From Influencer to Inmate Jegara Igbara, known to his followers as Jay
Mazini, went from beloved Instagram personality to super-villain in a matter of months.
He kidnapped and beat a rival while defrauding his followers of millions of dollars.
He was eventually arrested in March 2021 and is looking at quite a few years behind bars.
How did Jay Mazini fall so far?
Had he been scamming his followers the whole time?
Jay Mazini, the Beacon of Charity Jay was living the good life—at least he
seemed to be.
He claimed to be worth at least $33 million, but details of how he attained such a fortune
are foggy.
Could he have been lying about it the whole time?
It sure seems like it now.
No matter the case, Mazini was very open about flaunting his money.
He wanted his followers to know exactly how much money he had and how ready he was to
give it all away.
He was certainly different from your usual rich 20-something-year-old with an Instagram
account.
Instead of cars and flashy accessories, Mazini used his platform to build his public perception
by posting videos of himself handing out stacks of cash to random people.
This, of course, was such a nice gesture that it not only won him the public's trust but
also proved, in a way, that he had that kind of cash on hand.
Mazini & 50 Cent Mazini would hand out as much as $10,000 to
people walking in the streets, shopping at Walmart, and working the drive-thru window
at McDonald's.
In fact, it was a video he did with rapper 50 Cent that sent a visit from Mazini to the
top of everyone's wish list.
In the video, Mazini is seen approaching the drive-thru window of a Burger King, where
he and 50 Cent begin handing out stacks of cash.
The workers are obviously overjoyed.
The two even proceed up the line of cars and hand money through the windows of unsuspecting
drivers.
In total, the pair handed out 60,000 dollars.
Who wouldn't be excited if 50 Cent handed them 10,000 dollars through their window,
right?
Before his downfall, Mazini had gathered considerable influence on the internet.
Videos of his philanthropic acts and local news coverage had garnered him close to a
million followers on Instagram.
As mentioned, where and how Mazini got his fortune is unclear, but he used to drop hints
in some of his self-promotion videos.
They included Mazini Academy, which taught people how to trade, a clothing brand called
Mazini Italy, and Halal capital – an investment company designed to help Muslims make smart
and Halal-based investments.
Whether or not these ventures made Mazini enough money to hand out tens of thousands
of dollars is another question altogether.
We'll just look at what each business venture actually did and how Mazini promoted them
to his unsuspecting followers.
The Academy First on the list of Mazini's ventures was
Mazini Academy, a learning platform aimed to teach people how to trade various assets
such as stocks, forex, cryptocurrencies, and options.
Students had to part with $250 for full-year access to trading news, market analysis, and
trading strategies.
They also gained access to Jay Mazini along with a bunch of other supposed trading experts.
But Mazini had no proven track record of being a successful trader.
Not even that, he had no proof that he was even a trader to begin with—never mind a
successful one.
Mazini Academy even had the audacity to state the original price of the "class" was 1,199
dollars and made it look like students were getting the deal of a lifetime by only paying
250.
Mazini tried to prove his trading know-how by claiming that he was making million-dollar
trades every day on the academy's website.
He went as far as saying he made a new Lamborghini by trading for just 30 minutes.
Again, he never showed any proof of such outrageous claims, but he knew his followers trusted
him enough to believe him without question.
This was thanks to the public image he had built for himself by shelling out thousands
of dollars to strangers.
These giveaways were the primary way he promoted his most popular venture, the Mazini Italy
clothing line.
Mazini Italy It's not clear when the troubled influencer
launched the clothing company, but it was certainly a big part of his personal brand.
Aside from his handout videos, he heavily promoted Mazini Italy using the promise of
giveaways to lure in his followers.
The promises themselves were pretty outrageous.
It's baffling that so many people fell into the palm of his hand.
To win "free money," you had to be among the first several buyers and have a set number
of items in your order.
For instance, only the first 200 people buying at least six items would qualify for a cash
reward.
On the surface, this seemed perfectly normal.
It's not unusual for businesses to push cash or discount rewards to increase sales.
We've all heard or seen those ads saying, "The first ten callers will get a second item
free!"
The way Mazini went about it was pretty questionable.
For starters, he promised outrageous sums of money that he would have been impossible
to fulfill even if he sold all the clothes on the Mazini Italy website.
For example, in one video, he promised to give the first 1,000 buyers $12,000 each as
long as they ordered a minimum of six items.
The math here doesn't make sense business-wise.
Assuming that each of the 1,000 buyers bought the required six items and paid the maximum
possible price, which was 85 dollars per item, he would have sold 510,000 dollars worth of
clothes.
That's certainly not enough to cover his supposed cash giveaway, which would have amounted to
12 million dollars.
He promised 10,000, 30,000, 40,000, and even 125,000 dollars in trying to get people to
either purchase his Mazini Italy merch or academy subscriptions in other giveaways.
In total, he promised a little over $107 million in giveaways across a few clips, which, again,
doesn't make any business sense.
But, of course, he never gave any of his shoppers a single dollar.
Many people rightly came out to condemn him when they didn't see the promised cash in
their shipments.
But Mazini was ready with an excuse—an absurd one at that.
