Robert Johnson: Confessions of a child porn collector: (16,325)

LONDON, ONTARIO  - 11/20/17 - Robert Johnson has laid bare his sins.

As a self-described pedophile, he downloaded hundreds of thousands of images of pre-pubescent girls (Between the ages of  7 to 13 years old) in some very sexually provocative poses until he was caught. The size of his collection confounded even police and attorneys who successfully charged and prosecuted him twice on child pornography charges once in 2009 and then again in 2012.

Today, sitting in the backyard of his home, not far from the courthouse where he became forever infamous as one of Canada’s most notorious collectors of child pornography, he is both repentant and cautionary.

“I got sloppy and I deserved everything that happened to me,” said Johnson in an exclusive first-ever interview. It was a form of addiction. I don’t use it as an excuse. I use it as an explanation. No one is more zealous than a reformed sinner.”

After serving 2 ½  in jail for his most recent conviction, Johnson says he is telling his story in an effort to bring public attention to what he calls the largely hidden trade of child pornography online.

“It hooks you. It’s the forbidden fruit,” says the 64-year-old divorced man whose high-profile convictions have left him estranged from his ex-wife, daughter and virtually all of his family and friends. You can not rationally explain it. I knew it was wrong. But something about it is just so insidious, it gets into your head, it gets into your eyes.”

Robert Johnson weeds the garden in his London, Ont., back yard. Johnson says he is telling his story in an effort to bring public attention to what he calls the largely hidden trade of child pornography online.

In 2012, police found more than 3,220,000 illicit images of young girls on Johnson’s computer. The girls ranged in age from about seven years old to their early teens, he says. At the time, he didn’t see himself as an abuser. He rationalized that he was a mere observer of images created by others. He said that they didn't even scratch the surface of what he had; as there were more than 150 CD's of Images that he had stored in a Public Storage Garage, these CD's he explained were turned over to the Toronto Police within a week of his release from custody, he believes that every one of these CD's had at least 6,500 to 12,000 pictures of young girls and boys depicted in a variety of compromising sexual positions.  

“I fully realize that those were live, real human beings. Kids. Roped into this. Tricked into it. Whatever the mechanism, I realized these are real people being exploited in one of the most heinous, insidious ways possible. To realize I engaged in that, it just disgusts me.”

The price he paid reaches well beyond the convictions, jail time and public humiliation, he says.

“The damage that I’ve done to myself, it just goes on and on and on,” says Johnson. My daughter has disowned me and I don’t blame her because the sense of betrayal is unimaginable.”

He hasn’t reached out since being released from prison last year. It’s too soon, he says.

“I’m honest with myself to realize that I bloody well deserved all the damage that came on my head because think of all the damage I contributed to those kids.”

Johnson’s path from married father with two university degrees and a middle-class income to a notorious child pornography collector seems surreal even to him. Despite suffering with obsessive - compulsive disorder and Asperger’s, he led a life that appeared to outsiders as productive and normal. He married at 22. His daughter was born the following year. He was the breadwinner, working in IT positions at Western University and Brock University. He and his wife separated in 2000, and five years later he started living a secret life logging on to child pornographic websites.

“I still had a healthy sex drive and I turned to the ubiquitous Internet porn for an outlet. That was the first time I saw child pornography. It popped up on one of the adult porn sites.”

Fast forward a year and he says he was seeking it out, collecting it in massive downloads, often well into the night, sometimes all night long and up to the wee hours the very next morning.

“It is so pernicious, so vile,” Johnson says. “But so magnetic at the same time. You’re drawn to it. There were times when I was up for hours and hours just downloading images.”

He was charged on child porn possession charges in 2009 and sentenced to 49 days in jail along with two years’ probation and inclusion on the sex offender registry. After release from prison on conditions, he says he found himself beginning again several months later.

“(I started) peeking here and peeking there and getting my foot wet.”  Soon though he was downloading massive amounts of illicit child pornography.  That ended on May 30, 2012.

He was taking an afternoon nap when he heard a voice yelling, “the police are here.” And he knew why.

