1195: Javier Leiva | Modern Romance Scam Tactics and Ways to Fight Back

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Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 3 These guys are exploiting what makes us human, which is the fact that we are trusting. Trust by default is a fault theory, right?

Speaker 3 Where we don't have enough time in the day to question everything around us, because if we do, well, hey, first of all, we live a very pessimistic life, right? We trust people. We have to trust.

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Speaker 1 Coming up here on the Jordan Harbinger Show, you've heard the tales of Nigerian princes and Tinder swindlers, but today's con artists are moving in, they're marrying their marks, and they're walking off with entire estates.

Speaker 1 Javier Lieva, investigator and host of the pretend podcast and buddy of mine, joins us to pull back the curtain on celebrity impersonating Romeos, you know how your mother-in-law thinks she's talking to Johnny Depp on Facebook, gold-digging caretakers, and the posse of scorned women who formed Operation Cock Block, yes, that's real, to hunt a scammer down.

Speaker 1 We'll break down the psychological playbook, the red flags your parents and friends might miss, and the simple steps that keep love from draining your life savings.

Speaker 1 Listen, learn, and protect yourself right here on the show today. We experimented a bit with the format on this one.
Javier comes on and talks about something he's investigating.

Speaker 1 We give some examples in real-life stories of how these guys function and take advantage of others. Of course, we end with practical tips to help you and your loved ones avoid these scams.

Speaker 1 These predators are really prolific and scary. They don't just operate out of call centers in Asia.
In fact, the real-life versions are much more effective and damaging.

Speaker 1 All right, here we go with Javier Levo.

Speaker 1 Man, you've been doing the crime podcast thing for a minute, and this topic was interesting.

Speaker 1 I can't remember if it was you who just shot it to me or a publicist came to me, but you're like, hey, how about romance scams?

Speaker 1 And it was such a coincidence because I've been getting letters for Feedback Friday from people who say, I think my neighbor's caught up in a romance scam. They're on our Jordan Harbinger subreddit.

Speaker 1 Hey, there's this guy who's caught in a romance scam. We're here to the details.

Speaker 1 And it's almost comical because we'll air this stuff on Feedback Friday, and people will say, Jordan, I'm losing faith in you because I swear I've read this this story off the internet.

Speaker 1 Are you now so down and out that you've resorted to stealing stories off the internet? And I'm like, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 And it turns out that these scams are so common and they're using the same details with so many tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people at the same time that they'll read the story on the internet because it's on one subreddit, then it's on our subreddit, then it's on a podcast, then it's on our podcast.

Speaker 1 And they're like, you must have stolen this. And it's like, no, we didn't steal it.

Speaker 1 There's just actually 10,000 old men above the ages of 70 or 80 at any given time who think that they're in love with an architect that works in Indonesia who lost her purse in a car accident or is talking to Johnny Depp on Facebook Messenger.

Speaker 1 And it's that common that people are like, ah, this is one of those urban legend ones. I've heard this a hundred times.
No, it's actually just happening a hundred times an hour.

Speaker 3 It's probably the number one topic that people reach out to me about. There's so many of them that at a certain point, they become the same story, right?

Speaker 3 once you start digging in each case is unique each case is different and that's from a distance we're thinking about these romance scams like how could anybody fall for these things right but the closer you look into it and put yourself in the shoes of the victim you realize that when you're in the center of the cyclone that it all makes a lot more sense it does they're screening for the right kind of victim who's vulnerable, going through grief.

Speaker 1 Maybe they're suffering from some cognitive decline. Maybe they're isolated from their family.

Speaker 1 If you're a scammer, you're looking at a checklist and you're going, isolated from family, check, cognitive decline, check, terminal illness, check, has a government pension, check, lonely, check.

Speaker 1 They're checking off these boxes. And the more of those boxes you hit, the bigger a mark you potentially are.
A lot of people go, why would they come after me? I'm a retired mailman.

Speaker 1 Your pension is worth what this person makes in a decade working in rural wherever. So that's the other thing.
A lot of these people go, I would be a terrible victim.

Speaker 1 I'm an old lady who lives off of $25,000 a year. $25,000, that's half a decade or more of good money for somebody working an honest job in that person's country, the scammer's countries.

Speaker 1 But some of these romance scammer cases really are just diabolical. These are really gross.
And I want to throw you a curveball right off the bat.

Speaker 1 I know we sort of outlined a little bit of this together, but I want to talk about the celebrity thing because it's so ridiculous.

Speaker 1 You see these people who go, my mom thinks she's talking to, and I know what you're going to say, Jordan, she thinks she's talking to Johnny Depp online.

Speaker 1 And I'm like, okay, how did she meet Johnny Depp, your 70-year-old mother? Well, my dad passed away a few years ago. She's been super lonely.

Speaker 1 All the kids are out of the house and we have our own grandkids, but we live across the country. Anyway, he sent her a photo of himself on Facebook Messenger.

Speaker 1 And it's like, Your mom thinks she's talking to Johnny Depp on Facebook Messenger. We told her that it's not real.
And she said, if you're real, write my name on a piece of paper.

Speaker 1 And of course, like, the guy just uses Photoshop or AI to make a photo of Johnny Depp holding a piece of paper that says Martha.

Speaker 1 And you see the picture that the guy sends that it's so clearly fake, right? And you're like, how are people falling for this? Why are these working? Do you have any insight here?

Speaker 1 Because this is the one where I really can't wrap my mind around it. Like somebody uses you and ingratiates themselves.

Speaker 1 It just makes me think, how in the hell does anyone believe they're talking to Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp on Facebook? Come on.

Speaker 3 I think those examples, like the Brad Pitts and the Johnny Depps are messaging your mom, your elderly mom, I think those are the cases that make the news, the ones that are great headlines.

Speaker 3 And I would imagine, without knowing the individual cases, that a lot of these people who are being targeted are probably elderly and have cognitive decline. So that kind of explains a lot.

Speaker 3 But what's even scarier, Jordan, is the stories that don't make the headlines, right?

Speaker 3 When it's not Johnny Depp, when it's not Brad Pitt that's contacting your mom but it's somebody else and they are slowly working their way into their lives i've covered cases where they work themselves into the will cut off the kids from everything and those are the scary ones because those do not make the headlines no the one i'm thinking of is somebody had sent was it either brad pitt or johnny depp fake obviously $850,000.

Speaker 1 It's terrifying to think that somebody who has access to $850,000, which of course was supposed to last them the rest of their life, the rest of, you know, was supposed to be a trust for their grandkids, pay for college for them, is getting sent to some call center in Dubai or Pakistan or Cambodia.

Speaker 1 It's so sad.

Speaker 1 And it makes me want to do episodes like this where people can look for red flags, find out what they might be missing, pay a little bit more attention to their aging aunts, uncles, moms, and dads just because of how sad this actually gets.

Speaker 3 Because we always think about monitoring our teens, social media accounts and stuff like that, but you never think about monitoring your parents. Because these are the people that raised you.

Speaker 3 They're smart. They made you who you are.
And all of a sudden, they're making really weird, careless decisions.

Speaker 1 It's scary. And there's a part of me that's like, I'm doing this for all the people in my life that are older where I'm like, what is she doing all day on the computer?