He claimed the cash might have been stolen by, get this, postal workers.
However, there was never any evidence that the shipping boxes had been tampered with.
Most people could see through the deceit, which resulted in a ton of chargebacks and
customer disputes, ultimately leading to a ban on his PayPal account.
Mazini's treachery went beyond the online world of social media stardom.
He also tapped into his Muslim faith to steal millions of dollars through Halal Capital.
It was a classic example of affinity fraud.
Halal Capital Affinity fraud is a scheme in which the fraudster
targets a particular ethnic or religious group of people of which they're part.
In a tight-knit group, it's easy for people to fall for this kind of scam because they
trust each other.
"One of my own would never hurt me" would be the typical mentality.
That's exactly what Mazini aimed to exploit with Halal Capital.
This investment firm was tailored according to Islamic customs; hence the name "halal,"
which directly translates to 'permissible.'
They promised to make investments that adhered to those customs as well.
He struck a friendship with Noor Rabah, a funeral home owner and well-respected faithful
in his local New York community.
Mazini went overboard to paint himself as someone who knew how to handle money.
He told Noor that he was a licensed financial professional and a personal investor, thanks
to his family's vast wealth.
On top of that, he presented himself as a devout Muslim looking to help the local Muslim
community with his investment expertise.
It was an excellent pitch to Noor, and in October 2019, the pair launched Halal Capital,
each with clearly defined roles.
Noor would convince local Muslim groups to pool their funds while Mazini would control
the company's investment decisions.
Noor held his part of the deal.
Being a respectable guy in the community, the company raised a little over $10 million
from Muslim groups – including a Brooklyn mosque.
Investors were promised significant returns on their investments, a common occurrence
in most Ponzi schemes.
That would have been the case if Jay actually intended to help the community, as he had
led the investors to believe.
It turns out he had other plans, and none of them involved paying back Halal Capital
investors.
Instead of the profits, Mazini gave investors nothing but excuses.
He kept coming up with methods to persuade the people he'd defrauded to roll over their
promised returns.
This meant putting their non-existent profits back into the company to make more money.
While at it, Mazini made sure to keep up his innocent appearance by contacting Noor for
religious guidance.
When Noor and other Halal Capital investors could no longer put up with the excuses, Mazini
outlandishly claimed that he had been robbed at gunpoint.
Of course, at that point, they knew they had been swindled.
They knew the only way they would get any of their money back was to get the courts
involved.
But even with a lawsuit hot on his heels, Jay wouldn't stop trying to scam more of his
followers.
What's even more amazing is they continued to fall for it.
The $2.5 Million Bitcoin Scam Starting in January 2021, Mazini offered to
buy bitcoin from his followers at prices between 3.5 and 5% above the cryptocurrency's market
value.
His reason?
He claimed he'd been banned from major cryptocurrency exchanges because he was buying too much.
Getting people to trust him wasn't a problem – they already did.
He sent prospective sellers images of wire transfer confirmations, passports, and other
personal documents to convince them further.
His victims would then immediately transfer their bitcoin to his wallet.
The transfers, of course, were of varying amounts, but a lot of them were quite substantial.
For instance, several people sent bitcoin equivalent to $500,000, according to court
documents.
Before he was arrested, Mazini had received 2.5 million dollars worth of Bitcoin; none
of which he had paid for.
With such a clear case of fraud, it was only a matter of time before the law finally caught
up with him.
Finally Getting Arrested And it did – although not exactly for being
a suspected scammer, at first.
Aside from being an alleged swindler, Mazini was quite vile.
After a rival threatened to expose his illegal under dealings, Mazini set up a plan to silence
him.
According to court documents, Jay lured the victim by promising to work out their differences
in an Edgewater, New Jersey, coffee shop.
But when he got into Jay's car to drive to a coffee joint, two other men joined him.
They then proceeded to restrain and beat Mazini's rival.
Afterward, they stripped him and dropped him on the side of the road, all while inundating
him with more threats.
It was like a scene straight out of a Cartel documentary.
A week after the influencer's arrest for the kidnapping, he was federally charged with
wire fraud related to the 2.5 million dollar bitcoin scam.
Mazini's world was about to come crumbling down.
Going Forward Mazini's first public court appearance saw
him burst into tears after his request for an earlier trial date was denied.
It was alleged that Mazini had plans to flee to Columbia before he was arrested.
This made him a flight risk after his arrest, and the judge ordered him to remain in jail
until his trial date.
Of course, this just further proves Mazini's incompetence.
Columbia and The United States have an agreed-upon Extradition treaty.
This means US officials could still charge Mazini and bring him back to the United States.
If he wanted to get away with it, he would have fled to a country like Morocco, where
no such treaty exists.
After all, Casablanca, Morocco, is known as a fugitive's paradise.
According to a Bergen County judge, Mazini also posed a considerable danger to the assault
victim and the community.
If found guilty of kidnapping and assault, Mazini is looking at 15-30 years in prison.
The wire fraud charges could see him serve up to 20 years.
In total, it's safe to assume that Jay Mazini won't be stealing another penny from anybody—at
least not for the next 50 years.