The Internet Was a Mistake
His Time
Online dating is mostly terrible. Despite its increasing popularity, anyone who’s done it knows it’s largely a string of disappointments, punctuated with the occasional success. Scammers have adapted to this new environment, a rich sea of potential marks.
Derek Alldred was a serial con man and online predator - his prey were divorcees and widows, trying to find love online. He concocted a series of elaborate personas, fooling women into trusting him and letting him into their lives, where he would use that trust to steal from them and leave them in ruins.
According to the accounts of his victims, his stories had many of the same characteristics, though he changed some of the details. He was a Navy vet, a SEAL, he had a daughter and a dog, a dead mother, and lots of medical issues that had him going to the hospital all the time. He was a university professor, complete with campus ID and credible backstory. He was chivalrous, he paid for meals and offered them support in their personal lives - he’d move in with the women soon after meeting them.
Then, the troubles would start. He was moody, and had lots of personal drama. Things were always happening to him, usually problems with his family. His health was a constant issue. Typically, the relationships would break down as he became more and more difficult to deal with. What the women didn’t find out until later was that he was using this time to steal their money and valuables.
In all, Alldred stole almost a million dollars from a dozen women. How was he able to do this?
He tended to look for women in their 40s or 50s, preferably divorced, preferably with a couple of kids and a dog or two. Many of his victims were in a vulnerable place in their lives—recently divorced, fresh out of an abusive relationship, or recovering from a serious accident—and he presented himself as a hero and caretaker, the man who would step in and save the day. Even women who weren’t struggling when they met Derek soon found their lives destabilized by the chaos he brought—they lost jobs, had panic attacks, became estranged from family members.
It may seem outrageous that he was able to steal from all of these women and escape punishment, but law enforcement is typically hesitant to prosecute these types of crimes.
Derek’s victims kept underlining this point, I think, because they understood that crimes against women, particularly ones that happen in a domestic context, are often discounted. “It’s a he-said, she-said domestic fight” to the police, Linda said. “They lump it right in with divorce and family law.” She said an officer told her, “Well, it’s not like anyone got hurt; we have higher priorities.” They knew that some people hear dating scam and translate that to pathetic/desperate woman.
When Derek would commit other crimes - he regularly ran out on hotel bills - he’d serve a short jail sentence or simply skip town, exposing another weakness of the criminal justice system. Local police can’t do much when the perpetrator is constantly crossing city and state lines.
In the end, Derek was undone by the women he’d victimized. Unbeknownst to him, they had created a support group led by one of his early victims. She bravely made herself public, and women searching for more information on the con man would find her on Google. She listened to their stories, and would invite them in to a group chat they had been using to try to bring him to justice.
The women were able to find a chink in Derek’s armor - he was pretending to be a Navy vet. This violated federal law, and they eventually got a hold of NCIS - yes, that NCIS - who started an investigation and eventually set up a sting operation with one of his girlfriends, Tracie. For this, she’s my MVP:
When Derek was ready to be picked up, Tracie alerted the NCIS officer and his team. “They hightail it over there, and I’m on my way, too, because I’m not missing this,” Tracie told me. She pulled up to the patient loading area. Through the hospital’s sliding glass doors, she spied Derek in handcuffs, flanked by two agents. “I turn on my hazards, pop out with my cellphone, start snapping pictures,” Tracie said. “The NCIS agent is like, ‘No!,’ but I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, I need pictures of this. This is for justice for other people.’ ”
A few of the women Alldred had victimized were able to get some measure of financial relief - credit card companies didn’t hold them liable for his charges once he’d been arrested - but generally they were on the hook for it, not to mention the emotional damage he’d done. People found the story so compelling it’s now also a documentary on Oxygen, if you’d like to hear the story in their words.
Prince Khalid
Some con men seek lonely women on dating sites, others take advantage of some peoples’ “wealth blindness”.
Anthony Gignac, aka Prince Khalid bin al-Saud, spent most of his adult life pretending to be someone he was not. Unlike Alldred, who knew he was lying, there are questions whether Gignac had gone so deep into his role that he believed it. I’ll let one of his former associates explain:
“To play the role he played so well for so long, he had to believe the lie. He actually believes he is Khalid, the prince of Saudi Arabia. I was sucked into absolute mayhem. He dangled such a carrot. Even though you knew he was full of shit, the carrot was so big, and there was a 2.2 percent chance that there was some truth in his asinine lies, that you kept going. He was so talented, and pulled off so much shit, I don’t even know where to begin.”
Gignac was an adopted Colombian orphan, brought to the US at 7 years old with his brother to live in Michigan. Once he was there, he didn’t waste much time:
One day, when Tony was in sixth grade, his mother received a call. “Your Mercedes is ready,” the caller told her. Tony, it turned out, had duped a car dealership into believing that he was a Saudi prince whose dad was going to buy him a Mercedes. An eager salesman picked him up at a shopping mall and gave him some test rides.
