Speaker 1: Okay, I want you to try a little experiment with me.
It might feel a little a little uncomfortable, but just
stay with it for a second.
Speaker 2: M Okay.
Speaker 1: Think about just the last twenty four hours of your life.
You probably I don't know, ordered a coffee, maybe you
swiped a badge to get into your office, transferred some
money on an app.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, daily stuff, daily stuff.
Speaker 1: You probably walked under some construction scaffolding or you know,
drove through a green light. Every single one of those
moments you were suspended in this kind of this invisible
hammock of trust.
Speaker 2: The trust suspension. That's a good way to put it right.
Speaker 1: You were resting your safety, your money, your actual life
on the assumption that strangers are who they say they are,
that the brista didn't just skim your card details.
Speaker 2: That the engineer actually checked the bolts on that scaffold,
that the driver coming the other way isn't you know,
looking at their phone exactly.
Speaker 1: And I mean civilization is basically that, isn't it. It's
this huge collaborative hallucination where we all just for you
to follow the rules even when no one is watching.
Speaker 2: It has to be. It's the only way it works,
it's efficient, It lets us function.
Speaker 1: What happens when someone looks at that hammock at that
trust and pulls out a pair of scissors. What happens
when that trust isn't just broken, but it's weaponized. That
is what we are digging into today.
Speaker 2: I am so ready for this.
Speaker 1: Welcome to thrilling threads. I am honestly, I am vibrating
with this mix of excitement and just genuine horror for
this one.
Speaker 2: Oh me too. It's a deep, dark rabbit hole.
Speaker 1: It is. And we aren't just talking about, you know,
stolen wallets or phishing emails today. This is bigger. We
are pulling on the loose threads of ten specific cases
sourced from some truly disturbing reporting on fraud, where the
perpetrators they didn't just steal cash, they stole.
Speaker 2: Reality, stole reality. That is the perfect way to frame it,
because when we look at the psychology of the con
and especially the let's call it the creepy con, we
aren't looking at a simple trend. It's not just about money.
It's an invasion. The victims in these cases they didn't
just lose their savings, they lost their ability to trust,
their own senses, they lost their own narrative of their life.
Speaker 1: And the research stack we have in front of us
today it is heavy. I mean, we've got everything from
the Victorian era's most notorious serial killer all the way
up to the Silicon Valley Darlings who burned through billions
of dollars. It's a huge range, it is, so to
keep our own heads from spinning, we've organized this into
four categories. Basically, we're looking at them based on the
human trigger that the con artists exploited, the hook. The hook,
so we've got hope, ambition, identity, and finally trust.
Speaker 2: Which is I think a really smart way to do it,
because if you want to understand the con you have
to look at the hook. You have to ask what
was the victim hungry for? Was it health? Was it love?
Was its status? The con artist is just a mirror.
They reflect your deepest desire back at you. But there's
a price tag.
Speaker 1: Attached, very very steep price tag. So let's start with
I think the most visceral one, the most basic desire
of all, the desire for life itself. Section one, the
wellness trap. This is all about exploiting hope. I mean
we have to start with Bell Gibson.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, the whole pantry phenomenon exactly.
Speaker 1: Now, context is so key here. I want you to
think back to what twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, Instagram was
just exploding, right, It.
Speaker 2: Was becoming the dominant platform.
Speaker 1: And the clean eating movement was at its absolute peak.
I mean you couldn't scroll for five seconds without seeing,
you know, avocado toast or a green smoothie.
Speaker 2: Oh, it was everywhere. It was this promise of purity
and control through food.
Speaker 1: Right. So into this landscape walks Bell Gibson. She's young,
she's gorgeous, Australian, and she has a story that just
stops you in your tracks. She claims she has terminal brain.
Speaker 2: Cancer, the worst kind, inoperable.
Speaker 1: Inoperable, she has four months to live. But and this
is the key, she is rejecting conventional medicine.
Speaker 2: And that that right now, there is the hook, the
ultimate seduction for anyone who is terrified of death or
terrified of the brutality of chemotherapy, which, let's be honest,
is a brutal process.
Speaker 1: It's awful.
Speaker 2: And what she offered was this idea that you can
have control. Modern apology is terrifying. It's complex, it's painful,
and it offers absolutely no guarantees. Gibson came along and
offered a guarantee, the simple one. Eat this, drink this
lemon water, live longer. It's control in a situation where
people feel completely helpless.
