reason why they're doing it, which is why they never quit. They don't quit because they're after something else, which probably can never be satisfied.
Are there any common misconceptions about the victims of scams or even about scammers themselves? I feel like we hear some of them in the show, like people send us DMs and they have lots of opinions about people who got got. But what do you think? Yeah, everyone has always has opinions. And I mean, for me, the big one of the big ones is that the people who get scammed are
are gullible. You know, that's I mean, it's very easy to see them as gullible, that they just fell for a trick, you know, a trick like a street scam where someone comes up to you and it's like, my car ran out of gas. You know, I need 50 bucks and there's a gas station around the corner. And you fall for that. You're like, I'm so dumb. Like, I didn't interrogate that. But like, the reality is our impulse is to trust people. And in these big, elaborate cons, we
These are not people who just fall for any old thing. They are actually like oftentimes educated professionals or people that are successful in their careers, or they might be unbelievably wealthy and successful. But what happens is like the talent of the scammer is to sort of create these set of conditions to cause that type of person to ignore what they're seeing right in front of them, like what their initial feelings are about what they're receiving. They cast them aside. And that's,
And that's like that is the genius of a good scam. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I've definitely fallen for the man like my car broke down, got 40 bucks. Give me your number. I'll pay you back.
Because I'm also like, if they're asking for 40 bucks, they probably need it. Yeah, me too. But also you might say like, if they're willing, sometimes I'm like, if they're willing to like put on this show and talk this up in this way, even if it's not true, I don't know, they kind of earned it like a performer. You know, they did a great job. Yeah, it's happened to me too many times.
Sarah and I always have this problem where when we talk about different scam artist stories, one of us will get Stockholm syndrome and start to have like a disproportionate amount of empathy for them. So I'm curious, like as you report on this, how does your empathy change? Has your sympathy changed for the scammer?
Do you develop a weird kind of fondness? I mean, maybe I'm just telling tales out of school and me and Sarah are very sick and we need to go to the hospital. But, you know, here we are. I personally think it's okay. I mean...
Criminals are human beings by their nature, unless you're getting scammed by some automated system. There's a human being there and it's okay to have empathy for human beings when you come to understand more about them. I mean, there's a guy in Persona who we call Lucian, this Romanian guy who got caught up in committing a scam a little bit like against his knowledge and against his will at the beginning, but then kind of stayed with it.
He's an incredibly fascinating person to me and interesting and amazing at telling his own story, which is not to say that he is blameless. And he wouldn't say he was blameless. But I think he also ended up in a horrible Bulgarian prison. And I feel like
It's okay to have empathy for that. And it's even okay to say, wow, that scam is unbelievably clever. Like it's just very, very smart. And the person behind it is incredibly creative. I don't, I think you can do that without saying the people are blameless or scamming is okay. Or I don't care about the victims. Like, I think that you can hold both those ideas in your head. Yeah. That's good to hear. So we're not crazy. I'm like,
I'm like, okay, I feel a little better. Actually, one of our upcoming seasons of Scamfluencers is someone who you know very well, Hushpuppi. Hushpuppi. And you've written two insanely viral deep dives about the Nigerian fraudster turned global influencer for Bloomberg. And...
The story, I guess, it started like a bidding war in Hollywood. So what I'm wondering is, how did you first hear about him? And what made him such a compelling character to you? So I heard about Hushpuppi the way everyone else did. Hushpuppi is a classic, like, one-day international story.
So he got arrested in Dubai. It was this big raid in Dubai. And he got sent back to the US and it was sort of like, it was on CNN and it was all over the news because he's an Instagram influencer. 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.
He has millions of followers, borderline real high profile celebrity in Nigeria and interacting with, you know, all kinds of major, major pop stars, sports stars. He was huge. And so when he got arrested, it was a big story.
I happened to latch on to that story because I was interested in this type of fraud called business email compromise, which is actually in a way it's derivative of Gilbert Schickley scam. It's like it's a it's a more advanced version of the president scam, which Gilbert Schickley invented. So I was kind of interested in that. But.
But business email compromise, you can tell from even the name, is like, it's boring. Like, by its very nature, it's boring. It's not talked about a lot, even though it's huge. It's the biggest scam in the world, by far, cyber scam. And so Hush Puppy...
was alleged to have paid in business email compromise scams. That was the allegation that he had secretly actually been making his money, not as an influencer, but in BEC scams, and then lavishing that money all over the world and living in a penthouse in Dubai and buying the nicest designer clothes and Rolls Royces and flying on private jets, all paid for by these scams. But he also had this incredible reputation
like online persona that people were obsessed with and loved. Penthouse, rooftop, Palazzo Versace. And that combination, I mean, there are other scams like that, but I've never seen anything like that. Like someone who is that out in the world, pushing themselves as an actual influencer, but in fact is running a dark scam behind the scenes, many, many scams behind the scenes.
Yeah, there is something very beautiful about the Hush Puppy story where you're just like, why are you posting that? And he was also very good at Instagram. Yeah. Like he was a legitimate influencer, which is the craziest part. That's what I love about him. He was good at it. And also, if you look at him closely, it really shows you the extent to which like being an influencer, people who are not
you know, don't care about influencers would sort of say like, oh, yeah, they're just famous for being famous or they just take pictures of themselves. Like it was work. He was working at influencing and he was talented at it and he got better and better. And like he was rewarded for it. It just happens to me that he also was running a massive money laundering operation that was unrelated to him being on Instagram.
