Here are some scammers who will scam just about anyone!
8 - Evaldas Rimašauskas
This guy orchestrated a huge scam to steal from
Google and Facebook, as well as other tech companies. Along with his partners,
Evaldas Rimašauskas stole a total of over $120 million dollars from 2013 to 2015!
How did they do it? Rimasauskas and his associates
impersonated a Taiwanese company called Quanta Computer. This is a
legitimate computer hardware company that’s done business with Facebook and Google in the past.
So Rimasauskas created a company in Latvia with the same name as the legitimate one in Taiwan.
He would then email fake legal documents, such as invoices and contracts, to employees
of Google and Facebook for example. Rimasauskas would tell those employees that their company
was still owed money for outstanding invoices. But this time, they needed to wire the money
into a different bank account! Does this scam sound like a Hushpuppi scam yet?!
For roughly two years, Rimasauskas and his partners pretended to be employees or agents
for Quanta Computer. He tried to disguise the flow of money through bank accounts
in the US. And they kept stealing from American firms. His fraudulent company
had a board of directors that consisted of one person. Himself! He and his partners
could have easily stolen a few million dollars and then just disappeared. But no,
they got too greedy and they didn’t stop even after stealing over 100 million dollars!
7 - Cynthia Mills
She easily pulled off one of the biggest embezzlement scams in Western Pennsylvania
history! Cynthia Mills admitted to authorities that she stole nearly $13 million dollars over
16 years working as a cashier and a treasury specialist at Matthews International Corporation.
Matthews is a publicly traded company that specializes in making cemetery products,
such as manufacturing cast bronze plaques for memorials and monuments. So how did she
manage to steal millions of dollars? It’s as simple as it gets. Mills would simply
cash the company checks from different clients.
For the first 14 years, she just cashed checks that had been written out to the
company. And then she would just put the money in her own bank account!
She would then change the resulting bank statements to cover her tracks.
But then in 2013 she decided to make stealing much
easier for herself. She created a shell company called Designs by Cindy. She then started
automatic transfers to her fake company’s account from Matthew Corporation’s bank account!
She used the money she stole to fund an extravagant lifestyle for herself and
her husband. Do we need to say this ISN’T the smart move for a criminal? For example,
she bought a 47-foot yacht, as well as three Mercedes and a corvette.
She also bought dozens of Louis Vuitton handbags as well as a lot of jewelry.
For years, neighbors couldn’t figure out how she and her husband could afford it all.
She wasn’t a high level executive at the company. AND, her husband
actually didn’t even work! Really? She didn’t think that anyone would ever get suspicious
and start doing some accounting?! Because that’s exactly what happened. She could have
easily stolen over a year or two years and gotten away with it. But of course, she got too greedy.
In September 2017, Cynthia Mills was sentenced to eight years in prison. All the assets that she
owned eventually were seized and auctioned off. And when she gets out of prison,
her future earnings will also be turned over to the government to return to her old company!
6 - Michelle Higson
This Georgetown woman worked as a part-time bookkeeper for a Wilmington company in 2013.
She was responsible for handling paying clients for her company, but she paid herself as well!
From 2015 to 2018, she embezzled over $419,000 thousand dollars from her ex-employer!
This scam was ridiculously simple as well. Higson used the company’s
accounting software program to perform her scams. What she did was just steal
a series of the company’s checks. She then wrote out checks made payable to herself
or to her husband. She simply forged signatures and deposited the cash in her own bank account!
Of course, to avoid suspicion, Higson also falsified the records.
She made it appear as if the stolen checks had been actually issued to pay actual vendors.
And to steal even more money from the company, she inflated her pay rate and falsified the
number of hours she worked on several occasions! Why did she think that she wouldn’t get caught?
She ended up pleading guilty to four counts of bank fraud in September 2019. However,
her final sentencing still hasn’t been handed down yet because of the pandemic.
Her bank fraud charge carries a sentence of up to 30 years in prison,
five years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $1 million dollars!
5 - Brantley Thomas
This guy is a 62-year-old man who had stolen $1.3 million dollars of taxpayer money. Brantley Thomas
was the former chief financial officer for the Berkeley County School District in South Carolina.
Thomas oversaw nearly $260 million dollars for the school district. However, the FBI
investigation revealed that Thomas stole from the district on at least 45 separate
occasions! How’d he do it? Well, there wasn’t just one specific method he did to steal money.
For example, one method included overpaying vendors. The vendors would eventually send
refund checks, but he would just deposit the refund right into his personal banking account.
Another method Thomas did was just simply cashing the checks meant for the school district
and then putting that cash into his own bank account. He also took at least $32,000 dollars in
bribes and kickbacks for awarding the district’s insurance policy contracts to different companies!
In April 2019 Thomas was sentenced to 11 years in state prison. That’s after he serves 63 months in
federal prison first! His combined sentences add up to 16 years and 3 months behind bars.
And yes, he still has to pay all the money he stole back to the school district.
4 - Rubbin Sarpong
This is a scammer from New Jersey who scammed roughly $2.1
million dollars from more than 30 people using online dating
sites. Just how did this scammer get hopeless romantics to send him cash?
He would message and quickly sweet talk women looking for love. But then he’d quickly turn
the conversation into a promise of getting rich! Between January 2016 and Sept of 2019,
Sarpong and his squad worked together to scam women in New
Jersey and the surrounding area on online dating apps!
What he and team would do is set up fake dating profiles all over the place on various dating
websites, such as match.com, ourtime.com, and Plenty of fish. And most of the time,
they posed as US military stationed overseas. But why the military?
