What’s the dumber crime? Risking jail time by switching out designer labels with fake ones just
to save a few bucks, like Angelica Zabrodina did? OR would it be trying to scam all the rich people
around you when you’re ALREADY rich, like Adriana Benhamou Weiss did? Let’s get right into it!
4 - Label Switching Angelica Zabrodina is a self-proclaimed
influencer, photographer, model, actor, and extra. She’s known for walking into every store with
a signature tote bag with her white chihuahua inside. But aside from her blonde hair, tanned
skin, bejeweled clothing, and little chihuahua, Angelica’s also a scammer who stole over $1,500
from bargain stores in England. She specifically used fake labels to steal designer merchandise
from TK Maxx stores all across London. TK Maxx is essentially the overseas equivalent of TJ Maxx.
TK Maxx
Basically, Angelica purchased designer clothes from TK Maxx including dresses
from Dolce and Gabbana, Balenciaga, and Stella McCartney in addition to sunglasses from Brioni.
Then she would go home, tear out the labels, and sew them into other items
of lesser values. She would take the clothes with the fake labels to TK Maxx and return them,
claiming she bought them online or from other stores,
and receive a refund in the amount she paid for the original designer item.
She printed multiple receipts for the same item,
so she could try and get the same large refund from multiple store locations.
To buy herself more time to find a good dupe, Angelica sometimes returned the
original designer purchase, and then purchased it again to extend TK Maxx’s 28 day refund policy.
Germaine Parry, a regional loss prevention officer for TK Maxx,
said that Angelica stole about $1,500 worth of merchandise from the store.
Catching On
But eventually, some of the store associates started to catch on. There were inconsistencies
between the items listed on the receipt and the items Angelica claimed to be returning.
The designer labels she sewed into the counterfeit items were placed
poorly–definitely not to the standards of the brand.
One investigator looked at a counterfeit Balenciaga dress Angelica returned and
could see where the original label was ripped out and another was sewn in.
In another incident, Angelica purchased Brioni sunglasses
and returned ones labeled Boucheron. She purchased three pairs of sunglasses for
£96 and used that receipt an additional three times to return the wrong item.
In one Stella McCartney counterfeit item Angelica returned, there was a “Made in
Hungary” label on the outside and a “Made in Italy” label on the inside.
Angelica went on her crime spree between October and November 2018 before she got caught.
The Fall
The item that really got Angelica in trouble was a pink sequined Dolce and Gabbana dress
valued at £250. The investigator saw that the dress was tampered with,
and the designer label was hanging off the back, not in typical Dolce and Gabbana style.
CCTV footage showed Angelica walking into multiple TK Maxx stores towards the end of
2018. She was easily identifiable with the white chihuahua in her handbag.
There was a trial at Prospero House, London’s first ‘Nightingale’ Court. Prosecutors told
the jury about how Angelica printed multiple receipts to return the same white dress twice,
with a £300 price tag, earning her nearly £600.
She denied eight counts of fraud by false representation.
3 - Extreme Couponing
Moral Issue One debate among the shopper community is whether
or not it’s ethical to resell items purchased with coupons. Many coupons forbid buyers from reselling
items, and many people wouldn’t buy second-hand groceries, but reselling isn’t actually illegal.
But this Florida couple didn’t just resell items purchased with coupons.
They used fake coupons to buy products for free,
and then sell them at a local flea market for a 100% profit. That’s where our story begins.
Couponing Bonnie & Clyde
Shawn Ernst and his wife, Linda Disilvio of Ocala, Florida purchased and printed off fake
coupons in 2014. They recruited accomplices, Charles McGregor and Christine Pierce, to find
fake coupons that listed items as “free.” They purchased the coupons for a small price,
and then used them to buy everyday, popular items like detergent, diapers and dog food.
They went into stores like CVS, Publix, Winn-Dixie, and Walmart six days per week
to round up their items for their flea market booth or makeshift box-truck roadside store. They
persuaded customers to buy from them by selling the items at well-below market price, at about 25%
off store value. They had nothing to lose because they used the coupons to buy those items for free.
They sold $20 dog food for $15, $25 Pampers diapers for $17 per box, or $30 for two boxes.
The scheme worked well in their favor.
Shawn and Linda made an estimated profit of more than $140,000 from their fake coupons.
Walmart Crimestoppers
Walmart was the couple’s favorite victim,
and it was the store that ultimately put an end to the scheme.
Staff associates at Shawn and Linda’s local store noticed that the couple was buying tons
of products in bulk and not paying much for it. Some of the staff members then saw the
same couple at surrounding flea markets selling the same items. Walmart started combing over
their customers’ receipts and video surveillance footage, and turned the evidence over to police.
