Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
I was thinking about the North Pole police. There's a bunch of little guys. Hello, Matt Cox. It is so, so good to see you again. I feel like it's been months, but it's only been a few weeks. I know. I can hear the comments now. Your fans, they love us. Yes, they do. My God, I've never gotten so much positive feedback in my life than looking at the comments on your YouTube page.
It's so gratifying. It makes up for the fact that you don't pay me anything to do this, and I'm making you rich, and we're putting up big numbers, and the fans like us together. This is gratifying. I know. It's even better because I don't hate you and it irritates you so much. It doesn't irritate me. It gives me that much more of a tickle in my tummy. I know.
The idea of defrauding someone creates happiness in you. But I love your fans. They are the nicest people in the world. And so, I mean, every now and then you get a lunatic. I was going to say, I'm going to have to pull some of the lunatic ones. I'm going to start sending those to you instead of the good ones. Again, I mean, those are the ones that stick with you, right?
Those are the ones I'm laying in bed. The guy is like, what did I do to that guy? This guy sucks. Why does he hate me? Yeah, right, right, right. But again, I'm just tickled pink with how nice your fans are and how much they like what we do here when I come out. Good times. It is. So here's the deal. I got a dozen stories for you today.
A dozen crime stories ripped from the pages of federal law enforcement, most FBI. A couple of them I worked. Most are just other people's work. I don't want to take credit for anyone else's work. And we're going to play a game that we've played before. And I know there's people out there who don't know the format of this, so I want to kind of lay it all out.
that I'm going to tell you the crime story, I'm gonna tell you what the bad guy did, how the bad guy was caught, if I know, how the investigation unfolded, how the litigation unfolded, and your job, Matt Cox, is to tell me how much time that person got in prison. Based on all the facts we know, I'm happy to answer any questions along the way.
And if you're within 20% of the actual sentence, then you get a point. Colby is going to be keeping track of this. A passing score for young Matt Cox is 50%. Okay. Which you have achieved before. Yeah. Like by the skin of your teeth. Other times you failed miserably. I'd also like to say that even though you're giving me the information, there's some information that you don't have.
Like sometimes you don't know if they cooperated. So some of these things, some of the offset, like I can't – I'm not getting that information because if some guy could get five years and I'm saying five years and he ends up getting two years, sometimes there's – That variance could be because he cooperated against three other people.
When you place a bet on football, do you know whether the guy had a Wendy's chili right before the game? You don't know. There's a lot of variables in gamesmanship. I'm saying you're only – an artist is only as good as the medium he's working in. I'm giving you all the information I have. You have. In the case that I worked, I'll tell you what color underwear the guy was wearing.
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Chapter 2: What stories does Tom Simon share about investigations?
Oh, really? Like digging through trash to try and recover evidence? Dead bodies. No. Oh. Yeah. I've had three different investigations where a person is missing. One was two sisters who ended up coming up missing. They were kidnapped at a bus stop. And we had no idea where they were. We still don't. It's an unsolved case.
And we thought it was possible, because it was garbage day, that the girls were literally thrown in the trash after being offed. And so we spent a week in the blazing sun digging through the garbage at the landfill. Another case, a hairdresser came up missing.
And so we went to a landfill in Georgia where all of the garbage in Florida goes to and spent, I think, 10 days digging through that garbage.
It's an amazing experience being in a landfill because it's as far as the eye can see, it's a gigantic mountain of trash, but it's done like lasagna where it's layer of soil, layer of trash, layer of soil, and waste management or whoever the company is that would manage it. There's sort of an amazing job kind of building this thing up into the sky. That's all the garbage.
And what they do when we're doing a landfill search, and this is probably more information than we need to know for this story, is that they clear out a kind of a flat bit of soil, call it about the size of a pro football field, or amateur football field, any football field. And they can identify...
where the trash from this particular neighborhood on this particular date came from like what quartile of the giant lasagna of the mountain and then they move the trash there a little bit at a time spread it out in kind of a field and then you get about 100 agents standing shoulder to shoulder myself included with hoes kind of looking through the trash looking for the body of the victim and then my third one we actually successfully found the lady
her remains. She was murdered here in Florida by a contractor. It's a story I'll tell some other time. And this was in the landfill? You found her? Yeah, we were looking for her. We had good information that he had dumped her there. This is not a fun story. This is not nearly as fun of a story as I was hoping. I didn't even know you'd ever worked on any murder investigations.