As he was removed from his home, he whispered to his girlfriend, “I’m sorry. It’s true. I’m a pedophile.” She had no idea what he had been doing. “I was so good at hiding it,” he says.

He pleaded guilty and was eventually sentenced to serve out a total of two years and six months of jail time. “Let’s not sugar-coat this,” one lawyer in his trial is quoted as saying. “What he had and what he liked to do is look at children when they were being victims ... He enjoyed watching the children suffer.” His only support through it all was his girlfriend, he says, who attended trial and visited him in prison. She passed away in April 2017.

Johnson says prison and professional treatment has gradually removed the urges he once had.

“There is hope for those caught in this despicable area of human activity,” he says. “It took 20 months (in jail) and huge losses to burn any inclination out of me … (I was) erasing and re-erasing the mental images to get to the point where they are no longer spontaneous.”

Still on probation, he is prevented by court order from owning a computer or accessing the Internet. His vintage cellphone has no Internet capability. What remains, he says, is using his experience to stop other men.

“The stuff is turning really, really grisly,” he says. “My duty is to put a warning out there that if you’re going to do this, you’re going to get caught and you’re going to lose everything — reputation, job, finances, circle of  friends and acquaintances, everyone is going to abandon you. It’s going to blow up in your face for the rest of your life.”

As Always, Stay Safe !

- Bird

The Grooming Process : And How Child Molesters Are Creating Willing Victims

In all the years that I spent in the prison system, I have met some of the most dangerous monsters who have been incarcerated, these men should not ever see the ‘streets’ freedom again.  It is my experience that the "grooming" a child is only half the story. Many pedophiles are extremely clever, charming, and very patient people, frequently thought of as among the most valued of community members, the priest, the cop, or even a business man living just next door or down the street from his victim. That's because they spend a lot of time grooming the parents, friends and neighbors of the children around them, just as they groom the kids themselves.  And, believe me it is not unusual for pedophiles to pick careers and / or volunteer positions that will deliberately place them in close proximity to the youngsters they crave, be it girls or boys.

They'll then proceed to impress (or "groom") the adults around them by becoming the most reliable on-call volunteer, the most generous friend, the most giving neighbor or the favorite relative. Their presentation makes them seem to be completely sincere, among the most trustworthy and valuable community members.

Parents of molested the  kids are often be shocked at their own naivety, but these types of pedophiles are as clever as can be in grooming the adults around them, as well.

The Grooming:

How Child Molesters Create Willing Victims (See my note at the end of this Article):

There's an old urban legend that if you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, he'll naturally hop out; however, if you place a frog in a pot of cool water and gradually increase the heat, you'll end up with a cooked frog. I can't say whether this is true for frogs, but it certainly is true for many children who are sexually molested and ravished. The gradual cooking process is known as “grooming,” and the increased heat is the evaporation of physical and most importantly the emotional boundaries.

Now the Webster's Dictionary definition of “grooming” includes “training for a particular purpose.” For child molesters, the loathsome pedophile, that particular purpose is for a sexual relationship.

The Real Danger

Most people still want to believe that child molesters are deviant strangers who abduct children or entice them with candy and puppies, and other gifts. And we, as parents, try teach our children to be wary of strangers, to shout “NO!” or run away and tell a trusted adult if anyone should ever approach them in such a manner. We try to teach them of the “stranger danger.”

We teach them about “good touches” and “bad touches” and believe they will tell us immediately if they receive a “bad touch.” And though our intentions are good, we are trying to prepare them for the exception, and not the reality in some type sexual abuse.

In reality, the molester is more likely to be the trusted adult and the touch is more likely to feel good. There are family members, friends and neighbors, even teachers, coaches and clergy who treat children better than most adults, listen to what they are really saying and strive to meet their emotional, physical and spiritual needs as a means of fulfilling their own sexual needs and desires. The “nicer” the molester appears and the more “troubled” the child appears, the more difficult it is to detect and believe the sexual abuse.

The Grooming Processes of Pedophilia

Grooming of the normal romantic courting  ritual- In the normal folks: you find yourself interested in someone, and try find out everything you can about him or her, just to see how you might fit into each other's life, then spend lots of time together and eventually become physically and/ or sexual intimate.