Aftermath
When Shawn and Linda finally got caught, they denied knowing that the coupons were fake. But
Shawn did admit that any reasonable person would have questioned coupons offering free items,
asking buyers only to pay the sales tax. After continued questioning,
Shawn acknowledged that some of the coupons were fraudulent but continued to purchase them.
Shawn pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years of probation and $1200 in fines
and court costs. Linda pleaded no contest and was sentenced to five years probation and $1300 in
fines and court costs. The couple was ordered to pay a total of $140,000 in restitution in
Walmart. Both Linda and Shawn were banned from ever entering a Walmart store again.
Their accomplices, Charles and Christine, weren’t charged with using counterfeit
coupons to buy merchandise, but were charged with helping to sell the items. They were
each charged with one count of dealing stolen property but the charges were later dismissed.
2 - Little Miss Australia Adriana Benhamou Weiss was an interior
designer for the rich and famous, designing the mansions of Australian multimillionaires
and hotels and apartment developments in Paris, Moscow, and the French Riviera.
She also designed the interiors for luxury properties in Israel and the Middle East.
Adriana herself grew up in New York, Paris, and London, and reached high
society after marrying into one of Australia’s most well-known business families, the Weisses.
Australians, especially in Sydney, grew to love Adriana and her mother,
Helene Benhamou, also a decorator, fashion mogul, and up-and-coming cabaret singer.
Tabloids photographed the mother-daughter duo arriving in Paris in couture gowns
and popping champagne bottles. People were fascinated by Adriana’s beauty and lifestyle.
She became a regular at Gold Dinners and Silver Parties and started lunching with
Sydney’s wealthiest women, who called on Adriana and Helene to help them redesign their lux homes.
But in a few short years, Adriana’s enviable life
came to a screeching halt, with the help of a single WhatsApp message.
Falsify Please
DEC Services hired Adriana to help them renovate their offices at Bond Street in Sydney. She got
the job by promising DEC a lower price for the same service that her competitors were offering.
Adriana said that because she owned a furniture manufacturer and distribution center in Dubai,
she could secure a lot of the supplies from her own facilities at a fraction of the cost.
She asked DEC to make the payments upfront and urgently, so she could disburse the money
to her subcontractors to get supplies and start working. The company paid her
$325,000 immediately, and that’s when things started to get suspicious.
Adriana hired a junior worker for her firm, Benhamou Designs
Pty Ltd, in 2015 and wasn’t careful about what she put in writing.
In a WhatsApp message to the employee in 2016, Adriana asked her to use Photoshop to falsify
payment confirmations. The confirmations made it seem like the $325,000 that DEC gave her
went directly to suppliers and contractors when in reality, Adriana kept all of it for herself.
Investigators raised eyebrows when they noticed that Adriana’s payment
confirmations included misspellings and incorrect addresses. That’s when they
intercepted the WhatsApp message Adriana sent to her employee asking for these
alleged payment confirmations to be created on Photoshop between November and December 2016.
Crashing Down
Adriana suddenly liquidated her company in 2018. The business,
which at one time boasted about elite projects like Point Piper mansions and a
hunting lodge for a Russian oligarch, owed $8 million to the Australian Tax Office.
The liquidator’s report said that Adriana’s company was trading even though it was insolvent
since 2015. The report said that Adriana was aware of the insolvency yet proceeded
to conduct business anyway, allowing the company to rack up $7.5 million in debt while insolvent.
Adriana blamed her company’s failure on poor management and customer disputes.
Shamed?
In 2019, it came out that Adriana had fallen out with luxury car importer and
superyacht enthusiast Neville “Croaky” and his wife, Nadi, Crichton who hired Adriana
after meeting her through mutual friends. Nadi was so impressed with Adriana’s resumé that she
hired her to find the luxury furnishings for her $45 million Point Piper Mansion,
next door to former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s lavish home.
But things turned ugly when the Crichtons got frustrated after waiting months for their
furnishings to arrive. They directly contacted the European furniture manufacturers to check
the status of their order only to find out that their hundreds of thousands of dollars
of deposit money was never received. They called lawyers who were able to get their money back,
but getting a refund didn’t save Adriana’s tumbling reputation.
Adriana tried to save herself by blaming third party furniture manufacturers but it didn’t help.
As if Adriana wasn’t embarrassed enough, her husband Daniel Weiss of
the famous Weiss divorced her. The separation was highly publicized.
Rebranding
But Adriana’s downfall didn’t stop her mother Helene from claiming the spotlight. She made
headlines in Paris as a finalist for the French team in Eurovision. She used the stage name
Helene in Paris and became known as an eccentric jazz singer with big gestures and crazy outfits.