See, Stockholm syndrome. I'm like, he's amazing. That's a disaster. Evan, I wanted to talk to you about your scam performance that you did in 2009 for a Wired article. So you went on the run, as one does, and then you offered a cash reward of five grand for whoever found you. Why? And also, how did this come about?
This idea came about because I wanted to write a story about people who fake their own death and very interested in people who fake their own death. I still am. And the problem with that interest is that
uh, if they're successful at faking their own death, you can never find them because they succeeded and they're off in the world being someone else. If they failed, the generally the story is like pretty short. Like they get caught really quickly. Sometimes they last 20 years or whatever, but it ultimately was like, I couldn't get those people to really talk about how it happened. So the idea was that, well, what if I did it? And, and,
It was started as a kind of joke. What if I faked my own death? Obviously, I would rather not do that to my friends and family. But what if we did like a pared down version of that where I kind of went underground for a month and tried to see if people could find me? And then we added the $5,000 element because we wanted to sort of see what ordinary people could do to find you. So incentivize people to look for me. I should say this was...
what now 13 years ago, it was a completely different era of the internet and social media. Like Twitter was still very new and there was a kind of like kindness maybe that was still pervaded online life, not total kindness, but like
I would not do this now. The amount of insanity that you would engender by doing this now would be probably be terrifying. But someone did find me at the time. Were there any tips that you sort of figured out on how to stay hidden that you didn't know before? Yeah, I mean, the biggest one I was trying to sort of restart as a under a new identity and get a job and reestablish myself in a new place. And
The biggest thing is you just have to know how you're going to deal with money. I mean, I carried $3,000 with me for like a month, basically. Well, I was dwindling as I went in cash. And like, that's in and of itself, like scary. But also, you can't transfer things and bank accounts or whatever, like you'll get caught instantly if you do that. And then the other thing is, you just have to abandon everything like you have to
cut the cord otherwise you're just leaving nowadays the surveillance abilities are so extensive like you're going to leave something that if someone who's talented enough in finding people can see they will find you how did this inform your understanding of people trying to you know avoid being investigated or the police has it changed how you report out your stories
It has in that what feels like a disadvantage to criminals and to some extent to all of us because we are now subjected to a surveillance society is like an advantage to a reporter in some ways. Not saying like spying on people, but like to give you a kind of trivial example, like people go on LinkedIn. Like I have found so many people on LinkedIn and it astounded me at first. I found a contract killer on LinkedIn. Yeah.
Yeah.
Which now it astounds me when I can't find someone, which we couldn't sometimes for Persona. We just couldn't find someone or they wouldn't respond. But yeah, that's the main thing. It's like people are leaving these digital trails everywhere. And if you are good at looking for them, like you can find an incredible amount without ever picking up the phone. I...
I'm so curious about this hitman. I'm like, was he posting like inspirational LinkedIn posts? Are you looking to hire one, Sarah? Are you mad at me? No, I just think it's LinkedIn is such a weird place. It's the worst place in the world. It's the worst place. And to imagine like a non-inspirational person using it earnestly is insane to me. Okay, Evan, last question before we let you go. What is a big scam that you haven't investigated yet, but you want to dive into next?
Well, there are a couple I can't talk about because I want them to be mine, all mine. I don't want to give them away. What's a non-embargo? I will say in general that this will be obvious to anyone who pays attention to it, that cryptocurrency is an extremely scam rich environment. It is one of the... What? Chuck! You're telling me crypto is a scam? No, I'm joking.
Whether or not even if you do or don't think crypto itself is a scam, it is produced the most scams in the shortest period of time than like the invention of paper money or something like it. Yeah, it's just like you could throw a rock and hit a scam. And so I may throw a rock and try to hit a scam that hopefully it's like touches on some of the things that we've talked about here.
Oh, I'm so excited. I don't understand anything about crypto. I'll stick with my real money, but I do want to know more. Evan, thank you so much for joining us. It was my pleasure. Thank you very much for having me on.
This was a special episode of Scamfluencers. I'm Sachi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. Just a reminder, we're taking a two-week break from Scamfluencers. We'll be back with new episodes starting August 29th on Wondery Plus and September 5th on the public feed. In the meantime, if you need to get your scam fix and you haven't listened to Persona yet, you can now binge all eight episodes on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode is a production of Wondery, Pineapple Street Studios, and Amazon Music. It was produced by Brian Taylor White. Senior producer for Pineapple Street is Henry Malofsky. Producer is Sophie Bridges. Associate producer is Chris Knapp. Production assistants by Natalie Peart and Emmanuel Hapsis. Project management by Courtney Harrell. Persona's editor is Joel Lovell. Mixing by Hannes Brown. Head of sound and engineering is Raj Makija.
Executive producers at Pineapple Street are Jenna Weiss-Berman and Max Linsky. Producers for Amazon Music and Wondery are Eliza Mills and Stephanie Wachny. Our managing producer is Candice Manriquez-Wren. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. And our executive producers for Amazon Music and Wondery are Morgan Jones, Marshall Louis, and Aaron O'Flaherty.
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.