Speaker 1: And she built an empire on it, I mean a
legitimate empire. The whole Pantry app. It was on every iPhone.
It was beautiful, it was sleek apple. The company even
flew her out to Cupertino to feature it.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm. It was a best seller.
Speaker 1: She had a best selling cookbook with Penguin, a major publisher.
She was the it girl of wellness. But here's the
part that gets me, the part that really turns the stomach.
It wasn't just about the diet. Yeah, she was monetizing
her survival. She pledged publicly that the proceeds from her
app and her book would go to charities.
Speaker 2: And not just any charities.
Speaker 1: No, she specifically named the family of a young boy,
Joshua Schwartz, who had actual terminal brain cancer.
Speaker 2: And that right there is where the pathology reveals itself.
I mean, it is one thing to lie about your
own health for Instagram likes that's you know, sad and strained.
Speaker 1: Pathetic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it is another thing entirely to look into the
eyes of a family with a dying child, promise them
financial support from your imaginary cancer journey, and then just
ghost them. They never saw a scent.
Speaker 1: Never.
Speaker 2: That moves it from pathetic into predatory.
Speaker 1: And so when the whole house of cards inevitably fell
in twenty fifteen because journalists, real journalists, yeah, started asking, Hey,
where's that donation money you promised? Her defense was just staggering, unbelievable.
She admitted it. She didn't have cancer, she never had cancer.
But instead of just saying I am a fraud, I'm sorry,
she spun this whole new narrative.
Speaker 2: Oh, the victim narrative.
Speaker 1: The victim narrative that she was the victim of a
rough childhood, or that she'd been misled by doctors who
gave her a misdiagnosis.
Speaker 2: It's a classic Darvo maneuver. We see this with narcissists
all the time, deny attack and reverse victim and offender.
By claiming she was delusional or that she'd been victimized
by her past. She was trying to get sympathy from
the very same people she just scammed. It's shameless, but psychologically,
I think Gibson represents a very modern kind of danger.
She is the influencer who completely bypasses peer review. She
had no medical degree, no data, and no evidence, just
a good ring light and a really compelling Instagram caption, and.
Speaker 1: Because she looked healthy, because she was healthy, people took
that as.
Speaker 2: Proof her method work exactly. The survival was the proof,
but there was nothing to survive. It's a classic case
of survivorship bias, except the survivor as a ghost.
Speaker 1: It's a phantom, a total phantom. But okay, if Bill
Gibson was this global digital phenomenon, our next case is
in some ways even more terrifying because it's so local.
Amanda Riley. This one hits different because it's not some
distant appy download.
Speaker 2: This is your neighbor right known online as Scamanda.
Speaker 1: Precisely Amanda Riley, a mom from Santase and from twenty
twelve to twenty nineteen. Think about that. Seven years. That
duration is just it's incredible.
Speaker 2: Seven years of active deception, active daily deception.
Speaker 1: She claimed to have Hodgkins lymphoma, but she didn't just
mention it at a PTA meeting. She performed it. She
put on a seven year long one woman show.
Speaker 2: It was a full time job.
Speaker 1: It was. She shaved her head, She staged photos in
hospitals or what looked like hospitals. She blogged in painstaking
detail about the poison of chemotherapy entering your veins.
Speaker 2: This is a really specific subset of what used to
be called fictitious disorder. Some people call it Munchausen by Internet,
but in Riley's case, it was really Munchausen for profit right.
Speaker 1: Because there was a clear financial motive.
Speaker 2: A huge one, and the Internet allows for the curation
of medical records that don't actually exist. You can google
what a chemo port looks like. You can buy ivy
stands and medical supplies on Amazon, and you can stage
a photoshoot in your living room that looks exactly like
a sterile clinic if you crop it just right.
Speaker 1: In her community, her real life community bought it. Hook
Line and Sinker. Yeah, the church, the school her kids
went to. They rallied around her.
Speaker 2: Of course they did. That's what good communities do.
Speaker 1: They raised over one hundred and five thousand dollars. People
were emptying their four oh one k's taking out second
mortgages to help this woman stay alive for her kids.