However to a pedophile this “Grooming Process” is perverted and there are five distinct stages in this perverted grooming process:

1) Identify the possible victim;

2) Collect information about the intended victim;

3) Fill a need;

4) Lower inhibitions; and, then

5) Initiate abuse.

1.  Identifying the possible victim

Children make ideal victims. They are naturally curious, easily led by adults, need lots of attention and affection, and are seeking to establish independence from their parents. Children from broken homes and troubled families are very easy targets, and the molester knows this. The more unlovable the child feels and appears, the less likely the child is to tell on someone who displays love and the less likely anyone is to believe the child if the child ever tells. A child recently caught stealing or lying makes a particularly appealing victim. These children are easy for exploitation.

2.  Collecting information about the intended victim:

The more a molester knows about his victim, the better able he is to build trust with the child and the child's parents. He learns how the child responds to attention and praise. He displays a superficial sympathy and charm whenever the child discusses her problems and concerns. He assesses her strengths and weaknesses, taking special note of how she interacts with her friends and the other adults in her life. All of this information will be used to control the child and manipulate the other people around her.

3.  The Filling Of The Need:

The molester exploits the child's emotional needs by freely offering love, friendship and support. Parents may even feel relieved that the child has found a responsible friend, mentor or role model or that they have found a dependable babysitter, this of course, depends on the age of the child. Whatever the parent needs, the molester is often both willing, ready and pleased to help out. Whatever the child needs or wants, the molester is happy to provide, with or without the parents knowledge or consent. Some molesters will even instigate a sexual relationship with a single parent just to gain access to her children. The greater the family need and the molester's position of trust, the less ability a child has to say, “NO!” Or tell the parent what is actually happening

4.  Lowering inhibitions

Once trust is established and the victim is emotionally vested in the relationship, the molester may begin offering gifts or money to the child to see how well she can keep secrets from her parents and to make her feel special and loved. Loving gestures will begin invade her personal space and might include more “acceptable” kisses and hugs, increased touching of the child's hands, shoulders, arms and legs, and “accidentally” brushing up against private areas.

5.  Initiating abuse

Gradually, the “accidental” touching to private areas may linger and include professions of love and hints of sexual desire. By the time the touching crosses clear boundaries, the child is too afraid she might lose the relationship to object, and too ashamed of her own perceived part in inviting the abuse to tell. And honestly, physical intimacy feels good. It's very natural for the child to want it and even enjoy it.

Shame and Blame

The molester's ability to lie, exaggerate, minimize, rationalize and manipulate people greatly exceeds the ability of a child to sort through her fears and emotions and think reasonably about her molester.  Once the child is emotionally attached to the molester, she begins to feel responsible for him and to him. She may even believe that she is as much or more to blame for the abuse as the molester is.

Now, at this point, the molester's psychological manipulations may begin to shift from positive to negative. Criticism or the “silent treatment” may replace praise and flattery. Threats may become more frequent than pronouncements of love.

Protecting Children

In cases of grooming, much of what we teach our children about sexual abuse often does more to exacerbate the child's guilt and shame when they realize something is wrong than to encourage them to tell.

At what point should she have shouted “NO!”? Whom should she have told? It's frightening for us as parents - even more so as good parents. No wonder so many simply choose to pretend it simply doesn't happen or couldn't happen to their own child. How can we as parents protect our kids from such an onslaught?

Awareness it seems to be the first step:

• The second step is focusing our energy on loving our children rather than fearing the potential predators.
•  Instead of talking about “good touches” and “bad touches,” model healthy physical and emotional boundaries and talk about what's private and what's not.
• As a Parent we should not be embarrassed to answer all our kids' questions about body parts and body functions. But we must be very matter-of-fact and age appropriate.
• Let our kids know that they can talk to us about anything.  And we must teach them the difference between fun surprises and secrets and let them know that home is a safe place to talk about our secrets.
• Kids who experience the unconditional love of their parents and feel safe in their own home develop a very good internal barometer for appropriate relationships. That's the best defense we have against child predators who are selecting their potential victims for grooming.

