Scott Johnson

I mean, he was just a total mess.

He'd lost all his money, as I said, but he'd also kind of lost his self-confidence and

You know, his whole sort of work life was messed up.

His family life was a mess.

So it had just torn his life apart.

And I remember I got off that call

And I just thought, okay, well, there's something going on here that is different than what I at the time understood to be your average scam because there was so much work that had gone into this, huge amounts of labor on the part of the scammers to pull this off.

And what I would subsequently learn is that the amount of money he lost was the exception rather than the rule.

That is to say, there were hundreds and hundreds of these victims who went to Indonesia.

And the vast, vast majority of them lost relatively little money.

you know, on the order of a few thousand, you know, a few thousand dollars, really not all that much.

This guy happened to lose a lot, but yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, it is.

It was disturbing.

Yeah, it is.

And this is this is kind of the the question that sort of animated me from the beginning, which was and I think everybody

who comes into contact with this scam sooner or later gets to this question, which is, well, what, what in the hell was going on?

I mean, why, why did this person do this?

What was the end game?