Speaker 2: M just devastating.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile, where is she? She's taking that money and going
on trips to New York, She's going to concerts, renovating
her house. The cognitive dissonance required to sit in a
front row seat at a concert knowing that your neighbors
think you're in a hospital bed fighting for your life.
That is a specific and terrifying kind of coldness.
Speaker 2: It's sociopathic compartmentalization. I mean, she likely justified it to
herself some kind of twisted logic, like I deserve this
trip because I'm under so much stress keeping up this lie.
Speaker 1: Right, this is hard work, exactly.
Speaker 2: The real damage here it isn't just one hundred and
five thousand dollars, it's the compassion fatigue it creates in
that community.
Speaker 1: Well, that's such a good.
Speaker 2: Point, because the next time a woman in that San
Jose community actually gets cancer and genuinely needs help setting
up a GoFundMe, people are gonna hesitate, They're gonna wonder,
they're gonna ask for proof. She poisoned the well of
communal charity.
Speaker 1: For everyone that's the real tragedy of it. Skepticism is healthy,
we need it, but cynicism. Cynicism is a strategy. She
created cynics absolutely. Okay. So if we take this model
and we scale it up, way up, from a mom
in San Jose to a multi billion dollar valuation, we
land squarely on fair nose and Elizabeth Holmes.
Speaker 2: The black turtleneck, the weirdly deep baritone voice, the unblinking
stare the whole package.
Speaker 1: We all know the basis of the story, right, Stanford dropout,
hailed is the next Steve Jobs, the female Steve Jobs.
But I want to drill down on the why. Why
do is so many smart, powerful people We're talking George Schultz,
Henry Kissinger, investors with billions on the line. Why did
they believe that a little machine the size of a printer,
the Edison, could run hundreds of blood tests on a
single drop of blood.
Speaker 2: It wasn't just her charisma, though that was a huge
part of it. It was the deep desperate desire for
the technology to exist. We call this vaporware in the
tech world, but this was medical vaporware.
Speaker 1: Would that mean exactly?
Speaker 2: It means the product was promised it was sold, but
it never actually worked, and the science behind what she
was claiming is incredibly, incredibly difficult. When you prick a finger,
you get capillary blood, right it's mixed with tissue fluid.
The cells often break. It's called cell lycens Okay. To
run accurate tests, especially for really sensitive things like cancer
markers or potassium levels, you almost always need venus blood
from a vein in your arm, and you need enough
volume to separate the serum. Holmes was basically promising to
break the laws of physics and biology at the same time.
Speaker 1: So how did she keep the lie going internally with
her own scientists and engineers.
Speaker 2: She siloed the teams. That was the crucial internal mechanism.
The engineering team wasn't allowed to talk to the chemistry team.
So the engineers are busy building a box and the
chemists are trying to make the assays work on a
bench top, and nobody realizes that the two things don't
fit together.
Speaker 1: It's the Emperor's new clothes.
Speaker 2: On a corporate level, that's exactly it. Everyone is afraid
to be the one to say, hey, wait a minute,
I don't think this is working, And unlike Bernie Madoff,
who will get to later. This fraud had immediate physical stakes.
Speaker 1: Right, This is the part that's truly horrifying. They roll
this out. They put these faulty machines in Walgreens pharmacies
in Arizona. Real people got tests from them.
Speaker 2: Real people with real health problems.
Speaker 1: I read about people getting false HIV positives. Can you
imagine getting that phone call, the terror, the life altering devastation,
all based on a complete lie, or what.
Speaker 2: Might be even worse, a false negative for cancer. You
think you're in the clear, you go on with your
life while a tumor is growing unchecked.
Speaker 1: That's where the whole fake it till you make it
ethosis Silon Valley becomes straight up criminal. In software, if
you ship a buggy app, you know, people's phones might crash.
It's annoying, right, If you ship a buggy medical device,
people die. And Elizabeth Holmes just she blurred that line
until it completely vanished. She viewed herself as a visionary,
and in her mind, the vision was more real than
the current technical limitations. She was living in the future,
but her patients were living in a very dangerous present.
Speaker 2: The ultimate hubris. She believed her own hype completely.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pivot. We've talked about faking the illness, faking
the cure, or faking the tech. Now let's talk about
faking the.
Speaker 2: Actual person, the impersonator.