Speaker 1 Because I know that there's a lot of people on my production team who have older folks in their family. And they're like, yeah, I don't know.
She's lonely. And this can happen to anyone.

Speaker 1 And it's not just women who are targeted. Tell me about this guy, Jason Bartlett.
This guy, he's a character because he's such an obviously wonky narcissist, but this case will stick with you.

Speaker 1 You did an episode about it, and I'd love to hear some of the details.

Speaker 3 As of this recording, this is like my most current investigation. I've been researching this guy, Jason Bartlett, since the end of 2021.

Speaker 3 And I've been just following him, just trying to see where he goes next.

Speaker 3 I was approached by this guy that said that his mother, who had a Parkinson-like disease, had met this guy, this British guy named Jason Bartlett. He was a playwright.

Speaker 3 He wanted to put on this play and she was getting progressively worse and worse health-wise.

Speaker 3 And come to find out, she passed away and she had put Jason Bartlett as the executor of her estate, cutting off her kids, taking her home, her life savings, all to raise money for this play.

Speaker 1 Wait, so was he the executor or the beneficiary?

Speaker 3 The executor.

Speaker 1 Did he get everything? Yes. So the executor, so he's in charge of handing it out.
He didn't get access to her money. He was in charge of handing it out.

Speaker 3 But he got the majority of the money. I was looking at her will right now, and he maintains all her bank accounts.
He could create new accounts, investments, lease, exchange.

Speaker 1 Oh, so he has legal power of attorney over this lady's finances.

Speaker 3 And hold on to your seat when I tell you the next part. So when the kids discover this, the woman dies, right? Jason Bartlett moves on to her mother, her elderly mother, and moves in.

Speaker 3 The kids find out that now he's living with the elderly mother.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 3 Yeah, which is nuts. How brazen, right? Cases like this happen all the time.
I've actually tracked this guy down, and it turns out that he's been doing this forever. You don't just start here, right?

Speaker 1 That's a good point. How does one start the enterprise of being a professional scammer like this? because here's the thing, Javier.

Speaker 1 I kind of get being in a call center all day, chatting with people on your phone from a bar or a cafe, running your scam on, who knows, maybe even 30 people at a time from your place over in Nigeria, Pakistan, whatever, where these scam centers are often located.

Speaker 1 I can picture an alternate universe where I was born in different circumstances and I was doing that.

Speaker 1 What I can't wrap my head around just because it would make me nervous and I would be so uptight all the time.

Speaker 1 By the time you're close enough to become the executive and beneficiary of someone's estate, right? This guy is seducing these people, these women. He's moving in with them.

Speaker 1 He's being their boyfriend, their lover, their companion. His full-time job is to generate trust with this person while also, I guess, writing plays, which is hilarious to me.

Speaker 1 And then he's just doing this all the time. And then as soon as that person passes away, he's like, he's a parasite who needs another host.
It's a parasite. He needs another host.

Speaker 1 And he's like, let me find her mother. So these people have to be built totally different than me, right?

Speaker 1 They have to be malignant, narcissistic psychopaths where they just don't feel the stress of living with somebody and being like, I could get found out at any moment. The family all hates me.

Speaker 1 They're all calling her nonstop. They're coming over.
The police are involved. You just have to not care about any of that somehow.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it's almost like he could emulate human emotions, but he feels none. Like he's just using these people.
And like you said, a parasite is a great comparison.

Speaker 3 I went back and I found several women in the UK who he did the exact same thing. He was finding these women and plenty of fish.

Speaker 1 Throwback.

Speaker 3 Wow. Which, by the way, I've been out of the dating scene for a long time, but a lot of these romance scams start with plenty of fish.
Is that even still around? Is that a thing anymore?

Speaker 1 First of all, that's the first time I've heard the phrase plenty of fish, the name of that website since maybe 2008. So if it still exists, that is a surprise to me.

Speaker 1 The other surprise is that people are still using it. Like you might as well have said, yeah, this guy cruises MySpace for single women.
Okay.

Speaker 3 I've been doing these romance cams for a while and Plenty of Fish is definitely the top site for these guys.

Speaker 1 This is so interesting. You know what, though? This is maybe not a coincidence, right? Because if you're on Tinder, you got to look good.

Speaker 1 And if you're on match.com, you got to pay with a credit card and verify.

Speaker 1 And maybe they report you to the platform and the platform actually cares and again i'm spitballing here maybe on a site like plenty of fish you're only finding and i feel bad because i'm sort of victim shaming here but maybe you're only finding unsophisticated parties who don't know how to use more relevant and up-to-date websites for dating you're using people who think social media is still facebook or myspace right so it's the equivalent you ever hear how the nigerian email scammers they deliberately write crappy misspellings in emails because they're filtering for people who are so disconnected from everything that they don't notice.

Speaker 3 They want the low-hanging fruit.

Speaker 1 They want the low-hanging fruit. They don't want to have to come up with a sophisticated scam with good language and documents.

Speaker 1 They just want to be able to type in some barf and the people that fall for that are the easy ones to grift.

Speaker 1 So maybe using plenty of fish, which no one's heard of since 2009, 2008, is how you find somebody who's like, yeah, I should totally let this guy move into my house, live off of me for years at a time while he writes plays and then put him in my will.

Speaker 1 You know, maybe that's how you find those people.

Speaker 3 And it's crazy because I've met some of these women. These women are all across the board.
Like they have nothing in common other than some of them were the same age as him.

Speaker 3 So it wasn't like he was going after a specific demographic, women who were older than him. So it kind of ran the gamut here, but he charmed them with this idea that he was this passionate playwright.

Speaker 3 He was going to put on this play, and they were happy to help him out. He would immediately move in with them.
They would pay for his rent, his food. The guy would not have a job.

Speaker 3 There was one woman who worked a full day job, had to get a side job, and he even moved his mother and brother.

Speaker 3 His mother had dementia, his brother special needs, and this woman was taking care of his entire family. And eventually he left, abandoned his mother and his brother and left them with this woman.

Speaker 3 This happened like two or three times that I was able to find. God knows how many other women he's targeted.
These are just the women that I know of.

Speaker 1 I was about to say, oh, so he does care about his mother and his brother. And then you're like, and then he abandoned them at this person's house and fled.
It's like, oh, never mind.

Speaker 3 Oh, they actually kicked him out of like a home, like a nursing home, where eventually his mother and brother were put in a nursing home.

Speaker 3 The nursing home banned him because every time he would come to visit his mother and brother, he would try to steal money from them because they were still collecting the equivalent of disability in the UK.

Speaker 3 So if you don't care about your mother and brother, and also he uses his son's story. He says that his newborn son was murdered by his ex-wife.

Speaker 3 If you could actually create fantasies about your own child that are not real, no one's safe from you.

Speaker 1 No, and if you're stealing from your mentally disabled brother and your mother who has dementia, I mean, this is a person who doesn't care about anybody but themselves at all to an extreme degree.

Speaker 1 This guy, again, crazy, malignant narcissist. I shouldn't laugh, but it's it's almost funny to hear this woman say this on the episode.

