Here are a few kids who decided to turn into scammers!
8 - Charles Turner When he was 19-years-old,
Charles Turner was booked into a Georgia jail after attempting to trick state tax collectors on
multiple occasions. According to police, he tried to get them to send him a massive tax refund.
And this wasn't an amateur effort. The chief investigator for the Georgia Department of Revenue
told the news that he was impressed by the teen's scheme. When the cops
compliment your scamming abilities, you might be a natural-born criminal mastermind.
That being said, he wasn't good enough to get away with it. Turner was arrested at his mom's
house in suburban Atlanta. Yes, he ran his entire operation out of his mom's basement.
Turner had recently graduated from high school and decided to become a full-time
scammer instead of doing something boring like going to college or getting an actual job.
Turner did very well in school, and people who knew him said he was
pretty intelligent. His decisions, however, were less than brilliant.
Turner set up a couple of fake online businesses that supposedly sold electronics. But instead of
delivering anything, he just used his customer's bank account information and routing numbers.
Turner then dramatically overpaid his taxes by almost a million dollars with the stolen money,
hoping that the state Department of Revenue would pay him a huge refund. Unfortunately for Turner,
there are systems to catch this scam, and he never got any money. Turner attempted to
overpay the government 25 million dollars, hoping they would send him a $25 Million
refund. You've got to give him credit; laundering money through the IRS is a pretty bold strategy.
7. Yousef Selassie Yousef Selassie was charged with
first-degree grand larceny, identity theft, and many other crimes by the Manhattan Supreme Court.
So, what did he actually do to get hit with all that? Yousef ran a
highly lucrative scheme with nothing more than his iPhone and a laptop.
The unemployed teenager ran what's known as a SIM swapping scam. It's a scam where the
victim's phone number is transferred to the thief's phone. Then the scammer can
make or receive calls and texts as their victim. They can also change the password,
locking the original owner out of their own device. As you can imagine,
once you have control over someone's phone like that, there's a lot of illegal things you can do.
Yousef certainly got around, managing to scam 75 people in 20 different states.
But he didn't target people randomly. He only targeted certain people in certain industries that
he thought would likely have cryptocurrency. He would then steal that cryptocurrency for himself,
sell it on the internet for real money, and buy whatever he wanted.
He ended up stealing about a million dollars worth of crypto.
Yousef had pretty expensive taste. When the cops searched his place in California,
they discovered that he spent his stolen money in rather extravagant ways. He had two Rolex watches,
a monogrammed Gucci wallet, a diamond ring, a diamond and sapphire ring,
and six other rings with other jewels. So he may not have gotten away with his scamming in the end,
but at least he got arrested in style. 6 - Canadian Crypto
Yousef got away with a lot. But his operation was small-time compared to one teenager from Ontario,
Canada. This teenager, whose name isn't known due to Canadian reporting laws,
allegedly stole 46 million dollars worth of crypto
from a single person. As evidenced by the fact that it has two entries so far on this list,
the world of crypto has been the go-to destination for scammers in recent years. The arrest was
made as part of a joint investigation with Canadian authorities and the FBI since the
victim was American. Like Yousef, this teen used SIM swapping to steal all the crypto.
So, how did they catch this kid? The joint investigation discovered
that he used the stolen crypto to buy a rare username for a video game. Sadly,
the police didn't say what game it was in the report since that would be an identifying
detail. But it's still pretty funny that he was caught because he was spending money on
a username he wanted. This transaction led the investigators straight to him.
The true age of this scammer isn't known. The Youth Criminal Justice Act in Canada means that
the police in Canada won't tell the press how old this person is. However, that does tell us that
they're a minor, perhaps only 14-years-old. There are definitely some pretty tech-savvy
14-year-olds out there. The investigators for the case said that this is the largest crypto scam
involving a single person in Canadian history. Pretty impressive for someone who's probably in
high school. And rather silly that they would risk getting caught over a gaming username. Hopefully,
it was the perfect username. 5 - Graham Clark
Graham Clark also wanted to run a big crypto scam, but he wanted to get more creative than a simple
SIM swap. Along with a few other scammers, he hacked into several high-profile Twitter accounts.
They did this by targeting Twitter employees with phone and email scams to steal their credentials.
Once they had what they needed from the Twitter employees, they went big.
They hacked into 130 Twitter accounts, and we're not just talking about any Twitter
accounts. They took over and tweeted from accounts owned by Apple, Uber,
Coinbase, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Kanye, Bill Gates, and Joe Biden.
They had all of these accounts tweet out some variation of "Send bitcoin to this wallet,
and you will be sent even more bitcoin back." People reading these tweets fell for it and sent
bitcoin to the addresses that the companies and celebrities were supposedly posting.
Really? Nobody questioned why Joe Biden was asking for Bitcoin?