Speaker 1: Section two, the masquerade. This is identity fraud, but on steroids.
Speaker 2: This is where we really see the con artist as actor,
a full on performance, and.
Speaker 1: No one, I mean no one acted harder than the
Hollywood con queen. The story is just so bizarre. I
remember reading the initial reporting on this and thinking it
had to be a movie script. It couldn't be real.
Speaker 2: It's not like fiction.
Speaker 1: For years, you have these freelance workers in the film industry,
makeup artists, stuntman, photographer, as trainers, and they're getting calls
and on the other end of the phone is a
powerful woman, a voice they recognize, Ammy Pascal, the former
head of Sony, Kathleen Kennedy, head of Lucasfilm, Wendy Ding Murdoch.
Speaker 2: The absolute titans of the industry, the people who can
make or break your career with one phone.
Speaker 1: Call exactly, and the offer is always the same. It's
always this incredible opportunity. I have a huge project shooting
in Indonesia, it's the next Marvel movie, or it's a
big budget reboot. The catch is you need to fly
out tomorrow. The urgency is key, total urgency will reimburse
you for everything. Just get on the plane.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So these gig workers who were so hungry for that
big break, they put the flight on their credit card.
They land in Jakarta and then Jakarto Yes nothing.
Speaker 2: Well not exactly nothing. That's the insidious part. They meet
a driver, they get driven around the city. They're asked
to pay permit fee or location scouting fees in cash
with the promise of reimbursement.
Speaker 1: But the big movie, the powerful female executive, it never materializes.
And what's just fascinating here is the perpetrator, a man
named Hargo bind til Romani, a man, a man sitting
in a room in England and later in Indonesia doing
these voices and not just doing a generic woman voice.
He was mimicking specific cadences, specific vocabulary, specific speech patterns
of these real women. It was terrifyingly accurate.
Speaker 2: So he was a master mimic. But the part that
is truly disturbing as you dig into it, isn't the money.
He didn't get rich off. This the amount of effort
he put in versus the financial payout, it just doesn't
make sense if it was all about cash. No, it
wasn't about cash. It was about dominance. It was about
being a puppet master. He would keep these victims on
the phone for hours and hours. He would make them
do humiliating things. He would make them kiss the driver.
He would conduct phone auditions that would devolve into sexual
humiliation and verbal abuse of a power trip. He was
feeding off their desperation and their willingness to debase themselves
for a shot at fame that was never ever real.
Speaker 1: It's psychological sadism. He clearly enjoyed the control. He got
a thrill out of waking up in the morning and
deciding to be Amy Pascal for three hours and completely
ruining a stuntman's week and his finances.
Speaker 2: It's like playing a game of the Sims, but the
sims are real people with real bank accounts and real emotions.
Speaker 1: Yes, that's exactly it.
Speaker 2: And because he specifically targeted freelancers, people who don't have
an HR department to go to, people who are used
to the gig economy's instability, he knew they were uniquely vulnerable.
They are professionally trained to say yes to every opportunity,
no matter how strange it sounds. He weaponized the professional
drive against them.
Speaker 1: Just awful. Oh, from the psychological horror of the con
queen to yeah, just the visceral horror of a case
out of Mantua, Italy. This is the one that the
media nicknamed the Misdoubt fire case. But I hate that nickname.
Speaker 2: Oh I did too. It sounds whimsical and this is anything.
Speaker 1: But this is a nightmare.
Speaker 2: It's Gothic horror come to lag.
Speaker 1: So you have a fifty six year old man, his
elderly mother dies. He doesn't report it to the authorities
because he needs to keep collecting her pension. Okay, that
part is standard fraud, right, we've heard of that before.
Speaker 2: That Unfortunately, Yes, pension fraud is not uncommon.
Speaker 1: But then he keeps the body in the house for years,
to the point where she becomes essentially mummified.
Speaker 2: Okay, that alone indicates a very severe break from reality.
I mean to live with the old factory reality of decomposition.
To normalize the physical presence of a corpse in your home,
That is not a rational mind at work.
Speaker 1: But then it escalates. Her government ID expires in Italy.
You need to renew it in person. So he doesn't flee,
he doesn't confess. He comes up with a plan.
Speaker 2: A truly unbelievable plan.