Speaker 1 She said, one of the red flags at the start was that he loved photos of himself. He loved his own writing.
He loved the sound of his own voice.

Speaker 1 And he would tell anybody who would listen, like, oh, doesn't my voice sound so good? And it's, it's,

Speaker 1 as somebody who does podcasting, and you know what I'm talking about, in voice acting.

Speaker 3 Nobody loves their own voice.

Speaker 1 Nobody in the right mind loves the way their voice sounds in a recording. Professionals like us are like, ugh, okay, well, people put up with that.
That's fine.

Speaker 1 But then this woman's like, and then he wrote poetry on Facebook. And I got to be honest, it was shite.
It was just like, it was hilarious.

Speaker 3 The ironic thing about this whole thing is I come to find out, I think that he was really trying to put on this play just to raise money for the play with no intentions of actually ever running the play.

Speaker 3 Funny story, because you probably haven't listened to part two because it hasn't aired yet. The actors.
put on the play despite the fact that he quit, left with everybody's money.

Speaker 3 So they just did it just because they put so much work into this thing. But the goal was never to put on this play.
The goal was to raise money for this play so he could cash out and run.

Speaker 1 And balance. Wow.
It's so wild to me. And he's gaslighting these people into believing they're soulmates.

Speaker 1 I guess my point is it seems like more work to sponge off these people, put all your emotions into these people, juggle different folks than it would be to just actually get a job.

Speaker 1 It really seems harder.

Speaker 3 And circle back to what you were saying when we started the show, which was the Brad Pitt, the Johnny Depp scam. Those are easy scams.

Speaker 3 Those are like scam artists that their job is literally to scam you. If you don't fall for it, they move on.
And it's more of a nine to five for them. But these guys, they are embedding themselves.

Speaker 3 They're playing the long game here.

Speaker 3 And it takes a lot of work, but I would imagine that the reward is greater, right?

Speaker 3 Because these are the guys that you least expect, the people that fool your family into believing that they actually care for you, that fool you into believing that they actually care for you.

Speaker 3 And they're, meanwhile, they're just siphoning your money.

Speaker 1 That's right. Those online scammers, they might get a hundred bucks here, a hundred bucks there from a few people every week, which is a lot of money.
It adds up fast.

Speaker 1 But this person, they're living rent-free. They've got a home to live in.
They're probably sleeping with the person, so they're getting sex out of it if they're interested in that.

Speaker 1 They eventually get access to this person's finances. Maybe they get their name on the house and on the car.
So you're right.

Speaker 1 It's kind of like this is the deep, long con that really has a high payoff if everything goes well. And like you said, then they just move on to the next person.

Speaker 1 It's crazy to me that it became the elderly mother. And I hate victim blaming here, but like, where is the family who's going, you realize he just scammed your daughter?

Speaker 1 Are these people estranged from their family?

Speaker 3 No, they were there. This was a very close family.
How does this happen? It's very upsetting to the kids, honestly. It's been very traumatic for them because eventually grandma snapped out of it.

Speaker 3 He's no longer at her house. He moved somewhere else.
But for a while there, she was under his trance, and it really affected the family in a deep way.

Speaker 3 I'm not talking about just their kids, their spouses too. This affects everyone in the family and the circle.
It's not just the victim.

Speaker 1 Sure. It's not just that they lose money they were maybe counting on for their kids' education, for example, but the amount of stress that you would go through.

Speaker 3 And going to court and probate and this and that.

Speaker 1 Before we dive into how a playwright no one's heard of rewrote a stranger's estate, I'm going to rewrite your shopping list.

Speaker 3 We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 So my mother's brother, he had a drug problem and he was always stealing from my grandmother.

Speaker 1 And the amount of stress that my mom went through to deal with the police and the credit card companies and trying to get him put in jail and trying to get him to stop stealing from my grandmother and trying to get him to stop opening up credit cards in my dead grandfather's name, like the amount of stress put my mom in a bad place.

Speaker 1 That's happening, I would expect, to this entire family. And it's just, it's hard to overstate how toxic this really is.
Imagine you're this woman's daughter and your sister's been grifted.

Speaker 1 Now your mother's being grifted and then you're her daughter. So your kids are stressed out because their mom is stressed out.
Your husband's all stressed out because you're all stressed out.

Speaker 1 So it's taking a toll on your relationship with your kids, with your self-esteem, your own depression, whatever, and your marriage at the same time.

Speaker 1 It's affecting your work, of course, and it's doing that to everybody in the entire family that's in the orbit of this person.

Speaker 1 These people are parasites that cause basically an infection in the family. It's just crazy to see.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah. And the last years is not a one and done type of thing.
You get over it. No, these things take a while.
But yeah, it's been nuts. And I see these cases all the time.

Speaker 3 And like I said, mechanically, they are all the same. But when you start looking at the individual cases, the characters are all different and people react way different.

Speaker 1 So this guy creates this persona. It's an artistic genius.

Speaker 1 He gets her to bankroll the fantasy, but at what moment do these women realize, I think in the story that you covered, this particular one, her name was Emma, when does she realize, whoa, wait, this is a bunch of BS, right?

Speaker 1 Because he finds one and she passes away, but there's others where the woman just goes, this is nonsense. I'm not putting up with this anymore.

Speaker 1 And it seems like for some people, there's no convincing them that their true love is not a good person, that it's not Johnny Depp, or they are being scammed.

Speaker 1 It's hard to get grandma to snap out of it, even if everybody's saying the same thing because they're living there and they're saying, your family just doesn't want you to be happy, all this, you know, or whatever.

Speaker 1 How did emma snap out of it for example

Speaker 3 so emma and jason of course they meet online on plenty of fish and they start dating everything was good at the beginning i think she started figuring things out even before things got a lot serious he proposed to her and it wasn't this grand gesture you know he didn't get down on one knee and propose to her they were both from previous marriages right so this is their second marriage and they wanted to have a simple wedding right before the wedding, Jason tells Emma that he has to leave town.

Speaker 3 He has some sort of business meeting and he was going to take his wedding suit for this meeting. And she's like, no, no, no, this is our wedding's on Saturday.
You got to wear that suit on Saturday.

Speaker 3 Jason goes off, wears the suit to this meeting. It turns out that he was already seeing someone else.
You see, these guys, they're not just targeting one person.

Speaker 3 They are overlapping, making sure that they got their next victim lined up.

Speaker 1 I mean, you have to, because if you get kicked out of grandma's house, you're going to be homeless if you got to start from scratch trying to meet someone and plenty of fish, right?

Speaker 1 You got to have somebody who's a few months down the funnel for them. And then you go, oh, my work contract ended in Alabama.
I want to come live with you now. Oh, yay.

Speaker 1 It's that kind of nonsense, I assume.

Speaker 3 Yeah, so he comes back from his meeting. They get married.
You know, she didn't get the wedding that she wanted. Pretty soon things started to unravel.
He was mooching off of her.

Speaker 3 He would not get a job. She's paying for everything.

Speaker 3 And like I said earlier, he's now bringing in his mother and his brother to live with her. And she's having to take a second job.
And she's running out of money.

Speaker 3 And I think that's when eventually when she hits rock bottom, that's when she realizes, hey, I got to get out of this.