Again, I'm not the case agent. I'm unskilled labor. They need bodies. They need any dumb body who can just have enough stamina to kind of dig through trash with a hoe under the blazing sun or the freezing air, depending on what time of year it is, for 14 hours a day looking for the body of a victim. And we found it in the guys serving life in prison, bottom line. That's a different story.
But I've spent time in landfills. And there was a case that I did investigate involving a landfill on the big island of Hawaii. Okay. Okay? The landfill was a – I think it was a municipal landfill, but it was run by the company Waste Management, who runs most of the big landfills in the U.S., and they're very good at what they do.
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Chapter 3: How did the kickback scheme work at the landfill?
He's like, we finally got a good babysitter. We actually were able to get away for like a day. And he's like, honestly, I haven't been away from him in like, you know, three years. He said, and to get away for a day, he's like, it was really, it was nice because, you know, there's just constant, you know, you're constantly on. It's a full-time job.
Yeah, I told him, and I said, have you considered crating? And I thought – and Jess just looked at me and started laughing. I was like, oh, yeah, I was joking. Yeah, that's a joke. But, you know, I mean – Yeah, well, that's the thing. I mean having kids is – You put one little gate up and you just make sure there's nothing they can swallow and you leave.
I mean sometimes you got to free range. I could tell you some nightmare stories of parents who did that. That's another episode from the day. There's a town in Alaska. The name of the town is called North Pole. Nice. Isn't that clever? Yeah. There's literally, you go to North Pole, Alaska, and then it has its own zip code. And in the main street in North Pole, Alaska, Santa Claus Lane,
Wait, those – they are – Marketers. Yeah, they're good. They're good. What does the town look like? It's lovely. Is it? I've never been there, but I've been looking at it online based on the story, and it looks – it's like a theme party. It's like those towns that have Oktoberfest, and it looks like you might be in Germany. This town looks like Santa Claus' hometown. Nice.
And there's a restaurant there. Several restaurants there, but there's one particular restaurant, and don't know the name, don't know which one, but we'll call it the North Pole Restaurant for the sake of this conversation to protect the identity of the victim. And the owner of the restaurant took his eye off the ball. He wasn't keeping an eye on his own bank account.
And then he finally looks at the bank account after about a week and notices that for the last six days, none of his credit card receipts, someone rings it up on the credit card, was being deposited into his business bank account. Okay. Okay. And because of this, he's missing $128,000 in sales. Jeez. Ever have a business email compromise? No.
I mean, no, but I'm going to – You can figure out what it is. Yeah, I can assume. So what happens is this. Somebody clicks on the wrong thing or whatever, and your email gets hacked. And then what the bad guys do is they don't take over your email, but they begin reading all of your emails to look for information about you that they can exploit regarding your financial records. Right.
He suffered a business email compromise. It is a huge fraud right now. The FBI is getting absolutely swamped with business email compromises. How do you get access to somebody's email? Phishing? Yeah, phishing. Someone sends a message to you saying your Gmail has been compromised. Please click on this link to reset your password. You click on that link.
Enter in your old password, enter your new password, but you're not truly on the Gmail site. You're on a site that looks identically like it. That's basically how someone in your company has messed up. But what happened is, so he had a business email compromise. He didn't know it at the time. But then, so he calls the police. Oh, no, he looks into his, he calls his bank, first thing.
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Chapter 4: What are the consequences of automatic credit card payments?
So you and I— He's not even reviewing the bill. It's just automatically paying. Yeah. American Express every month just debits his bank account for the amount of money that he had spent on his Amex bill that month, and he goes on with his life. And all the credit card companies, including Amex, are kind of pushing you into a paperless thing. They're not even sending you a statement.
In fact, some credit cards are making you pay to get a paper statement sent every month because they want you just to have it on the app. And if maybe you're a rich guy who's running a couple magazines and enjoying daddy's money, you're not even bothering to look at that. You're not downloading the app and saying, like, oh, how much did I spend at Qdoba or whatever. So Sergey and Galina.
What's Qdoba? It's like Chipotle. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's like a Chipotle.
Chapter 5: How did Sergey and Galina exploit vulnerabilities in credit card handling?