Speaker 1: She has his legs. He puts on his dead mother's dress,
her jewelry, her shoes. He applies makeup to his own
face to look like her. He gets a cane, and
he walks into the municipal office, intending to impersonate his
own dead mother to get her ide renewed.
Speaker 2: It's the literal assumption of an identity. We often speak
metaphorically about a con artist wearing a mask, but here
it is completely physical. He is wearing the identity of
the person whose death he is concealing.
Speaker 1: And it almost worked.
Speaker 2: That's the craziest part.
Speaker 1: It took a sharp clerk noticing that his voice, despite
his best efforts to sound like an old woman, didn't
quite match the frail person he was presenting as. But
can you imagine the level of dissociation required to look
at yourself in the mirror, see your dead mother's face
painted onto your own, and think, yes, this is a
good plan, This will work.
Speaker 2: It speaks to perhaps the sheer desperation of economic survival.
But it also points to a deep, profound inability to
let go of the source of sustenance, both financial and
you have to imagine emotional. He couldn't exist without her,
so in the most grotesque way possible, he became her.
Speaker 1: It's tragic, it's grotesque, and it's deeply criminal, all at
the same time. Absolutely, all right, let's try to wash
that image out of our heads with something a bit
more glamorous, though no less manipulative. Anna Delviy, or her
real name, Anna.
Speaker 2: Sarrokan, the Soho grifter, the fake heiress.
Speaker 1: She has become this bizarre folk hero to some people.
The whole other conversation is wild. Well, let's just look
at the mechanics of her con Here's a young Russian
woman with no money and no connections who convinces New
York's elite banks, law firms, five star hotels that she
has a sixty million euro trust fund waiting for her
back in Europe.
Speaker 2: How it's a great question.
Speaker 1: She didn't have a fake bank statement taped to her forehead.
She did it through pure attitude.
Speaker 2: She hacked the social code of the ultra wealthy. She
understood something fundamental about that world. If you are rude, demanding,
and dismissive, people assume you are important. If you are
polite and accommodating, they assume you're the service staff.
Speaker 1: So she was just incredibly difficult.
Speaker 2: Incredibly she tipped with crisp hundred dollars bills, cash that
she usually acquired through fraudulent check kiding schemes. She wore
the right designer clothes, she name dropped the right artist.
She understood that at that level, wealth is a performance,
and she was a brilliant actress.
Speaker 1: The story involving her friend Rachel Deloche Williams is the
one that really anchors this for me. It makes it concrete.
Speaker 2: The Marrakesh trip.
Speaker 1: The Marrakesh trip. Anna invites her to this insane luxury
resort in Morocco, promises to pay for everything. Then predictably, oh,
my credit card isn't working. Oh the bank is just
confirming the international wire. And suddenly Rachel, who was a
photo editor at Vanity Fair, not a millionaire, is forced
to put a sixty two thousand dollars charge on her
corporate American Express card that's.
Speaker 2: More than her annual salary at the time.
Speaker 1: Exactly, and that's the coercion. Anna created a situation with
the immense social pressure to resolve the awkwardness of the
declined card, forced Rachel to step in and save the day.
It's brilliant in its cruelty.
Speaker 2: And Anna's reaction later when she was confronted absolutely no remorse.
She famously said, I'm not trying to trick people. I
just asked. In her mind, her friends were just walking
talking lines of credit, and.
Speaker 1: Now she was on Dancing with His Stars for a minute.
She has an art show. She's still under house arrest
in her New York apartment, but she's famous. She kind
of proved her own twisted point perception really is reality.
If enough people are looking at you, you.
Speaker 2: Matter, which is a terrifying lesson for the Instagram generation.
But notice the transition here. Anna exploited ambition and social climbing.
Our next category of cons exploits something even more fundamental,
even more.
Speaker 1: Powerful, love love Section three romance and control schemes, and
this is where it just gets absolutely heartbreaking. We have
to start with the tender swindler Simon Levive.
Speaker 2: This is a Ponzi scheme of affection that is.
Speaker 1: A perfect description a Ponzi scheme of affection. So he
meets women on tender. He claims to be the son
of Level of Ease, a real Israeli billionaire known as
the King of Diamonds.
Speaker 2: So he's borrowing a legitimate name to build his credibility exactly, and.