Speaker 3 And not only get out of this, she abandoned her own home, most of her possessions, just to get out of the situation. That was an easier option.
than to try to fight him.

Speaker 3 And yeah, he just took off and ran.

Speaker 3 And that business meeting, it was for sure another woman because later on emma starts connecting with some of these women oh geez so what did the family miss that allowed this to happen or were they on it from the beginning and the victims not listening in this case melany was living on her own with a child but In the case of Emma, she was a single mom, so she was living on her own with her child.

Speaker 3 But in the case of Melanie, the woman here in the United States that died from the Parkinson's like disease, Jason met her family.

Speaker 3 He won their approval he said hey i don't mind taking care of your mom if she's sick i've done this stuff before like i've taken care of people in need before i got this and he earned their trust and they actually thought that was a good thing because a lot of the children don't even live in the same state as their mom so right so he's a godsend there's a guy and mom likes him and he's okay bathing her and reminding her to take her medicine and it's just he's an angel right and then it's like well yeah and it kind of works out right because they don't have to interrupt their own lives.

Speaker 3 They don't have to go move in with mom and take care of her. They don't have to go find a place that would take care of her.
So it seemed like a win-win situation for everyone.

Speaker 3 I think when it started getting kind of weird was

Speaker 3 when all of a sudden he starts taking control of everything and they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. But by that time, it was too late.
He was already in.

Speaker 1 How did he end up taking control? He just took her to the lawyer and she was a little bit out of it and he had her sign her rights away. Is that it?

Speaker 3 That's what I'm trying to figure out because when you look at her will, there have to be witnesses. And so people were there.

Speaker 3 And these were her friends that she obviously convinced that they were going to get married. In the will, he's listed as the executor of her will, but he's also her fiancé.

Speaker 3 So they never did get married, but her friends must have thought that this was a legitimate relationship.

Speaker 1 Wow. I'm a terrible liar.
Really bad. Real bad.
Like, it's pathetic, actually.

Speaker 1 A lot of my friends are like, you you know, that game, Two Truths and a Lie that you play when you're getting to know people at parties.

Speaker 1 I am the worst at this game to the point where last time I played it, it was me and three women who are all about my age. And I did it.
And they simultaneously, when I lied, started laughing.

Speaker 1 And they were like, wow, you're so bad at this.

Speaker 1 And my friend Jackie was like, wow, it's actually charming that you're this bad of a liar because your wife must love that because you couldn't ever say anything untrue and not get caught.

Speaker 1 Like, it's that bad. This guy, meanwhile, has convinced family, friends, lawyers, everybody, I'm here for your benefit and I'm good for you.

Speaker 1 This is so far away is on the absolute opposite of whatever spectrum of good liar that I'm on.

Speaker 1 I almost have to give you a little bit of a slow clap, even though you're a serious bastard, just for the skill involved. in duping this many people without tipping your hand.
It's incredible to me.

Speaker 3 You have to believe your own bullshit, right? In order to be

Speaker 3 that good of a liar. I did a series on the polygraph machine, how to beat and cheat the polygraph machine.

Speaker 3 I wonder, I really wonder if these guys, like these con artists, if they could take a polygraph test and actually beat it, you know, because they are that convincing.

Speaker 3 There are like tall tale signs that you're lying. I know that.

Speaker 1 when you lie and when you get scared fear has a smell apparently you have glands that when you're scared they mix in with the bacteria of your body and they foul odor but i think that's because you and i are we don't like lying we feel uncomfortable lying these guys that's their comfort zone yeah they're maybe getting a thrill out of it or it doesn't affect them at all and so they're able to do it with complete nonchalance which gives them a massive advantage because most of us would never dream that somebody's actually doing this to us No normal person thinks this person's just pretending to love me so they can get in my will, even though I'm poor.

Speaker 1 That's insane. But here we are.
All right. So Operation Cockblock, I love this.
This is the Revenge of the Romance scammed.

Speaker 1 It's a group of scammed women who formed a posse, essentially, because look, Javier, usually when somebody gets conned in a romance scam, they want to disappear quietly.

Speaker 1 Their family might know, but they feel ashamed. They're super embarrassed.
They're isolated sometimes. But this group of women, they didn't just survive the scam.
They basically formed this team.

Speaker 1 And then they expose the scammer and they start warning other people, which is actually hilarious and definitely the right way to handle this. Get angry and take action.
I love it.

Speaker 3 Yeah. And you're right.

Speaker 3 Most victims of any con artists, they feel so ashamed that they don't want to tell their story because they've been violated, like their trust, and they're no longer trusting people.

Speaker 3 But I think that's what's unique about the story because these women were so pissed off that they were had by this guy, they took it upon themselves to form a Facebook group where they find each other and compare notes.

Speaker 3 They even gave themselves type of like military ranking type of names. There was Sergeant Cockblock.

Speaker 3 It was funny, but at the same time, it was very serious because this guy, Bill Sullivan, they say he completely wrecked their lives. He was out in Colorado, and this was his thing.

Speaker 3 He appeared like a successful business guy. He wore nice clothes, nice suits.
He would whine and dine these women, but slowly but surely, he was getting into their bank account.

Speaker 3 And this is the mind-boggling stuff. Some of these women, they bought him cars.
They bought him cars, not just once, but over and over again.

Speaker 3 And it's one of those things where you're like, come on, man. You should have learned after the first car.
And these weren't like Honda Civics or Toyota Camrys.

Speaker 3 These were Mercedes, Land Rovers, really nice cars. And these women were had over and over again.
But they joined a network. They say that they have over 100 women that he's targeted.

Speaker 3 And still, even today, I get women that are reaching out to me wanting to connect with them because he's still out there. That's another thing, Jordan.

Speaker 3 A lot of these stories, they're infuriating when you hear them, but then they're even more infuriating when you find out that nothing happens to these guys.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's one of the worst parts. So this guy, Bill Sullivan, claims to be a single dad and successful, like you said.

Speaker 1 But he's really married, juggling multiple girlfriends and running up credit card bills in their name. Javier, we're in the wrong business, man.

Speaker 1 This guy has multiple women paying for all of his stuff, and they give him credit cards and cars. So they didn't buy the car for him outright, correct?

Speaker 1 He said something like, I need to make the payments on this, but I need you to co-sign it because blah, blah, blah. And they were like, okay.

Speaker 3 Right. Cause he has no credit.
He has no credit. So they would just open up credit cards for him.
One person put him under the mortgage.

Speaker 3 That's the brilliant part because these are their responsibilities, not him, because he's just asking them to do all this stuff for them, but they are ultimately responsible when the bill comes.

Speaker 3 You know?

Speaker 1 I would just love to be a fly on the wall for this conversation. So I have no credit because reasons, right? Oh, my business, something.
So my credit's all.

Speaker 1 So I need a Mercedes, a Land Rover, and I forget what the other one was. And you need to co-sign it, but don't worry.
I'm going to be making the payments. In the episode, she's like, what do I care?

Speaker 1 As long as he's making the payments. What if he stops making the payments, numb nuts? Which surprise, that's what happened.

Speaker 1 And again, I hate that I'm like victim shaming a little bit because these women really are victims, but at some point, you just got to be like, you're just face palming because you're going, how did you not see some red flags here?

