Speaking of scammers….

Speaking of scammers and reputations: Yesterday Canadian authorities caught a major swindler named Gareth West.

He posed as an Andrew Tate style extreme sportsman and bodybuilder. He pretended to get rich from flipping properties and made videos showing people how to flip. He did buy lots of real estate but didn’t flip it. He lived in the houses and kept moving around to avoid easy capture. Buying and selling houses may have also helped to launder the money, though the reports aren’t clear on this point.

In fact he made his money from a classic Spanish Prisoner swindle. He had dozens of paid helpers running call centers in his houses. They called elderly Americans, posing as nephews or grandsons or granddaughters in trouble who needed cash for bail or cash to pay a pregnant girlfriend.

Other helpers in the US did the research and picked up the cash. The first key to solution came when one of the helpers dropped his envelope after leaving a victim’s house in Vermont. The victim turned it in to police who started tracing it.

Later noticed an odd connection. Another scheme discussed in the postal podcasts, the Marie Duval psychic racket, was also owned by a Montreal man, but its factory was in the US.