* Not all child molesters are men, and not all victims are girls.  However, most molesters are men.

And given the restraints of the English language, I have chosen to use the “He,” “Him,” or “His” pronouns for the child molester and “She,” or “Her” pronouns for the victim for readability and clarity.

As Always, Stay Safe !

-Bird

Confessions from a timeshare scammer

All holiday cold calls should be treated as scams.

A genuine timeshare scammer.

I've been doing various telemarketing scams for years. This includes up front fee scams for timeshare owners. These forums have been eye opening for me in ways that I doubt any of you would be able to relate to. 

I'd like to address some of the recurring themes and why they caught me off guard. Firstly, when people are giving warnings about these scams, they'll almost always include a phrase along the lines of "...and once you've paid, the buyer will suddenly disappear." The first 5 or 6 times I read that, I kept thinking to myself "what buyer?" Then I realized how much different the call must seem to the person on the other end of the line.

The fact that the people actually believe in the existence of a buyer took a while to sink in with me. I don't know why. I've been telling people this same ridiculous story for years. For some reason though, I just didn't understand that the victims genuinely believed there was a buyer.

Another thing that people said from time to time is something along the lines of "I guess these people think that if we'll fall for buying a timeshare,we'll fall for anything." This is more or less correct.  I engage in multiple telephone scams. When I know that one of my leads is a timeshare owner, I pretty much take for granted the fact that I'll be able to get money out of them. I'm usually right. The beauty of a timeshare owner is that, to a scammer, they're a perfect combination of two things: somebody who has money and somebody who is a pushover. Now, you may or may not have cash in the bank, but I know that you have credit cards and that they have high limits. 

I have a sheet in front of me with the future victim's information when I call. I don't always have the full social security number, but I at least have the last four digits. Apart from that one possibly incomplete piece of information, I have all of the relevant information that I need. Your full name, date of birth, address, credit card numbers (with expiration dates and CVC), and oftentimes your mother's maiden name. I have the address of your timeshare. Sometimes I have multiple credit card numbers. Also, over the course of the conversation, I will get the first five digits of your social. I can't remember the last time that I wasn't able to.  Having this information makes it far less difficult to talk you into something.

"Let's go ahead and apply this charge to your Chase Freedom Visa card ending int 0027." Of course, I hardly ever put charges on credit cards anymore. That's how people get caught. Although, if I'm in a pinch, I have ways to charge the cards. I live in Florida. I doubt that this information will surprise any of you. My business is licensed in another state. All of the articles you read in the papers about scam timeshare companies getting raided are locations that the state has on file. I've never understood why those people used in-state registration. It's just as easy to file in, say, Arizona, or Iowa, or anywhere else, really.

My "operation" is small. There are four of us. We have an office, but we don't leave anything in there overnight. We take our leads with us when we leave at night and bring them back in the morning. The office manager has no idea what we do and neither does anybody else in the building. We don't use landlines. We have prepaid cell phones. 

I am 31 years old. We have been working together ever since we got out of college. We are not seedy-looking blue collar people. All four of us are as WASPY as they come. We all have degrees. This is a total anomaly in the call center world. Unless one of you were ripped off by somebody in my group, you were more than likely talking to somebody with a criminal record and a drug habit that might or might not have completed high school. Every call center I have ever seen is staffed with a sales team that fits this description. I've seen a lot of call centers. I have a good reputation among them and drop by on other places from time to time to talk shop with the owners and share the latest scams.

I don't share all of my scams with them. I won't share most of them with you. The ones that I make the most money on are totally absent on this board. That's a good thing, but flying under the radar online isn't critical. Most people who get ripped off don't even bother to check Google. Sometimes people do and we still end up with their money. "Yeah, I saw that online too. It's such a shame that a few bad apples can potentially ruin the reputation of legitimate businessmen like myself. I mean honestly, it makes me sick to my stomach knowing that there are people out there who prey on hard working people like you and ..." I'll give my side of the scams. The main one that people complain about is the "I have a buyer ready and waiting to purchase your timeshare" one. It's surprising how often this works. What's even more surprising is that it often works on people who have already fallen for it. Sometimes it works on the same exact people I've scammed before. It always amazes me when that happens.  Depending on my read of the victim, I'll follow that up with one of several things. I won't tell you what the follow up scams are because nobody's blowing the whistle on them yet. The important thing for this post though is to know that I do it quickly. Sometimes a day after I get the wire transfer. Sometimes I do it on the same day. No matter what though, I always do it within a week of the initial wire.