Speaker 3 Some of them had the red flag. Like this guy was part of a business.
It was, remember laser discs back in the, what was that, early 90s or whatever?

Speaker 1 Gigantic C Ds, basically, that had movies on them.

Speaker 3 He worked at this company. Laser discs were big at the time, and he was a top executive on the company.
I think he was their chief financial officer, which is pretty ironic.

Speaker 3 And the whole time he's embezzling funds from this company, he ultimately gets busted, goes to jail. And some of these women that he were dating, they knew about this.

Speaker 3 But even knowing that this guy embezzled money from a company, they would still trust him enough to give him money.

Speaker 1 At some point, this is on you. Like, maybe not all of it.
Nobody deserves to be ripped off, victimized, and conned.

Speaker 1 But when you go, he embezzled from his job and got fired and put in prison, but he would never do that to me.

Speaker 1 This is the equivalent of putting a dog in your house with your wife and kids that has bitten every owner it's had and was about to be put down.

Speaker 1 And you go, yeah, but she was so sweet to me at the shelter. Just wait, dummy.
It's going to happen. So it shouldn't come as a surprise.
to anyone that he was doing this. It's really, really shocking.

Speaker 1 So this woman, Dana, was the first person to put the pieces together. She notices inconsistencies in his story and she starts digging.
So this woman is quite sharp.

Speaker 1 And by the way, if I ever tried to do this, this would happen on my second date, right? I could never keep a bunch of BS stories together coherently.

Speaker 1 So, if I dated anybody like Dana, I would have zero chance of ever getting away with these scams. So, Dana's like, wait a minute, I thought you said this and that and the other thing.

Speaker 1 How do you investigate somebody? I don't even know. I've never investigated a date of mine.
What did she even start looking for?

Speaker 3 I think it's because these guys, even though it sounds really sophisticated, they weren't that sophisticated. These women knew about each other.

Speaker 3 So, as he was dating one woman, they found out about the other woman. And he didn't keep it secret.
There was one woman that was upstairs while he was downstairs with another woman in the basement.

Speaker 3 Like he would actually bring some of these women to their homes. So it's not as sophisticated as we think they should be.

Speaker 1 No, but having your one girlfriend upstairs while you're in the basement with another girl, I probably wouldn't have even tried that in high school. You're going to get caught.

Speaker 3 And I just want to know what, but like this guy must have either be like extremely good looking or have tons of confidence, but I want some of that, man. Like put that in a cologne form.

Speaker 1 A little bit of that Riz would go a long way. Yeah.
Yeah. That's ridiculous.
Like, yes, exactly. Cause we know he's not rich.
That's the point. So it ain't that.

Speaker 1 He must just filter for victims really well.

Speaker 3 The funny thing, and this is neither here or there, but it's kind of a interesting fact is that some of these women, and I didn't put this on the podcast, but some of these women even question his sexuality.

Speaker 3 They don't even think he was straight, which adds like this other layer of complexity, you know, like he's not using him for the romance. He's just using him for the scam part.

Speaker 1 Wow. That is next level.
Cause imagine, put the shoe on the other foot. Try to imagine that you're into the gender that you're not in order to scam.
You think the lying's hard.

Speaker 1 That's really hard at that point. That's difficult.

Speaker 3 Jason Bartlett, the playwright from the first story, should cast this guy as an actor. But of course, this is all speculation.

Speaker 3 I don't know that for sure, but that would be a very interesting twist if that were true.

Speaker 1 Jeez, wow. So, okay, so some of these women find each other.
They launch Operation Cockblock. They start reaching out to these other women.
What does the group look like?

Speaker 1 Is this just sort of them texting each other, or do they have this Facebook group? What is it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, actually.

Speaker 3 This is actually kind of neat because I didn't even know about this, but apparently, and I forget the name of the Facebook page, but several cities have this.

Speaker 1 When you've been dogged by a specific guy, you could post his picture on this one Facebook group, and women are like yeah i i dated that guy okay so as i heard the episode i actually wrote this down i think these groups are called it's like austin texas are we dating the same guy something like that yeah which is nuts and you can post a photo of the guy and be like hey this guy he is dating me but he's got a really suspiciously closed calendar and then other women might be like no he's dating me too other times they'll say hey i don't know if anyone's dating him but he turned out to be physically abusive or he stole from me or whatever.

Speaker 1 And there's other people that I know who are genuinely nice single guys who have sued these groups and people in these groups because stalkers can use it to ruin your life, right?

Speaker 1 There's stories online of people losing jobs because their ex is, he stole from me and he was abusive. He's like, how do I prove that I didn't do any of this? She was fine dating me for three years.

Speaker 1 And then when I broke up with her, suddenly I'm an abusive thief. So it can be misused.
I mean, it's a powerful weapon. But but yes, those groups do exist.

Speaker 1 So, they basically created one of these, right? The Bill Sullivan Operation Cock Block. Here's photos.
Are they tracking his location and stuff like that?

Speaker 1 Because I assume if you got 100 women, you're not doing this all in one city. That's impossible.

Speaker 3 Well, we know where he is. He's in the Colorado area.
We know where he lives. He's still living with one of the women right now who refuses to believe this stuff.
And the mortgage is under her name.

Speaker 3 And yeah, he's still living living with her as of now.

Speaker 1 Imagine being that delusional. So look, if you have a crazy ex and you can tell your new girlfriend, my ex is crazy, you might get away with that.

Speaker 1 If you've got two crazy exes, you got a bad picker, a new woman might, after a while, believe that. If you have a hundred crazy exes,

Speaker 1 maybe they're not crazy. Especially when they have a Facebook group with court records and photographs and stuff like that.

Speaker 1 Maybe at that point, the evidence just becomes so overwhelming you should pay attention, but it shows you what the cognitive dissonance is like in a scam victim, that this guy's the victim and he needs to live with me and I need to support him because these hundred women are gang stalking him.

Speaker 3 The sad part is these women, at least a lot of the ones that I spoke to on this case, they haven't dated or have any plans on getting married. He ruined romance for them altogether.

Speaker 3 Why would you get into a relationship after you encounter a guy like that?

Speaker 1 Wait, so this guy has essentially burned these people so bad it's ruined dating for them?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I spoke to one that they're like, forget it. They just don't know how to trust again.
How do you trust somebody after something like that?

Speaker 1 No, but that's terrible, though. That's really sad because now these women are essentially, they're not going to allow themselves to be happy.

Speaker 1 Because of this. Oh, man, that's really terrible.

Speaker 3 Right? Like, the money is bad, right?

Speaker 3 But you can recover money, but you cannot ever recover trust once it's violated and they feel stupid like a lot of the people that i talk to on my show it's not just romance scams any victim of a con artist that i speak to they are just so embarrassed constantly they're like i'm so stupid i'm so stupid and imagine thinking about yourself that way it's like that sucks they're never going to be the same again We've exposed enough catfish for the moment.

Speaker 1 Now, let's reel in a couple of legitimate deals. We'll be right back.

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Speaker 1 If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. They make the show possible.