Speaker 1: He doesn't take them for coffee on a first date.
He flies them on a private jet to Bulgaria. He
stays at the Four Seasons. He drops thousands of dollars.
He invests heavily upfront in.
Speaker 2: Business terms, that's the loss leader. He spends, say, twenty
thousand dollars in pressing victim A, but that twenty thousand
dollars came directly from victim B, who he is in
the middle of scamming at that very moment.
Speaker 1: And once he has them hooked, once they truly believe
he is this wealthy, globe trotting prince who love them,
he drops the hammer, the security threat.
Speaker 2: The crisis.
Speaker 1: He sends a photo of his bodyguard, a guy named Peter,
who looks like he's been beaten up, bleeding in the
back of an ambulance. He says, my enemies are after me.
They can track my credit cards, I need to go dark.
You have to help me. I need cash.
Speaker 2: This is the absolute genius of the scam. He doesn't
ask for money for a new car or a business investment.
He frames it as a life or death emergency. If
you don't send this money, I might die. He weaponizes
their love and their fear for his safety.
Speaker 1: And these women they took out as of loans. They
went to nine or ten different bangs. They maxed out
all their credit cards. We were talking hundreds of thousands
of dollars per victim. And the entire time he's using
that money to fly the next girl to Micaos or Paris.
Speaker 2: It creates this horrible closed loop of trauma and debt.
And because the women technically authorize the bank transfers, the
law is a very hard time classifying it as theft.
He just claims it was a loan between friends, but
it's not. It's coercion. It's emotional blackmail of the highest order.
Speaker 1: And just like ANIDELDI, he's out. He served a very
short sentence. He's free. He's making personalized videos on cameo.
He's charging twenty thousand dollars for club appearances. It is
absolutely infuriating.
Speaker 2: The lack of consequences is stunning.
Speaker 1: But if Simon Levive was a one man show, our
next case ain't even This was a full blown institution.
This is I think the darkest hole in our entire
lineup today.
Speaker 2: Invalum is a different beast entirely. It started out as
Executive Success Programs or ESP. It was run by a
man named Keith Rainier who called himself Vanguard, and it.
Speaker 1: Was marketed as this elite self help program, optimize your potential,
remove your limiting beliefs, pretty standard corporate coaching stuff on
the surface.
Speaker 2: A lot of wealthy, successful people got pulled in at
that stage. But as you peeled back the layers of
the onion, it got weirder and weirder, and then you
get to dass the secret society. Within the secret society
ch it's a Latin acronym dominus obsequious sororium. It means
master over slave women. And this is where the fraud
becomes outright slavery.
Speaker 1: How did they control them?
Speaker 2: To join this inner circle? Women had to provide collateral?
Speaker 1: Collateral what does that mean?
Speaker 2: Nude photos, false confessions to crimes they didn't commit, damaging
secrets about their families. Ronier held this material over their
heads to ensure absolute obedience.
Speaker 1: It was blackmail and the branding. I still cannot wrap
my head around this part. Alison Mack, the actress from
the show Smallville, a friendly, trustworthy face million if people
recognize she was one of his top recruiters.
Speaker 2: She was instrumental.
Speaker 1: She would tell women that to show their dedication, they
needed to get a brand. They were held down on
a table, fully conscious while a hot cauterizing pen was
used to burn a symbol into their skin near their pelvis.
Speaker 2: And the symbol it wasn't some generic logo for the
group when you looked at it closely, it was a
combination of the initials kr Am, Keith Ranier, and Alison Mack.
They were literally branding women as their property.
Speaker 1: That is the ultimate commodification of a human being. You
are no longer a person, You are an object. You
are property.
Speaker 2: And Rainier used this convoluted word salad, redefining common terms
like ethical and parasite to systematically dismantle their critical thinking.
If you question him, you were being intellectually dishonest. He
trapped them in a logic puzzle where the only possible
answer was complete and total submission.
Speaker 1: It's a terrifying example of how a financial scam can
metastasize into a full blown cult. It starts by targeting
your wallet, with it owning your soul and your body
and your body, which brings us to our final section,
the Titans. These are the cons that were so big
they changed history. Section four, the historical and institutional Titans.
And we can't possibly do this show without talking about
the big one.
Speaker 2: Bernie made off sixty five billion dollars. The number is
so big it's almost abstract. It doesn't feel real.
