What happens when people are born with scamming in their bones?
They can’t help but just try the wildest schemes to separate people from their money!
Let’s start with: 5 - Pretend Billionaire, Real Prison
Justin Costello claimed he was a billionaire and he threatened to make cops pay for trying
to arrest him.
But Justin Costello wasn't a billionaire.
Justin Costello was a conman.
And Justin Costello conned businesses and investors into thinking he was rich.
The first time our fake billionaire got in trouble with the law, he was drunk.
Costello was at a Lodge and Spa, and according to staff members he got into a drunken rant
and started harassing employees.
He told them that he was a billionaire and that he could do anything he wished to them-
Montgomery Burns style.
Costello’s rants were so expressive and confident that staff members truly believed
that he was a billionaire and could make good on his threats.
They were so threatened that they decided that only the police could deal with their
drunken high-value customer.
Doubling Down
When the police arrived, Justin continued to wave his fake billionaire story in their
faces.
The police didn't care about that and warned him to calm down.
Justin, now apparently believing his own story, felt his pretend billionaire status gave him
the right to ignore the very real police, and he approached one of them with a clenched
fist.
Apparently, Justin Costello also fights like Mr. Burns, so things were over pretty quickly,
and he got arrested.
Despite being cuffed, Justin continued to threaten the officers.
He told police that arresting him would cost them a lot of money and that they needed to
uncuff him so he could punch their lights out.
It didn’t really seem like a good reason to take his cuffs off, so they didn’t comply.
Instead, the police ignored his ramblings because that's what they generally do to drunk
people.
However, threatening a police officer is an actual crime and our fake billionaire was
eventually booked for the very real crime of obstruction and harassment.
He was convicted and ordered to complete 40 hours of community service.
Costello was also ordered to avoid consuming alcohol and drugs for a year, and banned from
contacting witnesses or the lodge.
Despite this, Justin didn't relent on his claims about being a billionaire.
His lawyer even backed up his claims and told the prosecuting lawyer that Justin was a Harvard
graduate who was rich enough to pay off witnesses.
Runaway
The second time the police caught our wannabe billionaire, he wasn't lucky enough to escape
with just community service.
This time, Costello was facing an indictment of charges related to serious fraud, and these
charges carried very long sentences.
So Justin did what any fake billionaire would do: he ran away.
His plan was simple: he would take all his wealth, and just leave the country.
He had six gold bars worth around $12,000, Mexican pesos worth $10,000, and US cash around
$60,000.
Unfortunately for him, his plan didn't quite work.
The FBI was on the case, and Costello was captured about an hour and a half from Mexico's
border.
When he was captured, he told the police that he didn't surrender to the court system as
agreed because he'd recently had a stroke and was trying to recover.
Sure Justin, sure.
After his arrest, the prosecutors on his case told the court that he needed to be held without
bail because this billionaire was a flight risk.
And Justin was like ‘Pshhh..naw…’ while staring at the door.
Aftermath
Once Justin was in jail and his trial started, details about his fraudulent actions were
revealed.
He'd lied to several investors that he was a billionaire, Havard graduate, and Iraq War
Veteran who owned a hedge fund with over a billion in management.
Honestly, being all of that doesn't just make him a billionaire investor.
It also makes him Batman.
Costello’s lies were so effective that he managed to scam about 29 investors of around
$25 million in total.
He also used around $40,000 of investor funds to throw a lavish wedding party for himself.
In the end, Justin's lies couldn't save him.
He was eventually hit with a 25-count indictment in Washington State.
His trial is still set to be scheduled, but he faces up to forty years in prison and up
to $5,000,000 in fines.
That should be pocket change for our fake billionaire, right?
4 - No more bluffs Bill Jordanou is a professional poker player
who managed to set up a Ponzi scheme that defrauded people of over $72 million.
But he didn't do this alone.
He had, alongside him, a former Scoresby accountant called Robert Zaia, and they both carried
out a fraud of gigantic proportions.
Jordanou and Zaia didn't just burn customers by defrauding them.
They also burned them by pleading guilty to their charges and avoiding trial.
The entire fraud scheme couldn't have been successful without insider help from the Commonwealth
Bank.
The guilty pleas of the card-dealing and Ponzi scheming duo meant that victims will never
really know the role the bank played in building this fraudulent house of cards.
The fraud was simple.
Robert Zaia would use his connection to scout for wealthy clients, and Jordanou would forge
documents in those clients' names to request excessive loans that the clients couldn't
pay off.
Inside Man
The only way that Jordanou could ever have gotten away with this play was if he had contacts
at the bank who approved his forged documents.
Which he did.
One such contact was Brendan Epps who was described as the inside man.
However, Epps died of a brain aneurysm way back in 2007, and after his death, Jordanou
had to forge other contacts at the bank.
One of the plays that Jordanou and Zaia made was on Jim Barker and his wife Debbie.
