Judging History’s Greatest Scams

17:44Aiden:Oh, interesting. When you think about it like that. Finally, third thing, is this really the worst thing VW's ever done? we're really going to get mad about the emissions. They got away with this and we're going to get mad about the emissions.

18:00Atrioc:So there's a picture of Hitler looking at a BW here. If I understand your argument here, we should be lenient to your client because at one point Hitler existed. I rest my case.

18:15Aiden:Now I'm going to be honest with you. I've, I've been deliberating during your presentation and it, feels like uh there were there were some missteps maybe some mismanagement here and it could you clarify for me that people went to jail which seems to imply that the executives knew absolutely what they were doing when they made these decisions to to get around nobody nobody was like yeah this is actually fine this is actually a legal argument they were like no we're we're blowing by this. Here's what I'll say. Our great CEO at VW didn't go to jail. Okay. Okay. He just stepped down because he was ashamed at the stock price performance.

18:56He's a man who cares about the shareholders.

18:57Aiden:Okay. A lot of mid-level managers who were close to the problem and had paperwork with their names on it that could obviously not avoid being tied to it. They did go to jail. And that means the problem is done. It is cleaned up. All right. This company culture is fixed. we really need to spend time harassing the executives over and over bro they have the stock is down did i not mention that they've already been harassed enough which is they probably paid the price and i mean i can't even imagine them knowing anything about it

19:25Atrioc:no further humiliation you can do to a man look at how low the stock got it's it's just and that

19:32Aiden:is the most humiliating they're paid in stock paid in stock think about that so i'm gonna go out here and I say, I appreciate your honesty presenting this all to us. And I feel like you can, I think you just need to move on and be a better person. Thank you, judge.

19:47Atrioc:That really, we will though be giving you a six month ban from all car manufacturing and business. After that, you will receive a hefty subsidy. You're firm, but fair judge. Oh, deal. Case number two. I'm Honorable Judge Atriok presiding. Pleasure to meet you. You look familiar. Hmm. So do you. Judges, today I'm here to defend my client, Mrs. Ruja Ignatova, who you might actually know as the queen of crypto. Okay? Now, have you heard of a little thing called cryptocurrency? Crypto. Hmm. wait judges what are you guys what are you guys holding uh monero i'm long on litecoin right now

20:38Aiden:for one uh and then monero monero is mostly that's how i pay to watch beheadings on the internet so that's keeping a lot that stocked up uh but what i do in my own time is really none of your

20:53Atrioc:business judge okay don't you hate how hard it is to spend your litecoin to purchase those beheading videos don't you hate how the price the price fluctuates constantly hate that don't you hate how sometimes the price will go down could you blame a woman for dreaming what's the most important part of crypto dreaming dreams or that it goes up the community as they say crypto is nothing without its community so right rujja ignatova everybody talks about these small two bit scams like what's that guy who scammed like eight billion dollars out of people um f sb fb nobody cares about it spf nobody cares about it logan paul none of these things are are substantial no this is the queen of crypto 10 years ago in 2014 are you bragging no i look what i'm trying to do here i'm just i'm just trying the lawyer bragging i'm talking i'm saying that spf did dream very big.

21:51Atrioc:I see. He dreamed small. He dreamed small. He had small little dreams for a small man. He was guilty.

21:56Aiden:He stayed in bronze after a lot of games. That's why I put him guilty. Remember that's right. Murder?

22:02Atrioc:That's wrong. Murder is you kill someone with intent. There's nothing wrong with manslaughter, which is where you accidentally kill someone without intending on doing it.

22:10Aiden:No, you can't go to jail for that. We don't prosecute that.

22:12Atrioc:Is there nothing wrong with manslaughter? I have not brushed up on him. What?

22:15Aiden:You've been brushed up on him? Oh, it's because you've been stuck. I've been in Ibiza. You've been doing a lot of jaywalking cases, too. You've been doing a lot of jaywalking. Manslaughter, clean now. Okay. Can't go to jail for it. All right, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, all right.

22:26Atrioc:I don't know enough about the law to dispute it, but it sounds right. We can all agree. A couple problems with Bitcoin. This is 2014. You know, Ethereum's doing well now. Maybe Solana's starting to come up. I don't know. I didn't look into that. But Bitcoin is the big boy on the block. But this is still in the stage where people don't really know Bitcoin's a big thing, right? We were all there back then. We know it was like, oh, Bitcoin? It was like$500 at the time. But there's problems. The price is fluctuating. You don't feel like you have... What you really want out of a blockchain product is for it to be centralized under one company that can ensure that the price is stable.

23:00I believe the core promise of crypto is centralization. So I think we can all agree...

23:05Aiden:If you could just centralize the decentralized asset, then that probably rounds out... I think it would run through some kind of agency or one point of failure.

23:11Atrioc:That way people have security. They know what's going to happen, right? And so in 2014, ruja ignatova launched one coin okay this is going to be the bitcoin killer and it's the only thing she didn't do the only thing is that it's in a sequel database in her company's offices don't speak like a nerd i know what that means it's uh it's like an excel spreadsheet instead of a blockchain so when you buy coins it's not going onto a blockchain with cryptography it's going into my excel spreadsheet and it says aiden has five coins and then i can change the number anytime i want that sounds more efficient this sounds like it's more efficient that sounds

23:52Aiden:more efficient something matt.zeb was doing at smash gg eight years ago it sounds like paper

23:58Atrioc:brackets what do people want about crypto they want to feel like they have crypto so there's i got a question yeah this sounds better for the environment because you have to go with the energy of like doing the token process. Exactly. Okay. It's a little bad in that. Okay, so that's part one. First off, we save energy by it. There's no blockchain at all. We keep calling it crypto, but to be clear, no centralization. It's a database on my servers. And then the other thing is that they came up with a really smart marketing idea, which is that if I convince you guys to purchase into the company and buy some crypto, I will get some crypto in return as a payment.

24:36Atrioc:And then if you guys convinced your friends to buy in, wait a minute, then you'll get paid back some of the crypto. And so will I, for having brought you guys in as recruiters. I'm thinking about this. The weird thing is there's absolutely zero red flags.

24:53Aiden:I think, well, what I was thinking about is like, if I pull in people, right. And I get more people than just me. It's like they form a larger sort of base around me. Right. And then they build another tier below them. so you're right it's like a kumbaya circle it sounds like it's very stable but it sounds like it's hard to knock down yeah hard to knock down i can't move very easily okay you're winning me over but keep going because this still is the queen of crypto a famous so far so far sir i don't

25:21Atrioc:even know why you're in court with us yeah right that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying that's what i'm saying so in 2014 we start a crypto company we're the future we're going to be the new bitcoin as she says no one will even remember what bitcoin is by the time we're done in this incredible presentation. So 2015, they start growing. They start getting this marketing stuff going. And look, again, we want friends to encourage friends. Nothing wrong with having a pyramid of friends build a structure upwards with, of course, the company taking 5%. This guy. And because there's no crypto technically, right?

25:52Atrioc:It's not real. We can issue fake coins back to people, which is the rewards they get. And then you can, only through us, you can't sell it openly. You can sell your coins for real money as long as our exchange is open and we limit how much you can sell. But that's good because that way there can't be a run on the crypto. It's solving all of the core problems with cryptography. And this keeps growing. In 2015, right, this is before the big craze in 2020 during the COVID era. This is the big one that they start launching. And by 2015, it's growing. Lots of companies, customers, right? And they really go for people who could benefit, like poor rural farmers in East Africa and Asia and Eastern Europe, right, who are selling like cows in order to buy in.

26:36Atrioc:Like they're selling their life savings. Yeah. But this is the future.