She was one of 12 contenders chosen from thousands of people who auditioned. But Helene in Paris lost
her shine after performing Paris Mon Amour on French national television and losing her
top spot. But she still posts videos of herself singing French songs on YouTube.
Helene has had quite the interesting life. She was born in Morocco and lived in Casablanca until
age 13, after which she moved to Paris with her family. Then, she moved to the United States in
the 1980s to work in fashion and interior design, and then hosted her own show on the Home Shopping
Network. Then, she moved to London to focus on decorating. When things didn’t work out
with riding on the back of her daughter’s success, she moved back to Paris in 2019.
Meanwhile Adriana, a newly single mother of two,
now splits her time between Sydney and Paris. She launched a new decorating
company called Iconique Studio and is working under the name Adriana Schor.
Adriana pleaded guilty to three charges to be dealt with under the Corporations
Act and to a further three charges to be dealt with under the Crimes Act.
1 - Eastern Metal Securities Roger Nils-Jonas Karlsson launched the
website for Eastern Metal Securities in November 2012 stating that the company was headquartered
in Singapore and operated out of branch offices in Bangkok, Thailand and Vientiane, Laos. Roger,
the big boss of EMS, is a Swedish citizen who lived in Thailand with his Thai wife.
Starting in 2006, before he even launched the EMS website, Roger used three websites
to communicate with potential investors. The main point of investment was the Pre-Funded
Reversed Pension Plan (PFRPP). While his website doesn’t state what the PFRPP is,
he promised his investors a payout of 1.2 kilograms of gold per share. The first share cost
$98 and following shares cost $38 each. In 2015, 1.2 kilograms of gold was worth more than $45,000.
Impossible ROI
Such a high return on investment seems impossible, and Roger never explained on
his website how it worked, except to say that the risk of loss was eliminated. He promised
that in case the payout didn’t happen, he would be able to refund investors at least
97% of their original investment. He posted frequent updates on his website about this
amazing investment opportunity, and that it wouldn’t be available again.
Roger received payment from his investors via Bitcoin, Perfect Money, and C-Gold.
In essence, investors were promised a payout of $45,000 for a $98 or $38
investment. Sounds like quite the steal. And it was–but not for investors. Only for Roger.
Far from Honest
As it turned out, Roger was using the same IP address in Thailand to
answer from several email addresses, operate three websites, and go under
many names. Some of the online names he went by include Joshua Millard, Lars Georgsson,
Krister Joelsson, Paramon Larasoft, Kenth Westerberg, Euclid Diodorus, Steve Heyden.
Some of these people were supposed EMS employees, while others allegedly ran
other companies entirely. But investors started to grow concerned when they
noticed that many EMS employees were making identical spelling and grammar mistakes.
Roger even claimed that one of the employees, Euclid Diodorus, had died. He wrote a memorial
post on his website and used it as a way to encourage people to invest more money because it’s
what Diodorus would’ve wanted. But there was no record of a Euclid Diodorus residing in New York.
In fact, none of the other names associated with Roger’s IP address turned up any record.
When investors expressed their concerns, Roger shut them down immediately. He threatened them
saying that if they broadcast their concerns to others, they would never receive their payout.
Adding to the pile of evidence was the fact that Roger exclusively used Bitcoin,
Perfect Money, and C-Gold–all forms of virtual currency.
Virtual currency is often used for investment schemes because it’s decentralized,irreversible,
and has very little in the way of anti-fraud or money laundering checks.
IRS Investigation
The IRS started investigating Roger under suspicion of an investment scheme. Roger
targeted 3,600 people around the world. 31 of them resided in Northern California. Investigations
revealed an additional 195 individuals that used Coinbase to transfer a total of $890,000 to EMS.
The IRS traced 8.6 bitcoins, valued at nearly $40,000, and another 11 bitcoins at $61,000
transferred to accounts linked to Roger.
He scheme operated from 2013 to 2019 with Roger stating that he was working with the SEC to
ensure a payout. But the SEC denied ever working with Roger or any of his so-called companies.
Roger’s financial records revealed that he spent the majority of the cash his
investors sent him, and there wasn’t nearly enough to pay his victims back.
Aftermath
Roger was charged with wire fraud,
specified unlawful activity with the intent to conceal or disguise the nature,
location, source, ownership, or control of the proceeds. He pleaded guilty to all charges.
In total, Roger received $11 million on behalf of EMS by using wire fraud
to convert virtual funds to cash for personal use.
In July 2021, he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for securities fraud,
wire fraud, and money laundering charges. He had to forfeit several properties in
Thailand including a luxury resort, and a money judgment of more than $16 million.
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Let us know in the comment section what you’d rather do,
lend $1000 bucks to a friend, or just give them $100 dollars?