Speaker 1: It doesn't. But the mechanism behind it wasn't actually that complex,
was it. It was a simple Ponzi scheme. New investors'
money is used to pay off the old investors. But
why did it last for decades? Why did the SEC
investigate and miss it repeatedly?
Speaker 2: Because Madoff didn't act like a con man. He didn't
promise wild, unbelievable returns. He acted like a bored, slightly
annoyed bureaucrat.
Speaker 1: He was the chairman of Nazaqi. He wasn't some shady outsider.
He was the system.
Speaker 2: Exactly, And he didn't promise one hundred percent returns a year.
He promised to steady ten to twelve percent every single year,
like clockwork. The volatility was zero. In the world of finance,
that's the holy grail. It's not supposed to exist.
Speaker 1: The famous split strike conversion strategy. He claimed he was
buying stocks and hedging them with options. It sounded complicated
and plausible, but he wasn't doing any of it.
Speaker 2: None of it. The trading floor on the seventeenth floor
of the Lipstick Building in Manhattan, it was a prop,
it was a stage. The computer down there was just
printing out fake statements using data from yesterday's newspaper.
Speaker 1: And he used affinity fraud so effectively. He targeted Jewish charities,
the country clubs in Palm Beach. He made it hard
to invest.
Speaker 2: With him, right. You couldn't just call up and give
him money. You had to be invited, You had to
know someone, You had to practically beg him to take
your money, and by.
Speaker 1: Playing hard to get he completely bypassed their due diligence.
The thinking was, if Bernie is willing to take my money,
I must be one of the lucky ones.
Speaker 2: No one wanted to ask the tough questions that might
get them kicked out of the club.
Speaker 1: And then the collapse two thousand and eight, the global
financial crisis hits the market tanks and everyone needs cash.
They all tried to withdraw their money at once. They
requested about seven billion dollars.
Speaker 2: And Bernie only had a few hundred million left in
the bank.
Speaker 1: The tide went out, as they say, and everyone saw
that he was swimming naked.
Speaker 2: The fallout was biblical, I mean, Eli Weisel's Foundation for
Holocaust Remembrance wiped out, Steven Spielberg's charity. Thousands and thousands
of retirees lost their entire life savings.
Speaker 1: And the human toll. His son, Mark Madoff committed suicide
on the two year anniversary of his father's arrest. This
financial crime had a physical body count. It destroyed families,
and it broke the unspoken trust of the entire financial system.
It really did made Off. Was this clean shaven guy
in a fine suit. Yeah, but a final case. It
puts a very very different face on fraud.
Speaker 2: Hmm, A much darker one. H. H.
Speaker 1: Holmes The Devil in the White City.
Speaker 2: Eighteen ninety three, Chicago, the World's Columbian Exposition, The World's Fair.
Speaker 1: Holmes is the archetype. He's the original creepycon. He builds
it huge hotel near the Fairgrounds, the World's Fair Hotel,
but he funds the entire construction with fraud.
Speaker 2: He's a grifter first and foremost.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, He cycles through contractors, firing them just before payday,
claiming their work was shoddy. He buys furniture and building
materials on credit and then hides them in secret rooms
so they can't be repossessed.
Speaker 2: But the griff was just a means to an end.
It was funding a purpose built slaughterhouse, the Murder Castle,
as it came to be known.
Speaker 1: He designed it with murderous intent from the beginning, gas
jets in the hotel rooms that he could control from
his office to asphyxiate his guests. Staircases that led to nowhere,
shoots that led from the upper floors directly to the basement.
Speaker 2: Where he had a kiln, an acid vat, and a
dissection table.
Speaker 1: He would seduce women, often his own employees. He'd convince
them to take out life insurance policies with him as
the beneficiary. He'd marry them and then they would just
vanish and he.
Speaker 2: Would monetize every single part of the victim. He'd strip
the flesh from their bodies and sell the articulated skeleton
tends to medical schools. There was a huge demand at
the time.
Speaker 1: So he gets the money from the insurance policy, the
money from selling the skeleton, and he's already taken all
their money while they were staying in his hotel. It's
total perverse efficiency.