Jim made only $80,000 per year but suddenly discovered that his loan application document
mentioned that he made $343,000 at the time.
And this document had been used to apply for a loan of $1.5 million, which was impossible
for Jim to finance.
Jim wasn't particularly happy to hear that he'd gotten into perpetual debt because of
fraud, so he reported the case to the Commonwealth bank.
The bank's assessment analysis read the report and agreed that yes, it was indeed a fraud.
The plan was to report the fraud to the police and let them take it from there.
However, the bank only made the report four years later when the entire scheme was already
unraveling.
Meanwhile, the Bakers had to sell their home to finance the fraudulent loan that Jordanou
had gotten on their behalf.
Spending
So what did these two fraudsters spend all their money on, while literally forcing people
to lose their homes?
Well, let's just say they lived like kings.
Robert Zaia siphoned around $26 million into his family's trust.
As one would expect, both Jordanou and Zaia used the money to fund private gambling meetups
and expensive trips to Las Vegas and Macau.
The duo also bought a fleet of luxury cars, a jet-ski, Harley Davidson motorcycles, and
even owned a Speed Boat named Bad Boys.
Even for fraudsters, that's a little bit on the nose.
Aftermath
In the end, the scheme unraveled and the bad boys eventually had to face the law.
And the law treated them like the bad boys they were.
They were faced with 142 counts of fraud and eventually had to plead guilty.
Jordanou was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Zaia got ten years for his efforts as
well.
3 - Property Wars Scott Menaged is a former star of Property
Wars.
If you didn't know, Property Wars is a reality TV show on Discovery channel.
Aside from being a reality TV star, Menaged also happened to be quite the property warlord.
However, instead of winning property wars for his client, he just stole from them.
And after years of stealing from his clients, Menaged was eventually caught by the police
and pled guilty to multiple counts of fraud, money laundering, and even identity theft.
Menaged operated a real estate firm whose business was to use loans to invest in real
estate.
But instead of investing, he embezzled about $30 million bucks.
Menaged, whose name sounds like it’s in past-tense, used the embezzled cash to support
a lavish lifestyle.
He traveled a lot, bought luxury vehicles, and purchased million-dollar homes.
Property War Crimes
Vladimir Menaged had spent so much money lavishly that he ran out of money and could no longer
access more loans.
Ordinarily, when someone is faced with a complete disaster, they typically stop doing the dumb
things that got them into the mess.
But Menaged wasn't that kind of man.
He was already used to the trappings of a royal lifestyle, so he decided to get even
more hardcore with his fraud.
He built an elaborate identity theft scheme and started using the identities of recently
deceased individuals to send credit applications from his furniture stores.
The loans were never used to purchase any furniture, and Menaged just managed to spend
it all.
He allegedly caused banks around $2 million in losses through this ruse.
Sentencing
In the end, it took an organization of government agencies to take our property warlord down.
Menaged only got caught when the Department of Homeland Security, Homeland Security Investigations,
and Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation got involved.
In court, Menaged had an impressive rap sheet.
He was charged with bank fraud, aggravated identity theft, and money laundering.
The court heard that he'd defrauded up to 200 victims and he was ordered to pay up to
$33.5 million as restitution to these victims.
He also got a 17-year prison sentence for his war crimes.
In any case, it's sort of ironic that a real estate investor will have only one room and
one bed to call home for the next seventeen years.
2 - Bordeaux Cellars Stephen Burton and Andrew Fuller ran a scheme
where they defrauded a bunch of investors with a loan scheme that was collateralized
by wine.
Yes, it sounds weird to us too but it happened.
Before we dive into this scheme, let's talk about the perpetrators.
Who are Stephen Burton and James Wellesley?
The duo had a criminal history before now and these new charges aren't their first taste
of the law’s vintage 22.
Stephen Fuller, for one, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2013 after he admitted
to charges including fraud and forgery over a property scheme.
The duo also faced civil charges relating to fraud the year before they were recently
arrested.
They were found guilty in that judgment and had to pay £56 million in restitution to
their victims.
Wine Loan
But the present charges they face are criminal, and they are unlikely to get away with a fine.
Both men ran a business called Bordeaux Cellars, where they made outrageous promises to their
investors, claiming that they would get a 12% quarterly interest rate on their investments.
These funds would be lent to wealthy borrowers who needed cash, and the cash would be backed
by expensive wines.
The loans, they said, would be worth just 35% of the wines’ values, so lenders would
easily get their money back if any borrower defaulted.
However, there was one tiny problem; there were no borrowers and there was no expensive
wine.
In the end, the criminal fake-wine hoarding duo was able to scam investors of almost a
hundred million dollars.
The business plan made no sense if you thought about it.
Why would a person rich enough to own dozens of cases of the most expensive wines want
to get loans at 16 percent interest?
People with that much money definitely had better options.
Aftermath
Burton said he'd gotten the idea for the scam from a Sunday Times article where he read
that a man lent billionaires short-term loans and they gave him their luxury vehicles as
collateral.