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Speaker 1 We are happy to surface codes for you because it is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Javier Leyva,

Speaker 1 I have an episode that hasn't come out yet with this former cocaine smuggler for Pablo Escobar. And he actually was not a criminal before.

Speaker 1 What happened was his dad died and he got scammed by some other guy again. And he was 20 or something, trying to deal with his dad's estate.
And his family didn't know.

Speaker 1 And he was trying to make it and trying to finish this business that his father had started and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he was just like, oh, I see.

Speaker 1 In this world, the people that make it are the people that scam other people, that break the law, that don't take any prisoners and are no holds barred. So he becomes a cocaine smuggler.

Speaker 1 Cause one, he needs the money to finish the business, but two, he's like, screw ethics.

Speaker 1 This has only gotten me screwed over by other people i'm gonna start smuggling drugs because i need the money and also like screw it people who obey the law are basically suckers is that the same guy from cocaine air yes it's the guy from cocaine air yeah that's right yeah that's why he's cool he's a cuban guy yeah yeah i grew up in miami in the 80s so there's a lot of cocaine stories geez yeah i can imagine once again we're in the wrong business we became podcasters when there's all these good scams out there and cocaine business here we are behind microphones like a couple of dorks were Were the police involved at any point?

Speaker 1 Because once you've got a hundred scam victims, it's like, come on, detective, how much more information do you need to come up with some charges with the DA here? This is crazy.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, nothing serious, right? The only legal consequences that Bill Sullivan got was from his involvement in that company that he ripped off.

Speaker 3 But from these women, sometimes they would call the cops because they wanted their possessions back. They wanted the car back or something like that.

Speaker 3 But in terms of has he been prosecuted because of some of these romance scams? No, not really. Because it's on paper, it's what did he do? Convince somebody?

Speaker 3 They willingly put their name on that loan or you're right.

Speaker 1 I mean, when things get really bad, there are ways like with Diddy, it's like, okay, well, we're going to throw some trafficking stuff at you or fraudulently this, that, and the other thing.

Speaker 1 But you're right. It's tough to go through text messages where someone's like, hey, baby, my business is really screwed up my credit and I really need a car because I can't go to meetings.

Speaker 1 Will you co-sign a Mercedes for me? Sure, anything for you. It's like, you weren't exactly coerced.

Speaker 3 The crime is that he's an asshole.

Speaker 1 Yeah, a charming asshole.

Speaker 3 That he's a liar. What's the crime?

Speaker 1 It's tough.

Speaker 1 I got to wonder what the reaction is when a new woman sees the posts in the group. Do you have any experience sort of with this?

Speaker 1 Like, what happens when they're like, oh, I found a new person he's dating? And they're like, look at all this. Do they just pick their jaw up off the floor and dump him?

Speaker 1 Or how does it kind of go down?

Speaker 3 I mean, just recently, I got an Instagram message from a woman that's like, I need to get a hold of these women right away. It's almost like she's just discovering this right now.

Speaker 3 And that must be a very unsettling feeling. Could you imagine? We both probably have significant others and we think they're normal or whatever.

Speaker 3 And then you find out that they're like these crazy masterminds that have swindled all these people.

Speaker 1 It's got to just be so jarring. My wife, I don't know how the hell she would have time for that.
We have two kids. That's the thing.

Speaker 1 thing none of these people have kids once you have kids you don't have time to scam anybody there's no time what's cool about this group is it's an open source intelligence powered movement they use google social media court records They came with the goods, man.

Speaker 3 This was the best kind of case when they come to you, not with just these claims, but they just bring all this research that they've collected over the years. And you start verifying all this.

Speaker 3 And these women were serious.

Speaker 3 That's why I love the name Operation Cockbok because they treated it like they were going to war with this guy and they even got the cover of the local paper one day with this story which is cool you know like they feel some sort of pride that they are letting other women know that this guy's out there that's a good story in terms of yeah these women have been scammed but they didn't take it and just hide they did something with it Yeah, man, they track his lies.

Speaker 1 They crowdsource his patterns.

Speaker 1 They basically built something that law enforcement couldn't do, which is a coordinated victim network, which, again, is great, but it does make me sad that many of them are maybe unable to really move on truly because of the damage that he's done.

Speaker 1 Because if you're still participating in this group and you're still tracking this guy, that's one thing.

Speaker 1 But if you're doing it because you can't trust a man again, that just really breaks my heart a little bit. Yeah.
Man. And platforms can't do anything about this, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, plenty of fish isn't going to police the people. Facebook's not going to do anything.
Dating apps aren't going to do anything.

Speaker 3 They just keep creating accounts and they keep spinning up names. Like Jason Bartlett, the guy from the first story that we talked about, he has tons of different aliases.

Speaker 3 They're usually different combinations of Jason, Bartlett, and this and that. Not only do they keep moving on, they keep changing their identity.
So it's really hard to nail down.

Speaker 1 I want to, before we run out of time here, quickly go over this Ohio State quarterback. He wasn't this super romantic, charming guy.
He was kind of like a woe is me.

Speaker 1 I'm down and out and I need your help kind of guy. Like he'd just take a totally different tack with this.

Speaker 3 This is the story of Arch Schleister. He was Ohio State quarterback.
Really, from what I could tell, I'm not a big Ohio State fan, but he was a big deal back then. You know what I mean?

Speaker 3 He was like a very promising football player, but he fell down on his luck. He started gambling and maybe some drug addiction and just lost everything.
Meanwhile, Wendy's is based out of Ohio.

Speaker 3 Everybody knows Dave Thomas or whatever. But after he left the company, another CEO moved in.
He passed away and the wife of that CEO, she inherited his entire fortune. Okay.

Speaker 3 So here you have this widow in Ohio that has tons of money. And guess who shows up at her door? Art Schlester.
At one time, he was a big deal, but now he's just a gambler.

Speaker 1 So he just literally kind of weasels his way into her life. And he's well known enough to be like, hey, do you remember me? I was a big deal once.

Speaker 3 Oh, she knew who he was. And in fact, her son was involved in a plane crash and he was the only survivor.
And Arch Lister came to the hospital because his son liked him. That's how they reconnected.

Speaker 3 And so he came into their life very organically. It wasn't like, I don't think he tried to groom her.
And that's another thing. I don't think a lot of these guys start.

Speaker 3 Maybe some of these guys do, but not all of these guys start with bad intentions. They're just opportunists.
And Anita is the name of the widow. They form a friendship.

Speaker 3 And I tried pressing her on this because I wanted to know, is this a romance scam? Like, did they have a romantic relationship? She denies it, but they were very close.

Speaker 3 And to the point where he starts asking her to loan him money for these small investments. And of course, they always promise that they're going to pay you back.

Speaker 3 And a little bit here, a little bit there turned into over a million dollars. And this lady basically eventually gave him all of her money, all of it.

Speaker 3 But here's where it gets really interesting, Jordan, because now she's broke. So what does she do? She now becomes a con artist.

Speaker 3 She starts asking her rich friends for money in order to give it to this guy. And you got to wonder what kind of spell was she under?

Speaker 1 Yeah. She must have had millions and millions and millions of dollars.
You think at this point, this guy's like, screw it. I got $30 million.
I don't need to keep pressing this old lady for money.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I think he just went to the casino with it and he did some bad investments. It turned into a real high pressure situation.