26:40Aiden:You know what I'm saying? It's noble. Well, you want to give them opportunity. You want to give them opportunity through the one coin. I feel like in our ivory tower sometimes, we have access to financial products that regular people don't. So this is like democratizing. Democratizing. Yeah.

26:54Atrioc:In my Excel spreadsheet. And so we hit the peak in 2016. Okay. And I want you to take a look at this quick video. She goes to Wembley Stadium in the UK. I can't even show you the intro because it looks more like a WWE intro and not a financial conference. But she comes out and talks about the future of OneCoin. At this point, they have over 50 % of the market cap of Bitcoin. They've successfully grown this massively. It's global. Perry, pull up this video. And this is one of the big highlights of this speech. ... blockchain and switch on the new one. And for you... She announces... ...as existing members...

27:27Atrioc:...they're doing a new... ...as people who supported us... ...a new blockchain. One, because we are moving into a huge phase two now. Whatever coins you have on your account or in the mining, if you have 1 ,000 coins on your account and 1 ,000 in the mining, what we will do as a company, we will double the coins on your account. 90 ,000 people. so she comes up with a solution to double the amount of money that you have and then says that they're doing this on october 1st 2016 and you have to buy in before then so i want you to look me in the mouth and tell me if you would put behind bars a woman who wants to double the wealth of every single person which by the way makes no sense because that's not how decentralized currency works and if every single person who bought in suddenly has double the amount of coins it's all worth exactly the same amount of money but other than that she is helping the people she's helping them also it's not an open market because nobody could buy or sell them lawyer doug this sounds like an incredible woman all right a hero can i ask a quick question right um did she do this so the only problem uh little after this this is 2016 they uh tried to recruit a norwegian blockchain expert to build them an actual blockchain right because they don't have one And right.

28:52Atrioc:Well, it's yeah. And he looks at what they're doing and realizes they have it's a sequel database. And so then he becomes a key whistleblower on top of multiple regulators looking at this because it's very obviously not crypto, even though millions and millions of people have bought in. Wait, so let me get this straight. And then one minor detail in January 2017, they also stop allowing people to take money out. You can put it in still, but you can't sell anything. So far, I want to charge a Norwegian man for snitching.

29:22Aiden:They hire a man. They pay him a real salary.

29:26Atrioc:No, no, no. They try to recruit him, and he says no. They offer him$2.5 million a year, and he says no because he... They offer him real cash to do a job, and in return, for him narcs. It's unbelievable. You can't trust anyone in the world.

29:41Aiden:What's his name? This is the real villain story.

29:44Atrioc:I believe his name is some Norwegian blockchain expert. Norwegian names are crazy. They are so weird out there. Judges, a tear might. Nomative determinism, though, is crazy.

29:57Aiden:He was, as soon as my child was born, I knew what he was going to do. He was destined for that role.

30:06Atrioc:That's so wild. And after this kid who would ruin any playground recess, regulators start looking. 2017, they stop letting the customers of their crypto coin sell. And soon in 2018, the co-founder is arrested. And actually, a couple months after the regulation really starts kicking off, in October 27th, Ignatova, our beloved founder, flees to somewhere. We don't actually know where. At first, I think she went to South Africa, but it's not actually clear. By 2019, the new CEO is arrested. Basically, all the executives are arrested for money laundering and fraud. they confirmed that four billion dollars has been taken from average people that was either paid out in small chunks as mlm like repayments or taken by the owners or laundered offshore accounts a lot of it went to a bulgarian drug lord so that's cool they recover 40 million dollars of it and everyone goes to jail and the question is where is ignatova now my client she may have been murdered by a bulgarian drug lord that's a rumor she may be hiding in south africa someone said somewhere in germany frankfurt uh russia is a possibility there was a 50 million dollar transaction on her behalf from dubai at some point a few years ago so she maybe is alive and still has at least 50 million dollars on her the fbi has a five million dollar reward for this person and says she travels with bodyguards and changed her whole face with plastic surgery and so what i want to say to you is that my client's life has already been ruined she only has 50 million dollars left to her name she probably looks like some sort of hot freak

31:52Atrioc:and can you really blame a woman for doubling the money of the people where where was this company based again before she fled bulgaria oh it was based in bulgaria yeah but they had they had offices everywhere it is interesting because i want to point out just real quick this yet another absolution for my client ftx spf this whole this you know the biggest crypto thing that everyone knows about like they had a blockchain here right they they had a functioning blockchain they just took user deposits and used it for alameda right that was the crime yeah and with this one there is no blockchain no blockchain no crime no crime believe it was

32:36Aiden:johnny cochran who said that and it's like we don't even this is this is ridiculous this is america and it's like i'm what am i supposed to do well this is bulgarian woman what am i alive we don't even know she's alive and and she's already suffered so much and it seems probably And probably so much more than any of the people that lost money along the way. Did they have to get plastic surgery? I don't think so.

33:05Atrioc:Yes.

33:06Aiden:If they had enough money to put into this, then they probably could afford all the plastic surgery they want.

33:14Atrioc:Finally, if you have enough cows that you can sell a couple to buy one coin, you can surely sell the other cows for plastic surgery. Exactly. Yeah. And most importantly is that at the beginning of this, you asked if we had crypto and we do. And like, if we start snooping around and then we get all the legal team involved, like we could, I lost a lot of money in FTX and I regret us. That got to be guilty. So if we just kind of, we just call this a wash. Oh, it's a wash.

33:42Aiden:Yeah. Not guilty. Thank you, judge. Port for lemonade. Stan comes from quo. I've got, okay. I've got this new business. and people, I just have all this gold. I have so much gold. And people have been calling me and texting me, emailing me, and they just want my gold and I want to give it to them. But it's hard to track all the requests for it. I want your gold.

34:07Atrioc:I want your gold. I want your gold. You don't want your business to miss a phone call?

34:11Aiden:I wouldn't want to miss an opportunity to give this gold away, which is my business model. So if I just had a platform that like maybe put all the notifications that people are giving me. I'm calling you. I'm putting that hold. Dude, it's because you don't, don't call me yet. I need to set up Quo to have all the things go to one place so it's easier to check up and track on so I can give people the gold. And then you'll give me the gold?

34:34Atrioc:Then I'll give you the gold. Oh, great. Everybody make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Aiden, track Quo for free. Get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash Lemonade. That's Q-U-O.com slash Lemonade. Quo. No missed calls. No missed customers. I hate to lose customers on this. I want to give it away. Free gold. Tomorrow morning is knocking. Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries.

35:08Atrioc:You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's OmniShade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.

35:39Atrioc:Court is down session.

35:40Aiden:Case number three. I'm here to represent my client. who you may already know, you know, for his dashing good looks,

35:50Atrioc:for his charisma. I'm not on trial here, Aiden.

35:53Aiden:You're not my client. You're not my client, but you've been looking good. You've been looking good. Thank you. And Bernie Madoff, and he is simply the owner of a private fund that produced incredible returns over decades, almost fixed, with almost no falls ever. Somebody who never failed to deliver for his clients, I would argue. Good at his job. And in December 2008, he was arrested and charged with securities fraud. And as I will explain, I'm not even sure if that makes sense. His firm claimed to create incredible turns off of trading. Okay. And the little asterisk on the trading is that there weren't really many trades at all.