One of the more…enjoyable elements of the story for me was Gignac’s ability to exploit American racism to pass himself off as Middle Eastern. Brown skin? Sir, your Mercedes is ready!
Gignac suffered a mental breakdown at 17, after his adopted parents divorced, and emerged from the hospital determined he would never return to a life of poverty, like what he had experienced as a child in Colombia. He thought, well, big:
Around the same time he was living with them, he had one of his first run-ins with the law: at age 17, he was caught masquerading as “Prince Adnan Khashoggi,” the notorious Saudi arms dealer, who was then the world’s richest man.
While we’re talking real Saudi princes, there is one element to Gignac’s story that is never fully explained. Some of those who knew him over the years said they’d seen evidence that Gignac had some sort of access to actual Saudi royalty. The story went that Gignac had a clandestine homosexual relationship with one of the princelings, and was receiving hush money to keep it quiet. Whether true or not, Gignac was unsatisfied with the arrangement, and continued to claim he was royalty.
One of his more outrageous scams happened while he was in jail awaiting trial and convinced a Miami lawyer that he was Khalid. The lawyer bailed him out, and sent two bondsmen with him on an incredible journey:
But on the way back to the detention center, the prince came up with another idea. “There’s an American Express office,” he told the bondsmen. “Can you stop there?”
He entered the office in tears, claiming he’d been mugged, his credit cards stolen. He said his father, the king, would be “most upset,” The Miami Herald later reported.
American Express agreed to issue a replacement card if he could correctly answer a security question: “What were your last two purchases?” Gignac, miraculously, was able to verify the last two purchases on the card belonging to the real Prince Khalid—one in California, one in France. “Fearful of offending Gignac if he truly was actually a prince, American Express issued him a Platinum card the next day,” the Herald reported. The card had a $200 million line of credit.
It later turned out he’d had insiders at AmEx who fed him the information in exchange for two Rolexes, but you have to respect the planning! Gignac wasn’t done:
Gignac immediately booked two limos and embarked on a shopping spree, his bondsmen in tow. Heading to a jeweler on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, he bought two Rolex watches, along with a bracelet covered in emeralds and diamonds. The bill came to $22,120.
Next, accompanied by O’Connell’s bondsmen, Gignac flew home to Michigan.
“He bought out the entire first-class cabin of a Delta flight,” O’Connell recalls. “Because a prince can’t sit on a plane with anyone else.” Gignac visited a university, where he promised to donate $1 million in exchange for a scholarship for a friend. Afterwards he turned around and headed back to Miami. “He flew up and back in one day,” O’Connell says. “We thought, He is the prince!”
American Express…quickly noticed something was wrong and flagged his card. The bondsmen showed up and brought him back to jail, though not before he almost got them arrested at the airport for “abducting” him.
Gignac served time for his various frauds and emerged even more determined to elevate his status. What he needed now, he decided, was an air of legitimacy to give him access to the truly wealthy. He found it in a British investment manager named Carl Williamson. He was taken in by Gignac’s claims and the promise of wealth, and quickly started a business relationship with the Prince.
Williamson also began to back up Gignac’s lies. He vouched that he had known the prince and his family for 20 years. He purchased diplomatic license plates for the prince’s Ferrari and Rolls-Royce on eBay. And he introduced the prince to an investment banker in London who specializes in connecting high-net-worth individuals with investment opportunities. At the prince’s request, she demonstrated her devotion by lending him $150,000.
Gignac went on a spree, convincing wealth investors to give or lend him money, and spending it on a lavish lifestyle. He traveled with an entourage and posted all of it on social media, building a fake following for his fake persona.
He flew high for awhile, bilking the wealthy and greedy out of millions, until he made a fatal mistake while trying to buy a stake in a luxury hotel, because why not?
Then, over dinner one night with the Soffer family at one of Aspen’s hottest restaurants, the prince made a fatal mistake. For his appetizer, he ordered prosciutto.
Undone by delicious pork! The feds were tipped off, and Gignac was thrown back into jail. Williamson, his sole co-conspirator, hanged himself after he was indicted.
Two of these stories now and I have to ask - what is it about fancy hotels? Whether it’s running out on the bill, or trying to buy one, they seem to be the Achilles heel of con men.
Inside Men
This story, about a military veteran who was catfished and extorted, and who went on to kill himself, is heartbreaking. It’s a sad example of a type of romance scam that can have devastating consequences - in this case, a person posing as a slightly underage girl lures young men to message her, then her “parents” contact the victim to extort money, threatening to call the policy for solicitation of a minor. The victim in this story, Jared, did nothing untoward, but that didn’t matter. The scammers inundated him with messages threatening legal action, and the young father of two was ashamed and horrified.
The perpetrators in this case were inmates in a South Carolina prison. Groups of them had been running similar scams for years - in fact, these sorts of romance extortion scams date back to the 1990s, when prisoners would do it via snail mail, threatening to expose closeted gay men. In 2018, five inmates and their accomplices were charged with targeting active and former members of the military with these schemes.