Speaker 3 If we're doing like a cliff notes version of the story, you might ask yourself, how the heck does that happen?

Speaker 3 These con artists, they put you in a very stressful position to think that you're under a threat.

Speaker 3 He borrowed money from her to pay off these guys, and now he owes these guys money and they're coming after him. So she's scared.
She's scared for him. She's scared for her.

Speaker 3 And that's what creates this pressure cooker scenario where she's now asking for loans from people in her network. And eventually, you know, it all comes crashing down and the spell is broken.

Speaker 3 But at that point, she's broke. Now this woman who should be, and she's still around as far as I know, she should be living the last years of her life without any stress in the world.

Speaker 3 She should have everything in the world. Her husband earned it, right? And she has nothing.
She's going to probably die an old poor woman. Wow.

Speaker 1 I feel bad for the kids who are supposed to maybe inherit that money and use it to pay for their kids' college or buy homes with it. And now it's like, oh, all that's gone.

Speaker 1 I hope they have careers of their own. The thing is, once you start borrowing money on behalf of a con artist, you are, like you said, also a con artist.

Speaker 1 She becomes complicit, maybe without realizing it at first until it all collapses. I don't know.

Speaker 3 It's hard to say without the details, but I think at a certain point, you are so caught up in it that even if you do realize it, it's a little too late. You're in it.
So you got to keep going.

Speaker 1 And how do you recover then, of course, when you realize you helped scam your own friends on behalf of someone?

Speaker 1 Because your social circle, your support network is also ruined now because, oh, this is supposed to be a temporary loan and then it's just gone. And your friends like, oh, this guy scammed you.

Speaker 1 Wait, you must have known about that. Where was your money? Oh, he scammed you.
And then you turned around and scammed me. I don't ever want to talk to you again.
That's terrible.

Speaker 3 Yeah, it is crazy. And you know what? Eventually, R.
Schleiser

Speaker 3 went to prison and he died in prison from some sort of disease. So he didn't have a happy ending either.

Speaker 3 And it's sad because I do think that this is one of those cases where it was his addiction that led him to do this. Whereas some of these other guys, you got to question their motivation.

Speaker 3 What's their origin story? Like, how'd they become this way?

Speaker 1 Was she naive or was she emotionally compromised? Can you kind of explain the difference here?

Speaker 1 Because I think some people are naive, at least in the beginning, but eventually Bill Sullivan's newest girlfriend who lives with him and doesn't trust that these hundred plus women are telling the truth.

Speaker 1 At some point, you're just delusional. At what point do they cross over into this?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't know. I sometimes I question everything, even things in the news, where I feel like in this day and age, we all like to believe our own version of reality.

Speaker 3 You could be faced with facts and it doesn't matter. You know what I mean? Whatever makes you feel.
Yeah. Whatever your flavor of truth is.
I don't know, man.

Speaker 3 But I do think that she was naive at first. And maybe she's just not a very strong personality.

Speaker 1 Maybe, but gosh, now that she's facing the possibility, I'm lawsuits potentially. Jeez, look, before we go, I'd love to talk red flags.

Speaker 1 You know, what should we slash our parents, slash our family members, what should we be watching for?

Speaker 1 Obviously, if some random person that your mom meets on Plenty of Fish moves in, that's a big problem. But there's got to be a few things before that.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. And it's one of those things where, so I heard this thing on TikTok once where this guy was playing static.

Speaker 3 It was like very noisy and you could hear a voice behind it, but you couldn't make out what he was saying and then he explained to you exactly what was said in the video and then he played it again and now you could hear it perfectly because you had some context and so that's the same thing with con artists and this goes beyond just romance scams a lot of con artists they are very generous at first all right they're the types of people that are gonna pick up the tab when you go to dinner they're buying you stuff they're very generous and they're doing that it's almost like they're fattening you up for when they need that favor When they need that favor, when they need that loan, you wouldn't question it because this guy is so generous.

Speaker 3 Why wouldn't I trust him with money?

Speaker 3 Another thing is when somebody smothers you and just consumes all of your time, that's a warning sign too, because what they're doing is that they're cutting you off from your surroundings.

Speaker 3 They are also creating tense situations where you can't think. clearly because if something happens that's really bad at the spur of the moment, you kind of bypass your reasoning.

Speaker 3 You and I would normally think, like, hey, wait, well, I should probably call this number back to make sure they are who they say they are, or I should call a friend and ask them what they think.

Speaker 3 No, they create the urgency so that you could make stupid decisions. And honestly, when you start seeing all these signs,

Speaker 3 you recognize that maybe this is a situation where you got to create personal space. When somebody asks you for your phone password right away, it's like, why do you need to know my phone password?

Speaker 3 You don't trust me? No.

Speaker 3 Hey, I trust you, but you have to create boundaries because if they know your password, especially if you recycle your password, if you use the same password for your email as your bank account, that's a really bad thing.

Speaker 3 And so you have to create boundaries so that some things are just for you. And then also, like, I've heard somebody say that a lot of times these things are very small little red flags.

Speaker 3 But if you write them down and just put them in a jar or something like that, you start realizing that this jar is starting to fill up. These little red flags turn into a really big red flag.

Speaker 3 And maybe that's metaphorical. Maybe you don't really literally need a jar, but you have to start taking these things into account.
And don't forget your friends and don't forget your family.

Speaker 3 Their opinion counts and you should take it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the sort of fast escalation, right? The moving in, we should get married, we should share our finances, but that doesn't just happen in a vacuum, right?

Speaker 1 There's love bombing involved, I would imagine, in the beginning. Like you said, they fatten you up by, they'll take the check, and then maybe they'll take you on a trip, and they'll drive you places.

Speaker 1 This is what you hear about some of these guys who go after the elderly, especially. It's like they're isolated, they don't have any place to go.
Oh, he takes me out to lunch every day, and he pays.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because he's going to take your retirement funds.

Speaker 3 Lunch is a lot cheaper.

Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah.
And what about the sob story element?

Speaker 1 I know that's that's what the ohio state football guy was using right one of the earlier guys jason bartlett right he had it's like oh my my kid died it was murdered and then i medical issues and my family is estranged and it goes back to what i said at the top of the show oh my friend is an architect working in indonesia and then she got in a car accident and then someone stole her purse out of the car so the hospital won't release her because she's got to have surgeries and i need to help pay for that and the embassy won't help because her passport was in her purse and she can't can't prove she's American.

Speaker 1 And it's like, do you hear yourself? But if you've been dealing with this person and they've built a bunch of trust, right, the sob story makes way more sense.

Speaker 1 And if you don't listen to podcasts like this and you haven't heard this a thousand times, it's like, oh my gosh, do you just have terrible luck? No, no, no. This is a script.

Speaker 3 These guys are exploiting what makes us human, which is the fact that we are trusting. Trust by default, it's a fault theory, right?

Speaker 3 Where we don't have enough time in the day to question everything around us. Because if we do, well, hey, first of all, we live a very pessimistic life, right? We trust people.
We have to trust.

