She Will Scam You - The Dawn Bennett Story
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Who is Dawn Bennett and what led her to start her own investment company?
Remember that strange con woman who wanted to avoid getting arrested? So she cast some sort of magic spell using cow tongues in a jar? Now the woman's name is Dawn and Dawn is 44 when this story starts and she's living in Maryland. And Dawn's got a lot going for her.
She works at a major investment firm helping clients invest their money and she gets paid pretty well. But for whatever reason, Dawn isn't satisfied. She wants to make even more money. So one day in 2006, she takes steps to do that. She quits her job and she starts her own investment company. And immediately, things seem to be going okay. She's actually able to get a few of her clients to move over from her old firm. But it's apparently not enough. Because Dawn doesn't have a ton of clients, so she isn't managing as much money as she used to. And this feels like failure to her. So she decides to do something about it. And she low-key starts inflating her numbers. She tells people that her firm manages about a billion dollars in assets and that they rank among the top 1% investment firms in the world, which is all bullshit, but people don't know any better.
And this actually works. And she starts pulling in a ton of new clients. Then, in 2009, she submits these made-up numbers to Barron's, a major financial magazine, and they end up featuring her, and she gets ranked fifth on the list of top 100 women financial advisors. And being featured blows Dawn and her company the f*** up. And suddenly her name gets traction in the investment world and Dawn takes full advantage of this free publicity. She launches her own radio show on AM radio and there she talks about the massive returns all her clients are supposedly getting and how she's making them all rich. And all of this continues to work because people actually believe her and her listeners begin investing their money with her.
So now Dawn is getting paid left and right, and her firm is managing around $400 million in investments, which is a large and very respectable amount of money to manage. However, it's still not enough for Dawn because she feels like she has to lie to people now and tell them that her company is now managing about $2 billion in investment assets. so that they think her company's more successful than it actually is. And people fall for it. Many of the people who listen to her radio show are retirees or elderly people, and they don't know any better. They see Dawn as this genius investor who's managing a ton of finances. Now, here's where she runs into a problem. When you lie at this scale, eventually you need results to back up the numbers.
And Dawn just doesn't have results like that. So in order to try and get some results, she starts placing her client's money into some extremely risky trades. Yet she'll tell them that she's investing conservatively and that their investments are safe. And so, as you can imagine, it doesn't take too long before things start to go wrong for her. Soon enough, the trades go bad and her investors start losing money. Like, a lot of money. One guy invests about $1.1 million with her and her company and she loses $920,000 of it. Which sucks for that guy, but Dawn doesn't seem to care, because she's about to get into something even bigger. In 2010, she takes some of the money that she's making off these people, and she starts her own luxury sportswear website that sells a bunch of extremely expensive sportswear, like $13,000 golf bags, $700 ski hats, stuff like that.
But here's the thing. She tells her investors that it's a much bigger website than it really is. And of course, she tells them that it's an opportunity to make some serious money. She shows them fake financial statements claiming that the website is thriving and pulling in millions of dollars and all they have to do is invest in it and they could all be so rich. And once again, this works. People actually believe her, and they start investing money into her stupid website. Now, in reality, her website is not that big. It's actually losing money, as you can imagine.
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