There are many flavors of romance and “sextortion” scams, and they have quickly become one of the most common forms of online crime. However what I want to talk about here is how difficult they are to combat, and how poorly authorities and people in power have dealt with them.
We dehumanize prisoners in America. This has led, in part, to the proliferation of black market cel phones behind bars. This, coupled with a prison system that extracts money from inmates and their families for basic resources, can lead them to commit digital crimes for money.
The prison industrial complex, predictably, has some idiotic takes on the matter:
“Cell phones in prisons are the number one public safety problem in America,” says Bryan Stirling, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections.
Their solutions have been equally ridiculous:
The entire sprawling facility is surrounded with 50-foot-high wire nets, the kind you see at golf course driving ranges, to prevent people from throwing phones over the old barbed-wire-topped fences. Trucks patrol the perimeter equipped with hardware to detect drones, which have been used to air-drop mobiles. Airport-style metal detectors are in place at all entrances. In the corridors and common areas inside, 6-foot metal-detecting poles are scattered around. Despite all that, just a month after my visit, a child rapist locked up at Broad River was caught harassing a young woman on Facebook. A few days after that, a sweep of the prison turned up 36 contraband mobiles.
The next logical conclusion for these idiots is to jam cel signals entirely around prisons. This is how I learned it’s actually illegal to do this! Which seems good. Various stop-gap measures that do comply with the law have been deployed around prisons, such as the one in South Carolina, but they don’t seem to work.
This story highlights just how difficult it is to combat romance-related cons. At the end of the day, people who fall for these scams are lonely, and seeking companionship. The people on the other end of the line know what to say, how to play off our very human needs, and how to exploit those for gain. Authorities have been largely powerless to stop it, even when it’s literally coming from inside prisons.
Endangered Fleecing
I mostly write about scams that are illegal, or highly unethical. There are, however, some things you could conceivably call scams that are well-intentioned, perhaps even good. I’m not really sure where to draw the line, because the word scam is defined as “a dishonest scheme” which…covers a lot of territory. Are there good scams? Is this the sort of question I’m supposed to be thinking about, as a scam blogger?
I don’t know. Anyway:
A recent paper in Scientific Reports describes the manufacture of imitation rhino horn from, of all things, horsehair, using a process that is both simpler and produces a more convincing knockoff than earlier attempts, according to the researchers involved.
“Economists would argue if there is a commodity that's very expensive, and if you can flood that market, you should bring the price down if the copies are good,” says University of Oxford biologist Fritz Vollrath, coauthor on the study. That would make poaching less lucrative, potentially helping to save the endangered species. “Hopefully it will rattle the market.”
Scientists are attempting to create a knockoff version of rhino horn and saturate the illegal rhino horn market with it, hoping that it will lead to a reduction in poaching. Not to take anything away from the scientists, but I am not sure they thought this through. Other folks agree with me:
Some conservationists worry the fake horn will end up functioning like an ad for genuine snout protrusions. “It could grow a greater market demand and mainstream the trade to a whole new generation and niche of consumers,” says the World Wildlife Fund’s Crawford Allan
The article cites the replica fashion market, which is a good analog for what they are proposing. Would putting more rhino horn in the market really help the rhinos? Would it actually deter the poachers? We don’t know, but if it has the opposite effect and ends up creating more demand for rhino horn, that’s not good!
I am one hundred percent ethically okay with defrauding people who buy products that directly contribute to the extinction of rare species, but - like most things, these days - one has to carefully consider market dynamics before running any sort of scheme.
The most maddening part of it all is that rhino horn is used in China as a quack fever cure, which modern medicine has already solved! Can we convince the natural healers to crush up aspirin instead? This is so frustrating!
That said, it is pretty cool? I applaud the folks who cared enough to figure out how to create such a good fake in the lab. Science does all sorts of amazing things on a daily basis, and I’m sad my brain does not have enough space to learn about all of them because I am busy looking up which cryptocurrency pyramid scheme Floyd Mayweather is promoting this week. We all have our burdens.
Short Cons
The Next Web - “Comparitech and security researcher Bob Diachenko have uncovered a database containing more than 267 million Facebook users’ data that was left exposed online, with not even a password preventing unauthorized access to it.”
Dept of Justice - “The former CEO of the Israel-based company Yukom Communications, a purported sales and marketing company, was sentenced to 22 years in prison today for orchestrating a scheme to defraud investors who had purchased more than $100 million in financial instruments known as binary options.”
Washington Post - ““The Internet was never designed to be secure,” said Alan Brill”
We Did It
Thank you to everyone who gave me newsletter ideas and emotional support in 2019. My hope, when I started this, was that it’d help me keep my creative juices flowing by forcing me to write something every week. I find I quite enjoy it, and the positive feedback I receive keeps me motivated to do more. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed reading my silly hobby blog, and we can keep doing this for a long time. Tips to scammerdarkly@gmail.com