36:43Aiden:he mostly accumulated the returns by uh say getting investment from one party and then using that investment to pay out other investors and so on and continue to raise money through more and more people he's taking money yeah investment that sounds legal yeah he's paying out the people that want payment yeah that sounds legal yeah not like a man it's interesting i'm not seeing a problem here so you're noticing that nobody nobody seems unhappy nobody seems everybody everybody's earning on their money yeah i for example i get doug puts money into my company he puts some investment in right a million dollars and i go to you i go to you judge and you give me 1.5 million you invest well i don't want doug to have a better car than me incredible returns for my overall fund i have 2.5 million dollars now and i show i show doug i show doug that growth and he's like let me let me get 300k my money out no problem doug i've got money in the right i pay you out i'm getting more clients and the fund just continues to grow somehow overcoming a lot of the larger recessions and economic circumstances you said 2008 It's 2001.

38:01Aiden:Judge, you're getting ahead of yourself there. And I have to maybe clarify for some people listening. Some people have called this a Ponzi scheme, which is where the returns of a fund are based solely on new funds being brought in by other investors that are used to increase the performance of the fund and pay out other old investors. Some people have called it that.

38:29Atrioc:Okay. But what's the problem? If you keep getting new investors, it can go forever.

38:35Aiden:Well, exactly, exactly. And it lasted, I think, Doug, an interesting thing about Bernie Madoff, my client, that a lot of people don't know, is the amount of time that this lasted. I think this is one of the first big news stories that I grew up with as a child, where I was clocked in to what was happening. This big scandal broke and I was old enough to understand that, like the kind of the gravity of, of what it was. But I think I've always passively assumed that he'd been doing this for like 10 years. Dude, he started this in the sixties. What? Isn't that insane? Think about how long this Ponzi scheme ran.

39:18Aiden:And I read the FBI. Well, alleged Ponzi scheme. Sorry. hold on hold on innocent until proven guilty i asked you all the question if you can successfully run a ponzi scheme from the 1960s until 2008 that's just a good business is it really a

39:36Atrioc:real business that it lasted dude how old is he when he started i feel so unaccomplished now

39:44Aiden:dude he was he was a young man this is this is how it reportedly started uh this is a quote from supervisory special agent Paul Roberts from the FBI. He didn't want to own up to the fact that he had lost all the money from his father-in-law's friends when he started this fund in the 60s initially. So he started covering it up with all these other fake trades and it just snowballed from there. That's how the Ponzi scheme began. He wanted to hide the shame of like not performing for his, his father gave him an opportunity to get investment from friends he knew. He fucked it up. And he started covering it.

40:21So he tried trading like once as a young man, was horrible at it, and said,

40:25Aiden:fuck this. I kind of assumed that this guy had an actual... Keep in mind, this is a guy who eventually became chairman of the NASDAQ. What? As a separate job, became the chairman of the NASDAQ index.

40:43Aiden:And the build-up... That's almost inspiring.

40:45Atrioc:Yeah. From humble beginnings? In Silicon Valley, this is called a pivot. Yeah. You don't punish someone for realizing - It's like Bill Gates dropped out of college. Steve Jobs in a garage. Bernie Madoff lost all his dad's money. Bernie Madoff lost his father and lost money. He built something from the ground up, I would say.

41:02Aiden:And this goes on. So this goes on for decades. He's getting a ton of individual investors that he's networked with who would then recommend friends of theirs. And then eventually some larger, more institutional investors like the largest of which was the Fairfield Greenwich Group, a Connecticut firm that had invested seven and a half billion dollars with Madoff. And what's interesting also is that the SEC was warned about my client many times for years because people eventually, like other performers or other people on Wall Street looked into the returns of Madoff's fund and were like, this guy's batting near a thousand.

41:51Aiden:How is this possible? His fund doesn't go down at all when the rest of the market declines. Okay, riddle me this. What sort of trades is this guy doing?

42:04Atrioc:Shohei Otani, greatest of all time. Pretty sure he bats close to a thousand.

42:07Aiden:And that's the thing, Doug. It's not even close to a thousand.

42:14Aiden:And then early, early public accusations actually surface around 2001 in like published articles that heavily imply what Madoff and his firm are doing is fraudulent, I guess. And they begin warding off audits and oversight by falsifying trade documents. So they would get audited by like, like the SEC would come in. And then they would create fake documentation of trades that had taken place within the firm to show where the returns and the money had come from. So that they, to, to, to value the strategy. And, and I, and I beg the judges and I know this sounds bad. I know this sounds bad. Well, counterpoint, every YouTube commenter on a finance video does the same thing.

43:05True. They always got in at the low point and they've always sold at the high. So like, what was he makes him any different?

43:11Aiden:And keep in mind, we're talking 30, 40 years of delivery for his clients.

43:19Atrioc:Everybody's enjoying it, right?

43:21Aiden:Everybody's enjoying it until a little thing comes along, the 2008 financial crisis.

43:29Atrioc:I don't think you can blame him for that.

43:33Aiden:And we all agree that my client did not cause the 2008 financial crisis.

43:39Atrioc:uh follow-up question can we no he did not cause it oh thanks joe and uh so as you can imagine

43:50Aiden:ultimately that people say i wouldn't say it about my client but people say that the worst time to operate a ponzi scheme is when everybody wants their money back at the same time it's just advice on running a bossy scheme and what's interesting i'm taking notes what's interesting is like all the economic crises before this uh madoff's fund did not go down during the crisis at all miraculously and they tried to assure investors that their accounts in madoff's were doing well but many still wanted to withdraw their money anyway and madoff did not have enough cash to cover the demanded 1.5 billion in withdrawals they only had 300 million in cash at the time and and upon being backed into this corner a court by his own words which and i'm realizing that in a court setting this might play tough you're laughing a lot But my client did say on the record to the FBI, the sec, there is no innocent explanation.

45:00Aiden:I've been running a massive Ponzi scheme.

45:10Hold on. That's inadmissible. That's inadmissible.

45:13Atrioc:We're not going to get the record. Unlike strike that from the record, previous two clients. My client didn't eat. By the way, I'm the lawyer, I guess now. My client fled the country, okay? Your client comes out and says, hey, I made a little teeny tiny mistake, okay? I made one little fuck up. It's a long one. It's 50 years, but I made it. Comes out and admits the truth, all right? Nothing illegal against that. What is one month of being a bad guy to 50 years of being a respected Wall Street institution? Yeah, and delivering.

45:47Aiden:Yeah. And what's wrong? Well, and my client was punished because he was sentenced to 150 years in prison. How old was he? He was already like 70.

45:55Atrioc:We deprived him of his ability to be the next US president.

45:59Aiden:And he died. He died. My client has actually already passed away in prison in 2021. Oh my God. And although, and he notably in the wake of all of this falling apart, solely took responsibility for everything, even though it's extraordinarily unlikely that his partners from early on and his sons, among other parties, had no idea that this was happening. It's almost assured that many other people knew, but he took the fall. A family man. And the real consequences of this for people were he had people's tens of millions of dollars by family of their retirement. There were like pension funds that he carried for like certain, like I think like firefighters and things.

46:51Aiden:And overnight, all of this just disappeared. And for the families that had decided to store their retirement in this guy's fund, like thousands and thousands of families, they just lost all of their money with no recourse. There was an effort to sell off his assets in order to like recover and start paying people back. but the amount where this was in totality a 65 billion dollar fraud it is the largest ponzi scheme in history and i want and but my was it 65 billion at the time it was shut down or is that like the total amount i think 65 billion in total okay he had like essentially scammed out of people okay listen this guy sounds like a family man he sounds like a good man i feel like he's been unfairly maligned here.

47:37Maybe he made a mistake. And he's dead. And he's already dead. So I don't think we need to go any further here. I have just one question. I heard a rumor that he also stole from rich people. Is that true? He did. Guilty! Judges, boys, there's one thing this courtroom loves. Keep it friendly around here. Word up to the lawyer. One thing

48:01Aiden:we love. Case open. 7.30 tea time. Other than the green, you know what I'm talking about? We love horses. I know the Lemonade Stand courtroom loves horses. This one's for you, Judge Doug. For today, I am bringing you a basically, I'll just say it, an innocent woman. An innocent woman named Rita Cronwell.