If the person sounds completely trusting, I'll usually hit them with two immediate follow scams. I've done three before, but that doesn't happen very often and rarely works out when I try.  Okay, so now I've gotten their money up front and nailed them with at least one more follow up scam. What I do now is mail them a cashier's check. It's counterfeit, of course.  

For the sake of discussion, let's say they were expecting $25,000. Also, for the sake of discussion, let's say that they ended up paying $1,600 for the follow up scam. For the purposes of this post, we'll say that they paid the money on the follow up scam for the closing fees. I've never actually used closing fees, but this is only an example. What I'll do is mail the person a check for $26,600. I will call them two days later and ask them if they got the check. If they didn't, I will tell them to call me when they receive it so I can verify something before they deposit it. If they do have it, I'll ask them if it's for $25,000. They will inevitably say "no, it's for $26,600!" At that point I will act somewhat confused and ask them if they're sure. They're always sure. I will say something that conveys deep concern and tell them to hold on for a moment while I verify something. I'll them put them on hold and play a level of Angry Birds or something. When I pick the line back up, I'll say something like "Mr. Smith? Okay, I was able to find out what happened. The check was written for $26,600 because I accidentally forwarded the wrong information to our billing department. I added up the sale price and the cost of your closing fees and submitted that. This isn't good. Oh man. I can't believe I've done this. I'm going to lose my job. I can't believe I've done this again!" I'll act like this is something I've done a few times before and that I will lose my job if I don't get the situation straightened out. "I need your help! I need you to deposit the check into your account and immediately wire the difference back to the same account you sent the other two wire transfers to. I'm sorry to make you run to the bank again, but I really don't want to lose my job! I just put my son in preschool and I don't have a lot of disposable income right now!"  If the person doesn't want to play ball, I'll tell them that I will have to issue a stop payment on the check. I'll tell them that we'll have to physically locate the buyer because the check needs his signature. He just caught a flight to Ontario and we don't know when we'll be back. The people are usually willing to send another wire though. They don't hate me yet. They love me. I just sold their timeshare.

After I've gotten three or four wires from them, I hand the file over to one of the other people I work with. He'll call them in about two weeks and explain that he is a private investigator and that he knows they got ripped off on a phony timeshare deal. He can help them get their money back but they will have to pay a nominal fee to get started.  Of course, these things are going on all the time. My buddies are always handing their people over to me and vice versa. I can end one phone call as a timeshare salesman and be a private investigator on the next call. So can they. After we've wrapped up the investigator scam, we just put their information away for a year or two. It's shocking how many people you can get to go through the entire sequence I just mentioned multiple times. 

The three scams I've mentioned here are the ones that all of your are already very familiar with. We've got a lot more. Most of them don't involve timeshare resale anymore because the state seems to be taking the issue seriously for the time being. That happens from time to time. Things will cool off in a few months. They always do. The only time I'll do a timeshare deal nowadays is if I'm broke. This is because I can call somebody out of the blue and have a wire by lunch. 

What the police need to be doing is investigating where the timeshare rooms get their leads from. That is the real story here. 

I've been doing this since I was 23. I was going to start work at a "real job" in a few months but needed to do something to make some money before then. When I first started, I had no idea that the phone calls we were making to timeshare owners weren't legitimate. I was actually shocked and horrified when I found out that the job was a scam. I was making a lot of money though. More money than the salary offer I received from the job that was waiting for me. I continued to be a salesperson for about a year, taking a 30% commission on every sale. I hated myself for that year.  As time went by, I stopped feeling sorry for the victims. As sickening as this is for many of you to read, I feel only contempt for them now. What kind of person receives a phone call they weren't expecting and ends up driving to the bank an hour later to give a stranger thousands of dollars? 