The only difference was that Burton had copied a legal business model and had made it into
a Frankenstein monster of an illegal one.
In the end, the scam was uncovered when in 2019, the payments of quarterly interest to
Bordeaux Cellars lenders abruptly stopped.
All it took was one investor having his lawyer do some research.
The lawyer looked up the business and found little evidence of trading activity and no
audited records.
This discovery set off a chain of events that led to the police investigating the whole
scheme.
Burton and Fuller were able to get their hands on a total of 76 million pounds from investors.
Fuller was eventually arrested and is currently behind bars.
Burton, on the other hand, was also arrested but was released due to Covid concerns.
Despite currently serving a four-year sentence, he fled the country and is currently still
on the lam.
1 - The Crypto King Self-described ‘Crypto King’, Aiden Pleterski,
scammed investors out of millions of dollars intended for crypto and foreign exchange investments.
This young Canadian crypto king deceived his subjects, including Diane Moore, who was referred
to Pleterski by a long-time friend.
She wanted to invest the $60,000 she had set aside for her grandchildren’s education.
Moore’s investment would have a 70-30 split on any gains, meaning she would get 70 percent,
and King Pleterski would receive the other 30 percent.
In her contract, it stated that her investment would target gains of 10 to 20 percent every
two weeks, and she would be repaid her entire initial investment in full if any of it was
lost.
Moore ended up becoming one of the 29 creditors involved in a bankruptcy proceeding against
Pleterski after he lost her grandchildren’s money.
A fraud recovery law firm began investigating Pleterski and called out for information about
him.
The founder of Investigation Counsel PC, Norman Groot, was shocked by the response they received.
Around 140 people who invested a total of $20 million responded.
Investors participated in the same 70-30 percent split as Moore, and their goal was 10-20 percent
growth biweekly.
However, the interest rate of five percent a week was unrealistic in the open market.
Lifestyle
While investors struggled to recover their lost money, His Majesty Pleterski enjoyed
an extravagant lifestyle fit for the crypto king he self described as.
He owned 11 vehicles, including two McLarens, two BMWs, and a Lamborghini, and flew on private
jets.
The rent for his lakefront mansion was $45,000 a month.
Pleterski marketed himself through paid-for promotional articles, where he’d talk about
his success using crypto to buy and sell in-game items in video games.
The articles would list his credentials, including investing in Bitcoin early.
As he watched it grow in popularity, Pleterski capitalized on the growing stock and maximized
the return on his investment.
The articles also spoke about Pleterski’s plans to start his own company, using his
vast knowledge of the crypto industry to help investors obtain the same success as him.
Investors questioned Pleterski for more than five hours during a creditors meeting.
They demanded to know why his majesty kept investing money when he couldn’t repay current
investors.
The king’s excuse was that he was just a kid- like King Joffry.
But 50% less evil, and with 100% less beheadings so there’s that.
Excuses
Pleterski’s lawyer said the claims against his client were exaggerated.
Pleterski had never actually solicited money from investors.
Instead, people saw how successful he was when he invested in crypto as a teenager and
wanted to recreate the same success.
Pleterski’s lawyer pointed out that none of the investors considered that the crypto
market is volatile and a young Pleterski probably needed to be better qualified to handle their
investments.
Essentially blaming the victims for trusting him, because that’s always been a solid
legal defense.
Despite his lawyers’ claims that it was the victims own fault, Pleterski clearly deceived
investors.
He provided them with pictures and videos of statements from a foreign exchange/ crypto
platform, showing that he had $311 million in his business account.
However, an investor reached out to the trading platform and notified them that Pleterski
and his business didn’t have royal coffers filled with those funds.
It’s unlikely that investors will get their money back, and some used a line of credit
for their investments.
Apart from the bankruptcy, their other legal option would be to report Pleterski to the
Ontario Securities Commission and the police.
Aftermath
Pleterski was almost arrested twice after refusing to hand over his diamond-studded
Rolex, Audi and cell phone to a bankruptcy trustee in efforts to recoup some of the $25
million Pleterski allegedly owes 119 investors.
Threats of arrest were necessary to deal with Pleterski’s alleged lack of cooperation
ever since the Ontario Superior Court of Justice declared him bankrupt.
While claiming bankruptcy, his highness was still driving a car worth $150,000 while wearing
a diamond studded Rolex that he refused to offer up to the trustee.
Even with his assets seized, only $2 million of the $25 million has been recovered, and
Pleterski’s friends and family aren’t being very cooperative either.
With over $23 million still unaccounted for, it seems that Pleterski is actively hiding
his money, though the trustee is attempting to subpoena bank records of various wire transactions.
Unfortunately, the money recovered won’t be distributed for a while and the amount
returned to investors will most likely be far less than what is owed.
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Let us know in the comment section what percentage of crypto projects you think are just complete
scams!