The fact that military personnel are stationed outside the US makes it easy for scammers to
make up excuses why they don’t have something a normal person would have when someone asks
them questions. They can just blame everything on the fact that they’re overseas in the Military!
One unidentified and unfortunate lady was scammed by Sarpong. He told her that he was stationed
in Syria and that his unit had recovered MILLIONS of dollars worth of gold bars.
He told this lady that he was given one of the boxes of gold, and that box was worth
$12 million dollars! All she had to do was wire some money to him, and they’d split the gold!
Find out the exact details of this scam in this video here!
3 - Salvadore Galvan
Over the course of six years, this man embezzled more than $3.7 million dollars from taxpayers in
California! Salvadore Galvan was a former deputy treasurer for the City of Compton.
At the Compton Treasurer’s Office, he was responsible for the cash received by the city
as payment for parking tickets, business licenses and other fees. So how did he steal the money?
What Galvan was supposed to do after he counted the cash received by the city for the day,
is to just deposit the cash into the city’s bank account. Of course,
when he first started his job, this is exactly what he did. But after only a
few months in his new position in 2010, he added two extra steps.
Each day, he’d skim some cash from the cash the city had received.
Then he would prepare a new deposit slip for the reduced cash amount. At first,
it was just skimming a few hundred bucks a month. But then it quickly grew to
tens of thousands of dollars per month, and the amount he stole kept on going up
each year! It got to the point that Galvan was stealing thousands of dollars every single day!
So how did he get caught? In 2016, the other deputy city treasurer,
Ralph Salgado, just happened to compare Galvan’s deposit slip to the deposit slip prepared by the
accounting system. He noticed seven grand in cash missing, so he asked Galvan for an
explanation. Galvan told him that he had put the missing money in his drawer when he went to the
bathroom and he just forgot about it. But Salgado grew suspicious anyways and he began auditing the
cash deposits going back just two weeks. And that’s when everything unraveled for Galvan!
Galvan eventually pleaded guilty to stealing from the City from May 2010 through December 2016.
He was sentenced to six and a half years in federal prison! When he gets out, he and his wife
are jointly liable for the roughly $3.7 million dollars he’s ordered to pay back in restitution!
2 - Tyson Scholz
How far would you go for Instagram? Self-proclaimed “wolf” trader Tyson Scholz went
as far as using his mom’s life savings to look as if he’s living a glamorous life on social media!
Tyson Scholz is a 35-year-old guy who’s determined to make you think he’s rich
on Instagram and twitter with his “lavish lifestyle”. He’s on social media seemingly
having it all. An attractive girlfriend, a new Lambo, and many vacations overseas.
But how exactly did he make his money? Definitely not through trading,
something he’s trying to say he’s good at.
How he got a decent chunk of his money is through his mom. She gave him her LIFE SAVINGS of $530
grand to invest in a Subway sandwich shop in 2013. He already had experience
running 3 different Subway Stores. Supposedly, he inherited the stores,
but these are just twitter rumors. What IS real was that his mom gave him money to invest in a
new Subway store. But he never transferred the ownership of the new store into his mom's name.
AND he never gave her any money back. Eventually, she got tired of it. Six years later in 2019,
she finally launched legal action after still not receiving any money
from him! In short, the court ruled in HER favor.
The court ordered Tyson to repay his mom the money she gave him to invest.
But he couldn’t! He told the court that he was broke! He claimed to be on unemployment benefits
because he had a declared income of 44 cents every 2 weeks. That Lambo he claimed was his?
It was rented! The only thing he owned on the Lambo was the license plate.
But the craziest thing is, he actually offered to settle with his mom for 150 grand! This is after
he stole from her in the first place! When her lawyers asked him how come he couldn’t pay more
money, he said that he needed money to maintain the lifestyle he’s showing on Instagram. He said
that he had to eat out and buy new clothes because quote, ”that's what social media is about”!
In October 2020, the Brisbane Supreme Court issued an enforcement warrant to go after him for the
$750,000 thousand dollars he owed his mom. That’s the full amount of her investment plus interest!
1 - Jose Angel Aman
This guy ran the hot new way to scam people right now. And that’s of course,
running a crypto scam! But the technique itself is just the classic Ponzi scheme, except with crypto.
Jose Angel Aman and his partners however, didn’t start with a crypto
scam first. They got into that later. What they did first was quite old fashioned.
They would find people and convince them to invest money in diamond contracts beginning
in 2014. They promised investors that they would buy rough diamonds that
could be refined and then sold at a massive profit. Investors were told that their money
was backed by $25 million dollars worth of diamonds. The scam was described as a
high-return and no-risk venture. And hundreds of people bought into this scam!
Of course, Aman didn’t have 25 million dollars worth of diamonds to back the
incoming investment money. And Aman didn’t buy any rough diamonds to refine and sell
either. He and his partners just took investor money and used it for whatever they wanted!
All they did was keep bringing in new investors and paying off old investors with the new money.
If they weren’t able to pay investors back by the end of the investment period,
Aman would convince the investors to roll over their money. They’d claim that the full value of
their investments would be put into new deals. They provided fake “Reinvestment Contracts” to
keep old investors happy. Basically it was just a way to buy time until Aman could find new money.
Because the original scheme was starting to fall apart, Aman launched a diamond-backed cryptocoin
called Argyle Coin. But this wasn’t anything special. This was the same
scheme except investors were given crypto as well because it’s the newest gimmick!
Aman and his partners scammed hundreds of investors of almost 24 million dollars!
Ultimately, Aman was sentenced to seven years in federal prison in December 2020.
Here’s what’s next!