I have in my travels met rogue traders not only in timeshare, some industries are far worse. Some come across as like able rogues, as that's part of their charm, that's why you get caught out again and again! Most times there is no proof of their crime as timeshare owners usually don't have solid proof, only that they were told verbal lies. 

They are quite open about why they maintain their fraudulent operations. Their main reason for scamming is, because we are easy money!! 

As Always, Stay Safe !

-Bird

Confessions of a Grand Master Con Artist

A veteran scammer reveals how he made millions by ripping off unsuspecting investors—and how you can protect yourself from people like him.

My name is George (D---), and I have spent most of my adult life swindling people out of money—big money. I worked in 30 fraudulent business operations over a ten-year period, pitching everything from gold coins to timeshares to oil and gas leases and other “business opportunities.” These scams took in millions of dollars. No matter how much money we made or how far-fetched the deal was, I never got caught. That is, until September 30, 2011.

That was the day 40 U.S. postal inspectors and FBI agents with gold badges and guns burst into my office. This was on Biscayne Boulevard in Miami. We occupied two full floors of a nondescript commercial office building. The place housed numerous other scam boiler rooms I had worked in, but you would never have known that from the outside.

“Hang up the phones—it’s over!” one agent yelled.

The particular scam in my office was an Internet-kiosk business opportunity. We’d been running TV ads claiming that investors could make thousands of dollars from computer kiosks placed in high-traffic areas like airports and shopping malls. For a small fee, passersby could use these kiosks to check their e-mail or surf the Web. Back in the early 2000s, this was a hot idea. We told people they could earn a minimum of $30,000 to $35,000 per machine each year. This was pure baloney—the machines didn’t generate anything close to that kind of income. And we sold them at huge markups. We took in $17 million from 700 unwary investors in about eight months. At least 100 employees were in the building at the time of the raid, including secretaries and other clerical staff. A lot of them didn’t even know that the business was a fraud.

The agents gathered everyone in a big open area we called the Pit—where, moments earlier, dozens of salespeople had been pitching prospective victims over the phone—and started calling the names of employees. Each worker who responded received a letter explaining whether he or she was a target of the investigation, a material witness, or something else. When my name was called, things got quiet. I was the manager; people wanted to see how I would react. As I walked over to retrieve my letter, my cell phone went off. The theme from The Godfather (my new ringtone) filled the room. People laughed.

The next thing I knew, a postal inspector took me into a side room and told me, “Your day just got [crappy], and it is going to get [crappier].” That was the end of my last scam. The Feds sent a dozen guys to prison. I did 37 months, and it probably should have been longer. You might be thinking, Oh, those get-rich-quick scams are obvious, and I would never fall for one. When I hear someone say that only stupid people fall for fraud, I feel like asking for that person’s phone number. But here’s the thing: I didn’t want to talk to stupid people, because stupid people don’t have $50,000 lying around to give me. You would be amazed at how many doctors, lawyers, engineers, and college professors I have ripped off. The bottom line is, fraud is a crime that can happen to anyone, given the right con artist and a victim with the right set of circumstances.

Make no mistake: I am a very dangerous person on the telephone. If I choose to be fraudulent in my practices, nothing is going to stop me from taking a lot of money from you. Period, the end of story. And the world is filled with people just as dangerous as I am. I was what’s known as a closer: the guy who gets you to hand over the money. I’ll tell you how, so you can recognize and avoid the techniques I used. I can do this because I am out of the game now. If I were still in the game, I’d tell you only one thing: “You and I are going to make a lot of money together.”

BORN TO CON
I learned how to do this at an early age. I’ve got a natural ability to talk people into things. As a child growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s – 1980s, folks called me the Fonze; they would say, “Hey, Fonze, that mouth of yours is gonna make you a million dollars someday.” In my neighborhood, 700 families lived on my street, giving me a lot of parents to manipulate. You learned what works. I played the heartstrings; I intimidated; I made people feel bad for me. Whether it was manipulating my older sisters or convincing the neighbor lady that I needed one more ice cream bar from the Mister Softee truck, I always knew what to say. And as I got older, I got better.