Speaker 1 And society would grind to a halt if we had to verify, is this guy with the UPS uniform really the UPS guy? Should I open the door? No, I should shoot at him from my roof with a rifle.

Speaker 1 You can't function in society if you don't automatically trust that most people are who they say they are.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and they exploit that and they know exactly what they're doing. And so if somebody comes to you with a wild story, you got to say, that seems plausible.

Speaker 3 Oh, you used to be a CIA agent out in the Ukraine or whatever. I don't know.
And then you're like, chances are he probably wasn't, but somebody has to be, right? Like somebody has that job.

Speaker 3 And so just because there's that level of plausibility, you accept it as truth.

Speaker 1 What role does shame play in keeping people quiet?

Speaker 1 I mean, you have the Operation Cockblock ladies who just decided we're not going to let shame dictate what we do, but in a way they kind of are because, look, they're exposing him, but they're also so burned that they're not dating again.

Speaker 1 And that's, I think that's one of the real sad takeaways from this is that these people, they might be getting their revenge in some ways, but they've still lost because they're so damaged from the victimization and the con game that they're not having relationships anymore.

Speaker 3 The shame is what perpetuates this whole thing, right?

Speaker 3 Talking about this on a podcast might sound weird, but it's actually very helpful because you are also warning other people and they can learn from your experiences.

Speaker 3 But a lot of these people don't want to share their story because they're ashamed. And the reason why these guys get away with this stuff is because they're counting on you to be ashamed, right?

Speaker 3 Because if you're ashamed, you're not going to tell other people and they can just move on to their next victim.

Speaker 1 That's right. Javier, thank you so much, man.
We'll link to the pretend podcast, your podcast, in the show notes. And I've been on there before.

Speaker 1 I think we talked about Frank Abignale, who's been on this show, who turned out to be a complete fraud. And not in the way that we think.
We thought, oh, he's what a good con man.

Speaker 1 Turns out even all that was just made-up nonsense.

Speaker 3 You had a fantastic interview with Frank Abignal, probably the last interview that Frank Abignal gave in character before his cover was blown.

Speaker 1 That's right. He was still, oh, I did all this stuff.
And then a couple months later, that expose came out where his life fell apart.

Speaker 1 I really thought that guy had it made, man, because he had the Hollywood movie. He had the book.
He had the speaking gigs.

Speaker 1 He was like the face of anti-scam, this, that, and the other thing, the scammer that had turned out to be a good guy.

Speaker 1 And what's interesting is when I started looking at his anti-scam techniques, I was like, these are really not that innovative, not that interesting. You'd think a really good con man.

Speaker 1 would have really deep knowledge of how scams work and this has really surfaced and I was like oh well maybe it's for a lay audience I wonder what his consulting stuff is but 2020 hindsight when I pressed him on that stuff during the interview I ended up cutting it out because he didn't really have any meat on the bone.

Speaker 1 And I was kind of surprised by that. And I thought, oh, well, maybe it's context dependent or he's tired.
He doesn't want to talk about that.

Speaker 1 And now that I know he's completely made up everything that he did in the movie and the book, now I think he doesn't have any really deep anti-scam knowledge because he isn't actually a sophisticated scammer.

Speaker 1 He's just a bumpkin who made up a story.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he's a scammer, just not a very sophisticated one. And you pressed him.
I forgot what you asked him, but you got him good, even not knowing the truth about his story.

Speaker 3 You were able to press him and it was a fantastic interview. So if your audience hasn't listened to it, I think it's your first episode, right?

Speaker 1 It's episode number one of the Jordan Harbinger show, yeah.

Speaker 1 And then you can listen to how it all ended up falling apart on Javier's podcast, which called Pretend, which, again, we'll link in the show notes. Thanks for coming on the show, man.

Speaker 1 The romance scam stuff, very sad, but I'm hoping this gives people kind of like the, oh, my mom is talking with people online. I should pay attention.
Or my daughter is talking with people online.

Speaker 1 I should pay attention. Because you're right.

Speaker 1 We monitor our teens, but we don't monitor our 75-year-olds whose spouse passed away and they moved across the country to be closer to the grandkids and now they're lonely. It's like, that scares me.

Speaker 1 That puts the bug into my head too, man.

Speaker 3 That's awesome. Thank you so much for having me on the show, man.
I love that we connected and that we're collaborating again.

Speaker 1 Yeah, my pleasure, man. Thanks for coming on.

Speaker 1 What happens when you speak out against Vladimir Putin and the KGB starts showing up in your life outside of Russia? Konstantin Somoilov didn't just flee his homeland to avoid conscription.

Speaker 1 He's now exposing the regime from abroad with a target on his back.

Speaker 1 It's unbelievable. The Russian state didn't care about what was being said about it on the outside.
All they cared was on the inside.

Speaker 1 But now the focus has shifted on telling the truth about Russia, how things are. And my YouTube channel started growing.

Speaker 1 The numbers exploded because everyone wanted to be a part of a community, a support group. And I think that I'm becoming a bigger and bigger danger to them.

Speaker 1 So they're trying to neutralize me one way or another. Knowing that I am a narrator is one thing, but when you see actually an agent in real life, that's a different ballgame.
I'm not stopping.

Speaker 1 I keep on talking because I was silent for 15 years. I was looking at my country going down to hell and I wasn't doing anything about it.
So there's no way they're gonna shut me up.

Speaker 1 Even if I put myself into more danger, I think that's more important right now to tell the truth of what's really happening in Russia. If not me, then who?

Speaker 1 To hear more about life under dictatorship, the myths of Russian strength, and what it really costs to tell the truth, check out episode 1021 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Speaker 1 Thanks to Javier for coming on the show. If you like stories and investigations like this, check out Javier's podcast, Pretend.
He's always investigating some crazy new crimes and scams.

Speaker 1 And I actually did an episode there a while ago where I talked about my experience interviewing Frank W. Abignale.
That That was episode one of this show and how that turned out to all be a big scam.

Speaker 1 Because I don't know if many of you know this, Frank Abignale turned out to not have done any of the things that he did in that movie, Catch Me If You Can.

Speaker 1 So his scam was that his stories about scams were a scam and a big lie. And he turned out to be in prison the whole time.
And the whole thing is made up. Crazy.
Scamception, I guess.

Speaker 1 All things Javier will be in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Advertisers, deals, discount codes, ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com slash deals.

Speaker 1 Please consider supporting those who support the show. Also, our newsletter, We BitWiser, is a great read.
It's two minutes every Wednesday, under two minutes, actually. It's practical, it's specific.

Speaker 1 It'll have immediate impact on your decisions, your psychology, your relationships, and it's a great companion to the show. JordanHarbinger.com slash news is where you can find it.

Speaker 1 Don't forget about Six Minute Networking as well over at sixminutenetworking.com. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and Instagram.

Speaker 1 I'm also on LinkedIn with a bunch of other people who haven't succumbed to social media brain rot. This show is created in association with Podcast One.

Speaker 1 My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Tadas Sedlowskis, Ian Baird, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

Speaker 1 The fee for the show is you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about.

Speaker 1 If you know somebody who's interested in scams, fraud, romance scams, or maybe has somebody close to them going through one of these, definitely share this episode with them.

Speaker 1 In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.

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