After running the bitcoin scam, Clark sold the login information to double his money
and kill two birds with one scam. See what we did there? (Insert Twitter logo?)
In the end, Clark ended up with three years in prison after stealing 120,000
dollars worth of bitcoin. Maybe he would have been better off sticking
with the tried and true SIM swap scam instead of trying to get creative with
it. Thankfully, the crypto he stole was returned to its rightful owners.
4 - Davion Darrel Mitchell Davion Darrel Mitchel ran one of the oldest
scams in the book. But unlike these lazy teenagers doing everything on their phones with crypto,
he actually had to put in some effort for his scam. Mitchel sold candy to people, telling them
it was to raise money for his football team. But it was actually just to raise money for himself.
Mitchel ran his scam at upscale restaurants since he knew anyone eating there would have
money. No point in targeting broke people at Mcdonald's, after all. Mitchel would bring
three kids with him to look more legitimate. He was 19, but he looked like he could be older,
so the kids convinced people that there really was a school football team.
Mitchel's problem was that he became a little bit too greedy. He kept going
back to the same restaurants, and eventually, a manager got annoyed.
One restaurant finally called the cops after growing increasingly annoyed.
After all, Mitchel was selling food to their customers—that's their job!
The manager told the cops that he had asked Mitchel to leave before,
and Mitchel threatened to fight him. Threatening to fight restaurant managers is
not the best way to ensure that your scam flies under the radar. The cops
found out that Mitchel did not have a permit to solicit in the city, which was pretty obvious.
Mitchel only had a few hundred dollars on him and was given two misdemeanor citations for
contributing to the delinquency of a minor and solicitation without a permit. The police called
the parents, who didn't care that much. They even asked the cops to leave the kids with Mitchel
and let him drive them home. Not exactly the most responsible parenting. After the cops left,
Mitchel and the kids went straight to another restaurant and tried their scam again. They,
of course, were arrested again. Guess some people are just born to scam.
3 - Kevin Perry Kevin Perry ended up serving a 3-year prison
sentence for an operation a little more elaborate than selling candy to rich folks. No, this teen
was running a full-on Ponzi scheme. Perry told investors that he was investing their money into
the foreign currency market. In reality, he was taking that money and buying whatever he wanted.
He would also give some of it back to investors to keep the scam alive and attract new investors.
He'd take their money and give it to the next one and so on. It works great until people catch on.
One of his clients filed a civil complaint, but Perry ignored it and continued his Ponzi
scheme as planned. He kept right on pitching his scheme to new investors,
thinking that the complaint wouldn't go anywhere. He was wrong. Perry ended up
picking up a new investor who was actually an undercover FBI agent. He told the agent
that he could turn his $10,000 into $25,000. The agent responded with,
'you're under arrest.' Before its collapse, Perry earned over $400,000 through his scam.
Foreign exchange, or Forex, is one of the biggest financial markets in the world.
It has a staggering daily trading volume of about 6.6 trillion dollars. These crazy numbers
combined with the speed of the market make Forex trading very attractive to potential scammers,
who can promise their targets huge returns without any downsides.
2 - The Bling Ring The Bling Ring may be the most
popular gang of teenage scammers in history. They even got their own movie. They were also known
as The Hollywood Hills Burglar Bunch, but that's not quite as catchy as The Bling Ring, now is it?
They were a group of seven teenagers who all lived in or around Calabasas,
one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in California. The Kardashians, for instance, live there. For
about a year, these teenagers stole 3 million dollars in cash and belongings from the houses
of the Hollywood elite. Their biggest scores came from Paris Hilton, whose house they broke into
five different times. On one occasion, they made off with $2 Million worth of her belongings.
Other high-profile victims of their crime spree include Orlando Bloom,
Lindsay Lohan, and Megan Fox. Check out our in-depth video on the Bling Ring to
learn more about Hollywood's teenage criminal masterminds by clicking here!
1. Tre Brown Tre Brown only worked
at a Kroger in Georgia for two weeks, but they were the most lucrative two weeks of his life.
He scammed them out of almost one million dollars during his short stint with the
grocery store. The 19-year-old made a lot more than minimum wage... until he got caught, anyway.
Brown went beyond just taking cash out of the register, since there's only so much
you can make lifting 20s. He created a ton of fake returns for items that weren't actually
exist and put them on credit cards. The returns ranged wildly in price, anywhere from 75-bucks to
87-thousand dollars. Maybe he thought that he would go under the radar by faking small
returns as well. He bought multiple cars, clothes, shoes, and guns with his stolen money.
Brown was living it up until the store caught on to the scam. Kroger corporate
noticed what was happening and quickly called the cops. Brown had already
totaled one of the cars he bought with the money, but the rest was returned to Kroger.
Click to watch one of these next videos!
And let us know in the comment section who the worst scammer on this list was!