48:21Atrioc:By the way, that usually is what the prosecution says. Wink? No, they don't wink, actually. They just say, my client is innocent, and they don't wink. I'm still figuring this whole thing out. Yeah, you're right, you're right. Yeah, it's a learning process, Doug. Anyway, I'd like you to bring up a woman whose biggest crime is probably just loving horses. Her name's Rita Crundwell. She lived in a small town called Dixon, Illinois. It's true all-American. I'm talking about apple pie, a main street, a diner, a river. You can picture it. You can picture it. By the way, this is the town most famous for one thing.

48:58It's the small town in America that Ronald Reagan grew up in. Think about that. Okay. She lived in Dixon and she's born and raised there. And she went to the high school and she, upon graduating high school, after doing some volunteer work at the city hall, decides to join the local government and she becomes it's comptroller, which is a job that controls basically the treasury of the small town. They do the budget. They do the finances. They check all that nerdy stuff. All right. But she's good with numbers. She's good at this job. and she decides i will do it and i'll tell you guys she was fantastic at it she showed up early she stayed late she worked hard uh people around her were uh complimenting of her work non-stop and again this is a small town where everybody in government's a small government it's like six people total they're all local what the the other finance guy he works at the public high school The mayor is like a part-time real estate guy.

50:00Her husband's her brother.

50:03Atrioc:Her grandfather's her stepdaughter. Not in the South. And so she notices a comptroller, and she does this for, I mean, a decade, a great job. So she notices one thing. There's a very simple tax structure here in this small town. They collect the money, primarily in this top left bucket, sales tax. and then it gets distributed to other accounts for for things to be used in the town and again there's only one person doing this job it's her and so she realizes what if i add a seventh account a secret account and this is where i would say brilliance comes through not just a really inspired piece of brilliance she realizes that nobody will check on this account if she gives it a really boring name, but it has to be truly boring.

50:54So she thinks, and she thinks, and she comes up with the reserve sewer capital development account abbreviated to RSCDA. And this is such a good, such a boring name that spoiler alert, nobody's going to check for 20 years. so she creates fake invoices that aren't even spelled right like section is spelled secton and she starts billing the other accounts from this account and basically to anyone who's glancing at it it looks like money is just being diverted to a like a sewer fund or to a project or to build roads or it's just being shuffled around to where it needs to be to do the job the town needs to have it due.

51:41And these invoices all seem appropriate, except for the misspellings, but they're for massive amounts, like$500 ,000,$250 ,000,$300 ,000. And they all just go to the secret account. And then if anyone were to check what the secret account was doing, it was spending money on horses and RVs. Are we putting the horses in the sewers? that's would be a good follow-up but no in fact 179 times over the course of 20 years she just charges these accounts puts them in her secret account and then buys things now they had an auditor this is their office it's a nice office it's clifton larson allen this is a real auditor but the auditor just checks both sides of the books they just check is the amount that went into the first account the amount that went to the second account oh yep that's it adds up nobody's changing the numbers they're not checking whether or not where it's going makes any sense and so this is where the bad part of this well the supposedly bad part of the fraud comes in

52:39Atrioc:which is that you gotta defend your client better speaking as a judge man you're doing a terrible job you're making her sound like a real b-word you're gonna get to the part that's really beautiful in a second okay this is the part where all the haters come out of the work so the haters will tell you that in the first few years of this this is 1992 this goes till mid-2010s. She shows a little bit at first. In the first year, she only steals like$100 ,000. But the city starts to notice, hey, we are really in a deficit. We don't have the money. So they have to start making budget cuts. So they start cutting overtime for city employees.

53:14They start cutting station equipment. And then as the amount she supposedly steals, maybe misappropriates, maybe appropriates to a good cause, gets bigger. The deficit gets bigger. The cuts get bigger. So they start cutting fire department and streets and traffic maintenance and schools and cemeteries. And this keeps going and gets bigger and bigger and bigger until 2008. Very, uh, remind me of something. And in 2008, unlike that fraud, Bernie Madoff, she's the cause of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2008, she doesn't see it as like, oh no, everybody's going to want their money back. Cause she's not running a Ponzi scheme.

53:54Yeah. Okay. She's like, wait a minute. This is a perfect opportunity to explain why the city has no money. I'm going to steal even more. So instead of stealing less, she starts stealing way more. Until at one point in like 2009, the city's budget is like 13 million. And she stole seven. My God. That usually takes seven. And whenever anyone's like, why are we in such a deficit? She's like the recession. It's tax receipts.

54:25Atrioc:Does anybody notice that she suddenly had 80 ,000 horses in her backyard? Great question. People do notice a couple of things. They noticed that a town next door to them is an 8 million budget surplus. The town of the same size right down the street. So now it's managing their finances. But theirs is massively negative.

54:45Aiden:It hit Dixon really hard. People forget that. Yeah. People forget. In February 2012, they broke down the budget. this is where the budget went you know 200k to public affairs 268 to 3 560k to fire 1 million to police 3.2 million directly to her pocket she is the single biggest line item year after year

55:06Atrioc:on dixon's budget well let me defend your client for some reason the sewer system is the biggest recipient of money and i am excited to hear about what improvements she did make to the sewer system And we're going to find out, okay? This is a really incredible quote. There's only one other guy who could possibly have any insight into the finances and catch her on this or look into this. But he is a part-time teacher who does this like one day a month and barely looks into it. And he, upon his retirement, gives a speech where he says, Rita Cronwell is a big asset to the city. She looks after every tax dollar as if it was her own.

55:47which is true judges which is true she seems attentive where did the sewer money go reliable uh diamond studded horse outfits expensive quarter horses which can cost up to 250 000 each uh lavish parties again it turns out the the horse show industry is all about money she bought a million dollar plus rv with a luxury interior again each quarter horse can cost 250 000 she She bought four of them. So that's a million dollars worth of horses. I'm sorry. I lied. She brought 400 of them.

56:28So hear me out. So she has 400. Yes. 400 horses, multiple ranches. But hear me out. No, that makes sense. Would you rather have a sewer system that's like, what? Gilded, paid with gold. Or would you rather have a woman? Covered in shit. who has 400 plus awards in the quarter horse show horse category.

56:52Aiden:Well, you want her to represent the success of Dixon. She makes Dixon look good. Now, people do wonder exactly what you're saying, Doug. They wonder, why is this woman who grew up here suddenly fabulously wealthy, traveling the country in a giant RV? And the rumor goes around that she had a wealthy inheritance. Someone in her family died, and now she's wealthy. but she's just a hardworking local Dixon girl who got lucky. At one point, this woman, who's probably should be on trial instead of her, cause she's a snitch and a narc and a bad friend. This is her friend of 20 years who was her deputy assistant at the comptroller office.

57:30And she's even on this interview says I had a really easy job. Rita never made me do anything. Rita never made me check the books or do anything. But unfortunately, Rita was taking more and more vacation to do her show horse business. Right. So by 2013 or so, she's taking like 16 weeks a year to go travel the country in her RV. And she gives specific instructions to her deputy to be like, just always call me about everything. Don't handle anything. But she's stressed one day and she just asked the bank to send over all the accounts that the city's going to. That is a problem. She looks into the account.

58:08She's like, wait, there's one account here that is getting so much money consistently for years. It must be a mistake. The FBI is flagged. They investigate for six months, then pull her into a room and it all rumbles.

