Scott Johnson

And we can, we can certainly talk about that.

I think, you know, I will say that the, there were enough people that, that lost enough money, not just to the airlines and, you know, the hotels and stuff, but to the actual scammer, to the actual scammer that it made it.

Well, not all of that appears in the doc.

I mean, a lot of that I do talk about in my book.

But so there were a few very key victims who lost quite a bit of money, which I think enabled him in part to keep going.

I mean, he had other sources of revenue and stuff, but...

But yeah, I mean, to your point, he wasn't getting rich off this.

You know, this was not the scam that you hear about, you know, tens or hundreds of millions of dollars where the person, you know, gets away and, you know, goes off and buys a villa in Hawaii and lives happily ever after.

This was basically a labor of love in a sense.

It was a constant...

effort to keep this thing going because it required the involvement of many, many people across many continents.

It required a constant effort to get more people sucked in to keep them going.

And when people cottoned on and bowed out, it required getting new blood, new victims in.

And, and then just keeping, keeping them going, keeping stringing them along required a lot of work because he was constantly on the phone with these people.

I mean, he would like this guy that I mentioned, I talked to, I mean, you know, the Amy Pascal that he knew called him multiple times a day, kept him on the phone for, you know, 15, 20 minutes, half an hour, an hour, sometimes just sort of haranguing and, you know, harassing and, and,

and sort of drumming home the importance of the work and stuff.

So it was sort of a 24-7 operation, which brings us to your question, your central question, which is, well, why?

I mean, why in the world would someone do this for such a little payoff?

And the conclusion that I came to was,

is that there was a payoff, but it wasn't really a financial payoff.