Speaker 2: Holmes represents the absolute intersection of capitalism and psychopathy. He
treated human beings purely as raw material to be processed
for profit. There was no line he wouldn't cross. He
even convinced his business partner, a man named Benjamin Pietzel,
to fake his own death for an insurance scam, and
then what happened, And then Holmes just decided it was
easier to actually kill him and his children instead. Why
bother faking it when real death is more convenient and
leaves fewer witnesses.
Speaker 1: It is the darkest possible conclusion to our list. From
Bell Gibson's fake cancer blog to HH holmes Very real skeletons.
Speaker 2: In the basement, it's a whole spectrum of predation.
Speaker 1: So we've pulled on these ten threads and the tapestry
they form is It's terrifying. But I want to try
and synthesize this. What is the common DNA here? Is
it just simple greed?
Speaker 2: Greed is too simple an answer. I think it's narcissism,
malignant narcissism. In every single one of these cases, from
Annadelvi to made Off to Holmes, the scammer believes they
are exceptional. They believe the rules are for little people,
not for them. They rewrite reality to suit their own ego.
Madeoff couldn't admit he was failing as a legitimate trader,
so he invented a new reality where he never ever lost.
Belle Gibson couldn't accept that she was just a normal person,
so she invented a tragic, heroic backstory to make herself special.
Speaker 1: And then there's the other side of it, the suspension
of disbelief. We talked about the very beginning. We want
to believe. We want the easy twelve percent returns, We
want the natural cure for cancer. We want the handsome
billionaire boyfriend who whisks us away on a private jet.
Speaker 2: The con artist doesn't force their way in. They invite you.
They hold the door open to a fantasy you already
want to live inside, and once you take that first
step across the threshold, it becomes very, very hard to.
Speaker 1: Admit you are the sunk cost fallacy.
Speaker 2: Exactly, once you've told all your friends and family that
you're dating a diamond Air or that you've found this
miracle cure for your illness, your own pride prevents you
from seeing the red flags that start popping up. To
admit you were scammed is to admit you were a fool.
Speaker 1: I have to share something that's a little embarrassing. While
I was researching all of this, I got a text
message on my phone. Oh no, it's a USPS. We
cannot deliver your package due to an incomplete address. Click
here to update. And I clicked the link. I literally
clicked it. I was waiting for a package. I caught
myself before I entered my credit card info, but for
three seconds I was in that hammock. I was vulnerable.
I wanted the problem to be solved easily.
Speaker 2: And that's the point. We are all vulnerable. Intelligence doesn't
protect you. In fact, sometimes it makes you more susceptible
because you think you're too smart to be conned. Empathy
makes you vulnerable. Greed makes you vulnerable. Fear makes you vulnerable.
Unless you are a complete robot, you have buttons that
can be pushed.
Speaker 1: So a final question for you and for everyone listening,
and this is a thread I really want to leave dangling.
Speaker 2: Go for it.
Speaker 1: If Bernie Madoff had died in two thousand and seven
before the crash, he would be remembered as a Wall
Street legend, a titan of finance. If Bill Gibson had
just stopped before the app launch, she'd just be another
quirky blogger. Is the truth just the version of the
story that doesn't collapse.
Speaker 2: That's a heavy question. History is written by the victors,
and sometimes the victors are just the best liars who
haven't been caught yet.
Speaker 1: And here's the kicker for us right now. Annadelvi is
a celebrity. Simon Leviev is a celebrity. We are sitting
here talking about them giving them oxygen. Are we the
audience complicit in this by consuming their stories on Netflix,
by following them on Instagram? Are we incentivizing the next
generation of con artists? Are we sending the message, Hey,
even if you get caught, you'll get a book deal
out of it.
Speaker 2: It's the fame monster. We claim to hate the sin,
but we are absolutely obsessed with the sinner.
Speaker 1: So we want to know what you think. Are we
part of the problem by giving them this platform or
is exposing them? Talking about them like this the only
way to inoculate ourselves against the next big con.
Speaker 2: Where is the line exactly?
Speaker 1: Drop a comment, send us a tweet, tell us where
you draw.
Speaker 2: The line, and maybe you know, Just for today, check
your bank statement, and for.
Speaker 1: God's sake, verify the address on that package delivery text.
Thank you for listening to thrilling threads.
Speaker 2: Stay curious and stay skeptical.
Speaker 1: See you next time.