58:22Aiden:I'm noticing the theme here is like we have we have someone building their American dream. And then the FBI steps in the FBI and haters. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. I see a woman who paid a lot of money to have some of the cleanest sewers in the country. And by God, you can lick off the walls of that sewer. And I'm having a hard time seeing why you're...

58:49Atrioc:An enormous amount of horse feces has been going in there recently.

58:52Aiden:Yeah, but that helps clean up all the other things. It all adds up. They added up. It is the largest municipal fraud in American history. It turns out over the course of her time, she essentially stole$3 ,500 from every single man, woman, and child in Dixon. She was$55 million personally richer by the end of the process. However, who's really the criminal here? Good question. They start at your... Give me that horse stuff in you. Because she's just a horse girl who loves horses. the people start asking, wait a minute, we did have an auditing firm. This is not a complicated scheme. And so the city does sue the auditing firm and in fact wins a settlement that's about the amount that they lost.

59:41Now they did have less services for 20 years, but the auditing firm really did do no due diligence and kind of signed off on this. And they also did her personal taxes at the same time. And so we're making money from her in other ways. And so the city's whole. They never made it all. They got$45 million from the auditing firm, basically, and they got the rest from selling her horses. So was there really a crime? It all meted out in the end.

1:00:05Aiden:I do have to ask, judge. I'm looking over the details of this case. I'm the lawyer. No, I'm looking at my other judge. Shut up, please. Co-judge. I'm a part-time judge, by the way. Keep quiet now. I'm making my decision. So I know what it's like. It's a tough job. It's no harm, no foul at the end of the day.

1:00:21Atrioc:It seems. Oh, you're saying because you got the money back.

1:00:24Aiden:Because everybody's fine.

1:00:25Atrioc:Yeah. I mean, I think ultimately, what are you going to remember from this whole story, right? You're going to remember the 400 horse show first place prizes.

1:00:33Aiden:Yeah, memorable. That horse looked great.

1:00:34Atrioc:This is a sexy horse. I'm going to go with it. Thank you. I am going to say that this client of yours should be released from all charges. But that one horse, a little too handsome for Aiden's liking. We're going to say that horse is locked up.

1:00:52Aiden:next case yes been uh i mean this is a bit of a long day i was like i hope next guy doesn't have like a finance case or something i want like a dui yeah let's just get it let's slam a guilty on a dui just slam just like that's the only fun part of this job i know i know i feel like anyway uh sorry sir oh sorry you're in next class come on next case please next case look uh

1:01:17Atrioc:bros, you wanted something small. This one is actually pretty small. It's for$10 million. $10 million. $10 million. At this point, any. It's not even worth our time. I think we can let it go. I mean, we could probably say not guilty right now. You're going to throw someone in jail over$10 million. Come on. That's ridiculous. It's 2026.

1:01:33Aiden:Put it on the leaderboard.

1:01:34Atrioc:$10 million buys you a carton of eggs.

1:01:37Aiden:So far, I think Bernie's winning$65 billion.

1:01:41Atrioc:$65 billion. Okay. Small twist. This is from, um, 1711. Just - Uh, it's five billion dollars at least when you adjust it. But let's look at raw numbers here. It's ten million dollars. So, three hundred years ago...

1:02:01Atrioc:The South Sea - We're judging a case from 1711.

1:02:04Aiden:I gotta be honest, I don't know if I know the case work back then. I don't know if I've read - Does the case law apply before America was founded? It is the statute of limitations. What's the statute here? Yeah. Okay, anyway, let's find out.

1:02:15Atrioc:Gentlemen, you love to see the South Sea Company, all right? The time, it's 1711. It's the United Kingdom. And we decide, hey, we're going to form a little public-private partnership with the UK government called the South Sea Company. And what we're going to do, I heard that there's a lot of money in South America. Okay. Let's do a company that just does trade. So my company, we're going to make a deal with government officials that our company, the South Sea Company, is going to monopolize all of the trade between the UK and South America. Pretty genius on paper. Any problem?

1:02:53Aiden:I'm not seeing anything. No issues.

1:02:56Atrioc:It's all been colonized by Spain and Portugal. The UK has no ability to do free trade in South America in 1711, 300 years ago. These are buying questions, though. This is just... And so if you set up a company that is trying to do trade, for example, if I said I want to own all free trade to China or something and the government was like, can I invest? You're doing Doug free trade to China. Oh, you're going to be able to invest in my client if you were 300 years old. OK, so our company isn't doing that great. My client's company. Yeah. For nine years. All right. All we're doing is we're trying to make trade with South America and those Spanish fuckers.

1:03:35Atrioc:excuse my language. No, feel free. Overrules. Feel free to call them fuckers. Yeah. And the Portuguese owning Brazil? Yeah. We're not making good money. So what do we do? Okay, 1720. My client goes to the United Kingdom government and proposes that me, the South Sea Company, will own all of the United Kingdom's debt. And what we'll do is we'll go to every single bondholder who's currently holding debt for the United Kingdom government and we'll have them swap it with shares of my company okay and so the government loves this right instead of having all these different people they had to lend money to they just it's just one company now and all the shares are in that company that makes it super simple we can argue for better interest rates right that's fantastic for me the company i love it there's a lot of people who are suddenly getting shares genuinely confused the united kingdom gave all of its debt to one company yeah they allowed me the south sea company to go to every single bond holder you're just a random company and well don't say random i'm doing free trade with south america but even if you were doing that why are you suddenly the holder of all well have you noticed hold on have you noticed this this is

1:04:50Aiden:like every story about business and companies in the 17 and 1600s it's like some guy got a ship and then started a company and now he and now he owns all the assets of a nation and i feel like i've actually heard that and then and then that guy also happened to kill millions of indigenous

1:05:09Atrioc:people like that's i've heard that story for that he's not on trial for that aiden first off okay my client did not defraud any indigenous people only poor uh people in the united kingdom okay okay an innocent man secondly if you were to be a pessimist you would argue that what my company did was go to a bunch of ministers in parliament and bribe them with company shares so for them to pass a law to say that me my company and my company only with no other competitors gets to do this bond to share swap and no one else can and because so many ministers are bribed with my shares they're also incentivized for the shares to go way up and now we can get a whole ass little profit going that's called building a team and it's actually really good in business exactly we drop them a bunch of shares they give me the rights no other companies can come in and then the stock starts going up right and so if you're in 1711 united kingdom whether you're poor or rich you know not the super hot opportunities for investing until now in 1711 this happens over the course of one year in january my share price gets up to 100 pounds in august 1000 pounds this is like the tulip mania of the netherlands everybody is getting in you know who gets in a little man named Isaac fucking Newton who puts in 200 ,000 pounds.

1:06:29Atrioc:That's millions of dollars in today's money who gets swept up in it. In August, it's a thousand. Everything is up. Everybody believes this company is riding off of the incredible success of our trade with South America until, oops, confidence cracks. There's a little bit of realization that there's actually nothing here. There's no business other than trading stocks and getting them higher and higher that parliament investigates, realizes that there's massive corruption and we've bribed everybody. And even Isaac Newton quotes, he could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.

1:07:02Atrioc:Fortunes are wiped out across Britain. People are ruined and devastated over a company that did nothing. And in fact, by the end of that same year, they passed the Bubble Act of 1720, which restricts basically any company from raising money through shareholders. You can't issue shares anymore unless you get a royal decree. And so for 100 years, you can no longer run companies and raise capital unless you're doing like a partnership with the monarchy. Now, I don't think that my long dead clients should really be held to account for fucking over Isaac Newton, who's a bit a bit of a prick. I'm sorry.

1:07:44Are you telling me the bubble act was passed after the crime? Yes. You can't be charged for a crime that didn't exist yet.