In 1995, I got a chance to apply these gifts of persuasion in the workplace. I went to work for a Florida company that sold prepaid-calling-card vending machines. At first I thought it was a real job. But it seemed like a lot of customers were calling back to complain that the cards didn’t work. In fact, they all called back to complain. Believe it or not, for a long time, I thought every business was like this. Gradually, it dawned on me that this was the dark side of corporate America. But by then I had developed my own dark side—drug addiction. I first tried heroin when I was 22 and became instantly addicted. For the next 15 years, I would move in and out of rehab centers and in and out of fraud boiler rooms. Drug addiction gave me the two characteristics all scam operators want in a closer: selfishness and greed. If I am strung out and in need of a fix, I would do anything to feed my habit.

This may explain why the owners of many of these scam operations in South Florida recruited their boiler room staff at local Narcotics Anonymous meetings. Who’s a better talker than an addict? Nobody.

Who is more manipulative than an addict? Nobody. Who is more desperate for money than an addict? Nobody. So you combine that with my experience selling over the phone in Florida and you have the perfect storm. I’m a hustler from New York and an addict. These boiler rooms were dying to hire me.

DEVELOPING THE PERSONA
This was lesson No. 1: Swindling is really acting, and you play a character who will help you appear legitimate, confident, and successful… even when you are not.

I’ve trained hundreds of salespeople who worked in scam boiler rooms. I always told them to picture themselves in the big sprawling office, sitting behind the mahogany desk, with the family portrait on the credenza. Their autographed football and jerseys are hanging on the wall, along with awards and pictures of themselves with famous actors. They are these bigwigs to whom everybody wants to talk. The idea is to build up their confidence so that when they ask for the money, they won’t show one lick of fear or hesitation or doubt that this isn’t absolutely the greatest decision this client is making for his or her family and future.

The persona explains how a barrel of dented-can drug addicts can persuade successful business people to write big checks without reading the paperwork. On the outside, you will see nothing but charm, an engaging personality, and swagger. On the inside lies a predator. There is no conscience in this business. The business needs to have a persona, too, to look legitimate and trustworthy. So we would run television commercials and hire famous actors to appear in them. In that Internet-kiosk scam, we hired Adam West of the 1960s TV show Batman. The first day we ran that ad, it generated more than 10,000 phone calls.

I guess people see an Adam West on TV and assume the product he’s selling is the real deal or else he wouldn’t be selling it. But the celebrity’s contract frequently states that he or she cannot be held responsible for the accuracy of the claims in the script. The celebrity probably doesn’t know that people are getting ripped off; he may know nothing at all about the business. He just comes in, reads his lines, and leaves.

IT’S ABOUT THE EMOTION
Think about the first time you fell in love or a time when someone cut you off on the freeway and you were seething for hours. Were you thinking clearly? Probably not. Those who believe they would never fall for a scam, don’t realize it’s not about how smart you are; it’s about how well you control your emotions. Fraud victims are people with emotional needs, just like the rest of us. But they can’t separate out those needs when they make financial decisions.

As a master closer, I made it my first objective to get the victim “under the ether.” Ether is that fuzzy state when your emotions are stirred up and you’re so agitated that you won’t know which way is up and which is down. Once I have gotten you into this condition, it doesn’t matter how smart or dumb you are. Ether trumps intelligence every time. The two most powerful ways to do this are through need and greed.  To find a client’s emotional need, I’ll ask personal questions. Then I’ll throttle up the pressure by focusing on that need. “Oh, you lost your job? That’s got to be tough.” Or “So your two kids are in college, and the tuition is driving you into the poorhouse.” Now the person isn’t thinking about whether the offer is a scam; instead he’s thinking, Here’s a fix for my problems. The crush or the kill—that’s what we call closing the deal—is emotionally driven. It’s not logic. If you apply logic, the answer is “No, I am not going to send you my hard-earned money. I don’t even know who you are.” If my victims had applied logic to our deals, they would have walked away every time. The other pathway to the ether is simple greed: I just promise people they can make a ton of money.