Never heard of that. Yeah. No, no, they do. They have them here. I think I have seen them. Yeah, that's good. It's got a big Q, right? Enjoy Qdoba. Okay, I'll try it. I'll check it out. Qdoba should be a sponsor of the Matt Cox Show. Sergey and Galina, they saw an opportunity. They saw a vulnerability in Wynn's handling of the Amex.
And they started running Wynn's Amex card through their point-of-sale system several times a day. Started out small, charges between $1,000 and $4,000. And you know what happened? It went through. Everything was fine. Nothing happened. Nobody noticed anything. No one called them on it. They became emboldened.
For the month of April 2022, for example, they hit his Amex card 225 times in one month for $600,000. Okay, but he's not spending even close to $600,000. So anyway, okay, yeah.
Chapter 6: What was the scale of the fraud against Wynn?
They were pigs at the trough. Yeah, this is, yeah. This is pure stupidity. The swiping of his card through their point-of-sale system had no relation whatsoever to the amount of rides they were giving. Yeah, so it's not like they're padding the bill by 15% or 20%. This is fucking 600, 800 times. Any sense that these charges are tethered to his reality is just out the window. Right. Right.
The overcharging of his Amex card, think about this, continued for 17 years. What? How do you not? I mean, that's... He never does a periodic audit of his stuff. I mean, nobody ever catches this. Somebody did in year 17 of this thing.
And by that point, when someone realized that there was a problem here, when his accountant or whatever sees that, they realized that Sergey and Galina had stolen $34 million from Wynn. Wow. Let that sink in. Wow.
Chapter 7: What were the legal repercussions for the fraudsters?
Wow. Your limo driver has made $34 million over the course of 17 years just driving you around to Whole Foods. What does that accountant do? He's triple-checking this. He's like, this has got to be wrong. All right, so Sergey and Galina, how'd they spend that kind of money, you might be asking? They were living like millionaires themselves. They bought 14 homes. You are so stupid.
Seven vehicles. They were living the life of the wealthy, all funded by Wynn's Amex card. That's a hell of a driver. Single largest victim fraud in Oregon history. FBI Portland office opens the case. Pretty easy case. They arrest him on fraud charges, both of them, right? I mean, she's the one in the back office. He's the one who's driving. They're co-conspirators.
They plead guilty, and FBI is in the process of seizing their homes and assets with the money going to pay toward Wynn's restitution. But you know and I know that's pennies on the dollar, right? You're never going to get full value for that. Even though we have two defendants, they both got the same sentence. That's the clue.
And I think we're going to assume that there's no criminal history for either of them. Astronomical amount of money, though. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking... How much time do they get, Matt? I mean, I'm thinking like the max wire fraud is 20 years. It is. That is the max wire fraud. You know, sometimes they don't like to give the max max. Maybe 18 years apiece. Yeah.
Now, again, I think you're confusing two things. I'm not saying you're wrong. That the maximum sentence in the statute is 20 years. But we're still dealing with the sentencing guidelines range. And that dollar amount range gets bigger and bigger and bigger and wider and wider.
So the difference between a $2 million fraud and a $10 million fraud in the federal sentencing guidelines gives you the exact amount of time. I'm not giving you a clue here as much as I'm saying that you're getting hung up in your brain on the statutory maximum penalty, which has no relation whatsoever to the federal sentencing guidelines for fraud. We can go with 18 years.
I'm not telling you not to, but I just want to make sure that you understand that factor. Yeah, I'm going to say 18 years still. After your last experience with me, you're really sticking to your guns on this thing. There's no getting you off of 18 years? No, 18 years. All right, well, you can't say that I didn't try. Okay. How much? Because they both received 57 months in prison.
Are you fucking serious? Yeah. That is ridiculous. That is low. I mean, you know how many – I'm ready to go right now for – Get a limo? Start driving an Uber? No, for $34 million, I'll go do five years right now. You know and I know that's not true. You know and I know that all the tea in China isn't going to put you back inside for the amount of time that you've lost.
$34 million, I could pay my restitution off. Literally robbing Peter to pay Paul. Have some money left over. It's a big one. And I agree, that sentence does seem low. That does seem outrageous. But again, at some point, pull it up on Google, the sentencing guidelines ranges get so wide so fast.
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