1:07:52Atrioc:They did undo it once the industrial revolution happened, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

1:07:57Aiden:It just doesn't make any sense. Nothing's adding up. It's how can I be retroactively punished for something that I couldn't have possibly known was wrong. How would you know that's wrong? I don't understand. It seems like everybody was on board. The government was on board. If the government hasn't created a rule about me abusing the finances of poor people, then I should be able to do it. And I'm a judge. This is the air bud defense. there's nothing in the rule book that says you can't create other than bribing all the members

1:08:28Atrioc:of parliament right to make corrupt laws that give my company special permission and obfuscate the books wait was bribery not chill back then we don't know we can't possibly know it's like i haven't even read the laws about it so what do you want me to win the library of alexandria burned down we lost that history based on what i'm hearing it sounds like the south sea bubble not guilty. Pirates are back, baby. Trading at Schwab is now powered by Ameritrade, giving you even more specialized support than ever before. Like access to the trade desk, our team of passionate traders ready to tackle anything from the most complex trading questions to a simple strategy gut check.

1:09:08Atrioc:Need assistance? No problem. Get 24-7 professional answers and live help and access support by phone, email and in-platform chat. That's how Schwab is here for you to help you trade brilliantly. Learn more at schwab.com slash trading.

1:09:24Aiden:This episode is brought to you by Indeed. Stop waiting around for the perfect candidate. Instead, use Indeed Sponsored Jobs to find the right people with the right skills fast. It's a simple way to make sure your listing is the first candidate C. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs have four times more applicants than non-sponsored jobs. So go build your dream team today with Indeed. Get a$75 Sponsored Job Credit at indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply.

1:10:19Bye-bye. And participate in McDonald's while supplies last.

1:10:23Aiden:Order, order. Case number six. Well, I'm in the courtroom with you. You look at me. What do you think? What am I? I see my dog.

1:10:33Atrioc:I see my friend at this point.

1:10:34Aiden:Your dog. Our, our.

1:10:36Atrioc:I'm bargaining for you. But what else? Small framed beta. Small framed beta.

1:10:40Aiden:Well, well. But what else?

1:10:43Atrioc:A guy wearing a wig.

1:10:44Aiden:A Canadian. Right, right, right. A Canadian. Right, right, right.

1:10:47Atrioc:But he's Canadian?

1:10:48Aiden:And I'm here to defend a great Canadian company.

1:10:52Atrioc:You don't even look it. Like, I wouldn't even notice. Yeah, you totally could tell us. You're looking great. No, it's like, don't even be embarrassed about it. I'm not ashamed about it. I wouldn't be ashamed to be Canadian. You shouldn't be, because you don't look Canadian.

1:11:02Aiden:Nothing wrong with it. So go ahead, go ahead. Brie X, a successful Canadian mining company from the 1990s that owned a plot of land in Borneo, Indonesia. they hire a filipino geologist under uh the head geologist and the owner of the company that they had at the time to go check out this this area in the jungle for for gold and this geologist comes back his name michael de guzman and uh brings back a sample that shows there's a gigantic gold deposit in this plot of land that brie x the mining company owns just like that hand me that gold bar judge sure upon hey judge hand me that gold bar on your desk this small canadian company that started in 1993 by 1997 they had claimed that this gold deposit could produce potentially over 200 million ounces of gold based on the samples that had been collected and first context the entire world's annual gold production at the time was around 80 million ounces per year uh they struck it rich that's awesome the stock price spikes to 500 usd per share in 2026's money.

1:12:32Aiden:And in total market cap of money at the time,$6 billion in Canadian money market cap. And upon this gigantic success of the mining company, a separate American mining company, Freeport McMorrin, does an independent investigation to look at the gold deposits in Indonesia. This American mining company, they produce samples of their own and they bring them back and they find that the discrepancy in the amount of gold found is impossible it is it is not possible that they could have produced any sample with this amount of gold in it from what we can find and they're this entire company's evaluation right now is built on fraudulent samples one promise and it turns out de guzman the geologist that was sent to find out if there was gold in this area had just shed gold flakes into the sample and mixed it in to show an insane amount of gold in each like deposit of the earth that he brought back he's the expert right and that's what you do you you plant the gold to grow the gold i don't know how gold i'm gonna

1:13:47Atrioc:trust the geologist yeah i'm a judge what do i know i would start judges by my clients clearly

1:13:52Aiden:retract and before this comes becomes fully public michael de guzman the geologist that put the gold like shavings or salted the gold into the samples falls from a helicopter copter over the borneo jungle in march of 1997 while flying to the mining side to your clients And he's clumsy. Yeah, he's a goob. He's a goober. It's not illegal to be a goober. The official conclusion is suicide, and his body is reportedly found days later in a state of decomposition in the jungle heat with mixed... I found mixed reports, by the way. One report saying that his hands and feet had been removed, and then the other report...

1:14:39Aiden:That can happen when you fall. Yeah, you fall and he fell into the helicopter rotors. That makes sense. the other report claiming that he was identified via his fingerprints but actually nobody is really sure if this is his body like to this day there is a conspiracy theory that he faked his death or was killed he's hanging out with a crypto queen but there is no solid evidence in any direction of this and my client should not be to blame for his death his circumstantial death

1:15:10Atrioc:by the way I forgot to establish the entire concept of this. Are we, is your company on trial or is that geologist on trial? No, the geologist, we're throwing him under the bus for sure. Okay, okay, cool. He fucked the company over. He's guilty of being clumsy. David. And of being Canadian.

1:15:24Aiden:My client, the company owner, David Walsh, immediately fled to the Bahamas like any reasonable man would do.

1:15:30Atrioc:Good man. Wait, that's the, hold on, that's the CEO of the company? Who's that? He was the CEO or the owner

1:15:36Aiden:of the company. Okay. And he was never extradited and died of a brain aneurysm a year later.

1:15:41Atrioc:Innocent.

1:15:42Aiden:Off Hopefully coincidental. The chief geologist of the company, John Felderhoff, one of my clients, was tried in Canada for insider trading because he sold tens of millions of the stock before the collapse of the company. Good timing. But he was acquitted in 2007 after a long legal battle. So I ask you, if one of my clients was acquitted and one of them died after fleeing, can anybody be blamed here? Were they not just tricked? by this man who created fake gold samples and created a gigantic multi-billion dollar company in Canada. Events happen. We can't be persecuting every event. And also, can anybody prove?

1:16:27This is all in the past. We can't be looking back at things and building structures.

1:16:31Atrioc:Okay, all right, hold on. If I find the Hope Diamond, all right, and some other geologist comes over and says, you wouldn't find that. I did find the Hope Diamond. It exists. It's real. It's possible that he found the Hope Gold. Yeah. Are we sure that it wasn't real? One patch of land where there was gold flakes in it, and he was so clumsy that he fell out of the helicopter, chopped his hands off, fled the country, and lied.

1:16:55Aiden:I appreciate that you think... It's living an awesome life,

1:16:58Atrioc:a handless life in the Bornean jungle. And nobody believes about the gold, but it was real the whole time.

1:17:03Aiden:I'm not 100 % reading conflicted things about that. And it's like the circumstances of his death... And I am drunk. they're not important i'm not on trial for that they're not important and i i think it's this is a simple case of we all make shit up sometimes we all to get out of something to maybe overvalue our stock and it's a mistake that anybody could

1:17:28Atrioc:make i'm trying to get out whether we knew it or not innocent you can't be guilty for a little

1:17:33Aiden:white lie it's been a long day i'm hoping to close this courtroom out soon maybe uh keep this one snappy oh judges this is open shut case my guy is innocent he's as innocent as they come let's start with his name gregor mcgregor okay a manly good name right there two first names second thing professional mime and rich okay i like that are we talking give us a number i like that so he's actually at the time of this photograph he's a younger man he's from an upper middle class family but he strives for a great. He's not that rich. At this time in Great Britain, he's Scottish, but he moves to Great Britain or moves to London.

