You look for a sympathetic character if you can get it, but the pool’s pretty shallow.
On victimless crimes and second acts.
Good afternoon, Scam Fam! (Better late than never, I guess.)
Guess who's survived another unexpected period of radio silence from me? It's you! And might I add that you look great and that patience really suits you? Both attributes will really come in handy for all the revenge plotting.
For mysterious reasons we'll never fully understand but may be related to the fact that I write the newsletter you are currently reading called This Week in Scams, some people think I Know Things about les scams. It's quite a leap, honestly, though I can't stop you from inferring what you will from the information at hand. Here is what I can tell you: I am drafting this on an 82-page single-spaced google doc that contains hundreds of links to stories that are about scams or scam-adjacent as well as dozens of my own aborted attempts to Say Something about some of them. Please don't tell anyone this ever, but I sometimes lack the will to make my hilarious jokes and searing observations about people getting robbed.
Not today tho ;)
Matthew Cox, a true inspiration, knows my struggle, and I shall draw my strength from him. I recommend you do the same. Cox, a con man turned true crime writer, was profiled by Rachel Monroe in this month's Atlantic.*
Rome wasn't built in a day, and Cox didn't become the Clyde of the Bonnie and Clyde of mortgage fraud by faking a single form. He faked a single form overstating someone's salary, then he faked another, until eventually he faked an appraisal and accidentally sent it to the appraiser whose signature he'd forged who was also a former deputy sheriff. Can't win 'em all. He could, however, rise from the ashes of his probation, especially in the mid-'00s when most of us were ignoring the fact that this country's financial infrastructure consisted of a sandcastle built on a foundation of playing cards on an eroding cliff above a pit of lava while a hurricane brewed overhead. (I'm sure that's been fixed by now and we can go back to not worrying about it.)
In his new life as a phoenix, Cox went all in. He made up Westing Game meets Reservoir Dogs style aliases like Brandon Green, James Redd, Michael White, and Lee Black; forged birth certificates to get social security numbers; used the social security numbers to open credit cards; then leveraged the credit history into home loans. It was all fairly elaborate and quite clever and raises some philosophical questions like if one can't use that type of enterprising spirit to get rich in legitimate ways then perhaps legitimacy is the scam? Perhaps it is! In Cox's case, legitimate forces were at the very least complicit. As Monroe writes,
It wouldn’t have taken much digging to uncover Cox’s deceit; on at least three occasions, he says, mortgage underwriters did figure it out, but they let the matter drop once he agreed to make them whole: “They would suspend you, then you’d take the underwriter out to lunch, send the manager some gift cards, and they’d take you off suspension. You know I sent you fraudulent loans. You know that a couple million in bad loans are out there. But they accept the lie eventually and start sending us loans again. So you feel like everybody’s kind of in on it.”
Then the story gets kind of familiar. Law enforcement began to catch up with him, so he went on the run with his then girlfriend Rebecca Hauck (she's the Bonnie referenced in this Fortune story by Marcia Vickers). They found it easier to borrow real people's identities instead of inventing people wholecloth. As you probably suspected, Cox spent his creatively-gotten gains on:
hair grafts, a face-lift, liposuction, an Audi, vacations to Jamaica, a couple of Rolexes. Hauck got breast implants, liposuction, designer handbags. “Fraud on the run, it’s not a full-time job,” Cox told me. “You’re working five or 10 hours a week maintaining some scam, and your life just turns into rock climbing and skydiving and going on vacation.”
(Vickers describes this vibe as "Swindlers by day, couch potatoes in the evening," which I personally consider aspirational.)
When your scheme relies on real people in addition to banks, you may find that the crime you understood to be victimless harms others. When you do craft projects inside those real people's homes like "a bizarre papier-maché statue of a man kneeling on the floor. The statue's face resembled Edvard Munch's masterpiece, 'The Scream,'" you may find that when you are eventually caught, those real people are motivated to see you sentenced to 26 years in federal prison. Which Cox was.
During his incarceration, in addition to working through some of his daddy issues, he began collaborating with fellow inmates to tell their stories for commercial gain. As Monroe describes it, "There were jailhouse lawyers and jailhouse personal chefs; he was the jailhouse true-crime writer." As I'm assuming you've already attempted to connect the internet directly into your nervous system so you can ingest all the #content in half the time, you know there's a pretty lucrative market for Cox's new hustle.
In 2013 his sentence was reduced, and he was released to a halfway house earlier this year. He “owes $6 million in restitution, and a portion of his income will go to his victims; the largest chunk is earmarked for the mortgage companies and banks he defrauded.” 👎
I won’t speak to the odds of him earning all that ca$h as a writer, but I will congratulate him on going legit. Lucky for us all, there's nothing at all exploitative or illegal about turning other people's criminal history into entertaining narrative. You can trust me, I write a newsletter that aims to do exactly that.
Scam artfully,
Ruthie
*Thank you to work pal, Brenda, an ace reporter and Florida Queen, for sending me this story. I wrote about another of Monroe's articles in a January edition of TWIS, Scammers never die, and most of her work appeals to our collective interests, in particular this book she wrote that's coming out this month that I look forward to reading.
Bonus reading because it's been a while:
My Week in Consumption
I finished the new season of Veronica Mars. I will not be sharing my thoughts at this time, beyond encouraging those of you who have watched all of it to read Willa Paskin's typically spot-on reaction. If you want deep cuts from me on the Neptune-verse, you can read my 2013 blog posts on the time Logan Echolls sent me a birthday card and the intensity of our imaginary relationship. (I was in my late 20s in 2013 lest you think I have at any time in my life engaged in age-appropriate behavior.) Also, if you haven't watched season one of Veronica Mars, you should do that. Seriously. I know other people have already told you to before, but I mean it, and I’m right.
Some books! I wound up with a status galley of Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid (it comes out in January), and let me tell you, that book is excellent and a reason to look forward to the future. A novel you can read right now which brought me untold joy is Big Sky by Kate Atkinson. Life After Life got all the attention but IMO the Jackson Brody books are where it's at.
My friend Erica who I've told you about before who has the best taste of anyone I know got me these dainty glasses as a housewarming gift a few years ago. I loved them so much that I got kind of weepy when I managed to break four of them in one fell swoop a few months ago. I finally replaced them because pretty objects can definitely fill the holes in your heart.
I went down the shore with old friends last weekend and it was — no duh — wonderful. I stayed briefly with a friend of a friend in Atlantic City. Previously, I had only been to Atlantic City to gamble and to accompany a different, now former friend who was buying drugs; my experience with both was pretty terrible, although I did enjoy the oxygen they pump into the casinos. This time, though, I drank beer on the boardwalk, ate a giant hoagie from Whitehouse Subs (it's awesome), and went to the beach. Maybe we should all move there????
I laughed so much at Get on Your Knees, a one-woman show about blow jobs and ghosts and Batman that's at Cherry Lane through August 18.