THE PERFECT VICTIM
I’m often asked how I could have ripped off senior citizens. The answer is that con men target people who have money, and a lot of seniors are sitting on fat nest eggs. It’s the Willie Sutton rule: He robbed banks because that was where the money was. But there’s more to it than that. I think older people are easier to scam because their emotional needs are closer to the surface. They aren’t afraid to tell people how much they care about their kids and grand kids. They aren’t afraid to share their fears about the unstable financial markets and how much they worry about being on a fixed income. These fears are real. And every one of them is a bullet in my gun.

My scam career was focused on investments like phony oil and gas deals, bogus business opportunities, and gold-coin scams. And for these types of investments, the perfect victim was almost always a male. Why men? Men are more emotional than women. Men are grandiose; they are full of ego. And that’s all driven by emotion; it’s driven by insecurity; it’s driven by a feeling of inferiority.

Most people who get emotional will fall quickly every time. And if they don’t get worked up, I won’t waste my time with them. If prospects ask a lot of questions or tell me they want to think it over or talk with their lawyer, I will hang up the phone. Victims don’t ask a lot of questions; they answer a lot of questions. Victims don’t read paperwork; they wait for you to tell them what it says. Victims don’t look for why the offer is a scam; they look for why the offer will make them money. They want you to make them feel good so they can pull the trigger.

How to avoid being scammed

THESE SCAMS YOU NEED TO WATCH OUT FOR
If I were still in the scam business, I would focus on reverse mortgages and precious metals. Home-equity and reverse-mortgage swindles are attractive now because a lot of seniors have paid off their homes, and that’s like an untapped bank account. If your home is worth $300,000, and you’ve paid off your mortgage, you have $300,000 sitting in the bank, waiting for me to steal it. A lot of TV and direct mail advertising tells you how to get money out of your house while you are still living in it. Some of these ads are legitimate; many are not.

My mom asked me once how her friends could avoid these schemes. I told her two things. First, if someone is pitching a deal, ask yourself, What’s in it for him? A common ploy is to get you to take out a loan on your house and then invest the proceeds in a long-term annuity or any other investment in which the salesman makes a huge commission. It may not be a fraud, but it may be a lot better deal for the salesman than for you. Second, I told Mom that when it comes to your house, never sign any paperwork until your attorney—someone you choose, not someone the salesman refers you to—reads the fine print. As for gold and silver scams, we would sell gold coins at a 300 to 500 percent markup. So the victims would pay $25,000 for a bunch of coins, which they would receive, but years later, they would take them to a coin shop and learn they were worth only a few thousand dollars. This is a great hustle, because the coin industry is largely unregulated. Plus, because the victims receive the coins, they don’t realize until years later that they’ve been taken. With the bad economy, these scams are huge now.

OUT OF THE GAME, FOR GOOD
All those years I ripped people off, I knew it was wrong. But I was making so much money, I didn’t care. It wasn’t until those agents busted into my office in Miami that it finally hit me: What I was doing was really bad. I pleaded guilty and went to prison. I had a lot of time to think about my crimes. When I got out, I promised my mother I would never go back to my old ways. It wasn’t easy. The first year out of prison, I was asked almost daily to work as a closer for the latest scam. Finally, I changed my phone number so I wouldn’t be tempted. In 2013, I spoke at a Washington, D.C., fraud-prevention conference sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission. Since then, I’ve been working on the other side of the scam business: I gave a couple of television interviews and even did some role-playing with fraud fighters from the AARP fraud fighter call center.

Today I am over 45, and I live with my parents. I owe the federal government almost three  million dollars in restitution that I don’t have a prayer of paying back. Thanks to years of smoking and drug abuse, I have acute emphysema, and I carry around an oxygen tank. I’m on the waiting list for a double lung transplant, but the clock is running out. Can you spell karma?

People sometimes ask me about remorse. I do understand that innocent people got hurt as a result of my actions. I think about my victims. I pray for my victims. And even though I have spent the past four years trying to help people avoid monsters like me, I wonder if it has been enough.

As always, be safe !

-Bird