1:18:16You could buy an officership in the British military. You can get to do this until 1871, I think. So his family wants him to have a good job. So they just buy him an officership. And he, a young man, is now in charge of parts of the British military. He wants fame and glory and success. Turns out he's not particularly suited for. It's not really his calling yet. We're going to find his calling later. So he is yelled at by a commanding officer for a blunder and is kicked out of the military, at which point he is despondent because he wants to be rich and famous. He's wasted his one opportunity.

1:18:52He's not happy. So he decides, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm hearing of an uprising in Venezuela where Simon Bolivar is rebelling against the Spanish. And I'm going to go down there and prove that I'm a really good military guy. I'm going to make my fame and fortune.

1:19:10Aiden:Right. So he goes to Venezuela. Now, what's interesting is as he's traveling, the squadron he was in, in Britain becomes super famous. They do like a really incredible battle and they invent the phrase die hard because somebody who's about to die goes, we have to die hard men. And that becomes famous throughout Britain. And his squadron is known as like the the super badass guys. He arrives in Venezuela and is like, I was part of that squadron, even though this all happened after he was kicked out. I gotta be honest here. You're just, your client seems like a badass. That's what everyone in Venezuela says.

1:19:47So he's given a really high up ranking in Simon Bolivar's revolutionary army. And surprisingly, this is the, I shouldn't say surprisingly, not his lawyer. He does a good job. He does a pretty damn good job. He actually leads some, some successful battles. His only problem is after every successful battle, every city he takes or hill he takes, he stops his troops and gets incredibly drunk and makes no progress. Until eventually, people are so mad that he has to flee. This happens like three different times. You're telling me he wins? He wins battles? Yeah. He works hard and plays hard. Yes! Yes, Judge.

1:20:25He works hard and plays hard. Interesting. So anyway, after years of doing this, he's actually a celebrated Venezuelan war hero. He has medals and everything. Understandable. And but they kind of get fed up with him and he has to leave. So before leaving, he does a bit of drinking with a guy who claims to be the king of the Mosquito Coast. Now, this guy, yeah, he has some land in the area, but there really isn't. There's no territory here. There's no he has a tribe in the area and he gets drunk, but he doesn't have a way to enforce or own this land.

1:21:00Atrioc:mosquito coast is famously the east coast of modern nicaragua that's right

1:21:06Aiden:the mosquito coast is real and no need to say things that people know particularly on a podcast that people listen to sometimes the mosquito coast so he uh he's he's drinking with this guy and he's like you know what if i give you some of my rum and some of my jewels will you give me land on the mosquito coast and the guy who has no real claim to it anyway goes Yeah, of course. Makes sense. So he gives him a deed to thousands of acres of land in the Mosquito Coast. Yeah, of course you have the deed to the Mosquito Coast. You give it to your friends. So Simon Boevo, I'm sorry. So Gregor McGregor has kind of been scammed himself, but he owns this land in paper.

1:21:45So your client is a victim? He's a victim. Victim. He's a victim. So he goes back. Also, my client loves LARPing, which is not a crime. He loves the idea of like make it up. He's like a J.R.R. Tolkien of his time. He likes writing fancy ideas and drawing ideas. He goes back to London and he. I'm sorry. It's not. He's in the Mosquito Coast.

1:22:07Atrioc:This is just real. This is not the Lord of the Ring are not LARPing. They just are in it. And I love that you said that this particular photo is fake. And when he gets back to London, he commissions a fake guidebook of a fake country that he's created in the Mosquito Coast called Poyer. Poyer. and so he walks around claiming he is the Kazik of Poirier. What does that sound like to you? Like a prince or a king? A Kazik? Yeah, some sort of mosquito queen. That's what he wants you to think because it's a fake word that he's made up. He's actually made up a bunch of language of Poirier. He's made up a banking system.

1:22:44He's made up a town that has 20 ,000 fake people and has an opera hall and a main street. He also...

1:22:53Aiden:If Poirier is made up, where did my grandma use to summer? that's what people in London are asking themselves because he also says it's filled with many exhausted Londoners who went out to enjoy the great weather. And he also tells everybody that the natives there are unique in that they love the British. The natives are so grateful and happy for the British. It's a true blessed paradise where they're thankful. And so everybody in London is like, this place sounds bomb as bomb.com, as they used to say back then in the 1800s. and because he's such a good LARPer, he commissions, he writes this whole thing himself, this entire fake guidebook to the territory that has like flora and fawn all made up, natives and land and maps.

1:23:39He makes this whole thing up, and he puts it under a fake name called Thomas Strangeways, and this goes kind of viral in 1800s London. So everybody wants to either move there or invest there.

1:23:51Atrioc:I just want, can you go back one? so in this pamphlet which is made up to promote his made up country they're still calling it the Mosquito Shore why wouldn't you call it like calling it Virus Town is not good marketing and if he's lying about everything anyways call it a different fucking name it's extra funny because there's a page in this guidebook where they specify how there's zero mosquitoes zero diseases zero diseases oh in the book they're saying there's no mosquito in the book There is plenty of mosquitoes, but in the book, zero mosquitoes. It's a paradise. It is like a spa. It is so beautiful.

1:24:30He also creates a fake currency. So there's two parts of this. One is, at this time, largely because of events like the South Sea Bubble, honestly, people are, in Great Britain, really tired of investing in British government bonds. What year is this again? This is the mid-1800s.

1:24:47Atrioc:I don't know the exact. So it would have been after the ramifications of my thing. It's probably after. But it's British government bonds at the time only offer like 2%, 3%. So everyone's like, I need a better return than that. Of course. Well, it's popping South America. That's what everyone's hearing about. South America is like blowing up. And Poyer is offering like 15 % return on its bonds. 15 %? And it's a paradise. It's doing well. They say the ground is so fertile, crops grow twice as fast. Oh, yeah. So everybody starts investing in Poyer bonds. Of course. Now, if this was just the scam, that would be, I think, no harm, no foul.

1:25:22Okay, what's the problem with that?

1:25:24Aiden:Who doesn't want to bond for the bank of Poirier? Yeah, it's cool on its own. The problem is people want to move there. And Gregor McGregor does nothing to dissuade them of this idea. And he actually encourages it. And in fact says, you know what? When you get there, you're going to need Poirier dollars. So give me all your London money. I'll convert it to Poirier dollars. And then when you arrive, you'll be able to do that. And this is one of the worst ones.

1:25:48Atrioc:he's like sending people across the world to the mosquito coast okay excuse me i try to stay objective here yeah stay objective here so you're sounding really uh no you're right like a class traitor so people quit their jobs like some guy quits his job as a cobbler to become the official royal cobbler of poyer converts all of his life savings into poyer dollars and they all get on a boat hundreds of people and they sail and when they arrive they find a lot of mosquitoes and empty land and natives that hate them and death and disease and decay and the second they land the ship captain realizes they've been had he nopes the hell out of there instantly leaving everyone stranded um of the hundreds of people that were sent 50 make it back alive.

1:26:42Everyone else gets hit with disease and dies and one person kills himself because they've been had and they lost all their savings. Let's not go into the details because I think it paints the wrong image of my client, Gregor McGregor, who's really a good man.

1:26:54Aiden:Because I feel like maybe he did do something wrong here. So maybe dig yourself out of this hole. Sure, okay. So they get back to London and they're complaining. He gave them a free trip, basically. But they saw the world. And they get back and they complain and it becomes a big viral sensation in London. People have all been scammed. Nobody's getting interest paid in their bonds. Everyone that went is... It's newspapers. So my man, Gregor McGregor, realizes they don't want me here. Okay? You don't want my talents? Fine. So he moves to France, where he immediately starts selling Poirier bonds and running the same scam.

1:27:29Atrioc:And to be fair to him, now he's not lying. There's people living there. There's a settlement of some sort. A few people. He's in France. He runs the exact same scam twice. It's slightly less successful because a few people have heard, and there's a little bit of suspicion. Plus the South America thing is fading. And eventually they arrest him and make this cartoon showing him as the so-called, uh, Kazik of Poyer and, and being arrested. By the way, he was like, again, every step of the way, he's writing thousands of pages of fan fiction. He was like giving people green crosses that represent honor.

1:28:06and he was like, you're in the order of the Green Cross. He really created it. He would have been a great writer. At which point, he flees France, goes back to London, and it has now been so long since the first game that few people remember it and nobody remembers his face. So he does the same thing again. No way, dude. The return of the king. He does it a third time. That is crazy. It is markedly less successful, but still enough to live off of. When they finally do catch him, he goes to Scotland, does it a fourth time to buy a house and pay off his debts. He sells bonds a fourth time, at which point it's all been burnt.

1:28:44Everyone has figured out a scam. He runs out of money. His wife dies. And he says, you know what? I'm going back to Venezuela. He goes back to Venezuela.

1:28:54Aiden:How old is he at this point? At this point, he's an old man. He's like in his 60s. He goes back to Venezuela and he says, hey, I was a war hero here. And a few people kind of remember him yeah and so they go he was and they give him a full pension military honors and he dies a hero he does a hero they give him like a parade like no one else is around that really remembers the battles so he he kind of pulled off scam after scam his whole life and ended up why am i the most mad about this one it's like, I think it's just something about being like, you just live in an era where you can truly quintuple down.

1:29:39Aiden:No one can call you out. Nobody has photographs. Nobody has because you just like, you could, you can't do this anymore. Not in the same way. It has to be different now, but this was just the time where like nobody had the technology to quickly communicate about scams or people or photos so you could just, you could keep running that shit. That's so funny. Yeah. And so is it really a crime to do something, be rewarded and double down? That's just human nature. We do what works. And see, your client, I have to reward him for his resilience, for one.

1:30:16Atrioc:And credit to him. The vast majority of people who went to Poirier have been there forever. Oh, dude.

1:30:29He's guilty, bro. He's fucking, this guy's an utter piece of garbage.

1:30:34Aiden:Let's close this out. I have a CVS theft case to get to.

1:30:40Atrioc:Case number eight. Theranos. This one's a little interesting because my client, alive still, and currently in jail, serving jail time. And there's an argument. Just maybe. Should be let out. She's certainly making that argument. Okay. Now, there are no... I'm going to assume most of the people listening have heard of this. It's one of the most infamous cases of fraud in the entire tech industry. You seem like you're about to slam the gavel.

1:31:07Aiden:No, I'm just prepared. Oh, just prepared. Innocent.

1:31:10Atrioc:Let me give you a quick overview. Elizabeth Holmes is the Steve Jobs-esque founder. Now, all of the great stories that you hear about the tech industry usually involve an eccentric leader who has a vision and is able to burst through, just like Steve Jobs. She, Elizabeth Holmes, recognizes this. As a young Stanford student, she realizes, I can tell an incredible story. The story of how with a single drop of blood, I could have hundreds of different tests that tell you about your health. From just a drop, it's me, a powerful woman, fighting against the sort of, you know, genuinely misogynistic tech sphere.

1:31:45Atrioc:And finally, we have like a powerful leader. She starts talking like Steve Jobs. She starts wearing black turtlenecks. and as a 19 year old drops out of stanford and says i have invented this technology that could take a drop of blood and get hundreds of tests drops out of stanford and drops her voice a few octaves i love that literally starts using a fake lowered voice to sound like steve jobs and from the beginning in 2003 is telling people i elizabeth holmes have invented a machine that can do hundreds of tests off a single drop of blood and just to be clear at no point during the next 15 years of this scam did she ever have technology that could do that but what she did have is storytelling right a powerful story and that story is that i have this thing that she will never show to anybody over the next 10 15 years she builds more investors who start to buy into this story and it spirals like we've heard many times you get in investors you get them excited you tell them well it's trade secrets i can't show you exactly what it is but you give them obfuscated results and sort of like really really sketchy like you know you're seeing through a window in a laboratory there is an incredible book called bad blood by john carrey rue who's one of the key figures and exposing this whole thing that i highly highly highly recommend uh reading if you just want like some of the best drama this goes on for a number of years at no point they have a product they continue to bring in investors but the investors get more high in profile so they never get like real scientists or people who can verify anything they get people like rupert murdoch the walton family and then big big like elder statesmen henry kissinger george schultz james mattis these are people who were like a great blunt rotation hey you know like basically led u.s foreign policy like george schultz was under reagan i believe and so they keep bringing this credibility they build up this investor pool that's just insane right that they can use to say look at how amazing our product is and then you just kind of show fake results about what's going on literally all faked and then at the same time builds an incredibly powerful legal team that threatens intense legal action against anyone who tries to speak up against anything any former employee starts talking to anyone in any way they're getting like tons of lawsuits at them and threats from big firms that are credibly going to destroy these people's lives that's called being a girl boss first of all she indeed was a girl boss yes and there's nothing wrong with that why can't women do what nintendo does all the time these are different these are not the same i want to be clear with a sheeo making it happen had fake data and fake labs and we're selling this story for 15 years so from 2003 up to 2018.

1:34:32Atrioc:It continues to grow. They continue to raise more investor money. Finally, though, after whatever, it's like a decade, I forget the exact year, they start to get actual clients. They get Safeway and Walgreens, both major pharmacy providers who the idea is in their stores. They're going to have a Theranos system, the Edison, where you can get the drop of blood and you get all the tests. So they start finally getting a real customer. And the problem is that is that since the machines don't work they have to like mail the blood samples to theranos's lab but then theranos's lab doesn't have working machines so they have siemens machines in their labs that do the test semen machines they have semen machines you mix the blood and the semen machine together now siemens what's the crime with that the german well so the crime is if you tell everyone and invest money and get walgreens and safeway to give you massive would not invest in something bad first of all okay so god doesn't let you live to a hundred if you did bad things right it's it's a wild story where basically for the last several years they they what really gets bad is at first it's just invest scamming investors for a long period But then there is this long period where they get Walgreens and Safeway to put these into their pharmacies, right?

1:35:57Atrioc:And the blood results, the machines they have aren't very good. And they are able to do a couple of lab results badly. And the rest of them, they have the Siemens machines do. But say, oh, yeah, we're doing all of this. So it's not just all the lying. It's they genuinely have bad machines that don't give good results and sent those to real patients in America and said, this is your health and it was wrong and the nurses were trying to speak up threatened all over the place former employees were threatened with legal stuff finally a journalist john carrie roux amongst other is talking to some people it's like heroic story which we won't get into but finally someone has the conviction to go through and make this public and to be a whistleblower the story drops by the wall street journal and that just blows the whole thing open they the wall street journal was threatened immensely that they were going to basically try to destroy the Wall Street Journal and they had to debate whether they were even going to post the story.

1:36:52Atrioc:It was that intense with legal threats.

1:36:54Aiden:Doug, I'm having a hard time here because it seems like your client set an ambitious goal that needed to be fulfilled in order to create a great product. Sometimes that vision needs to come first. Much like when Steve Jobs told Steve Wozniak that the Macintosh could only be this big and that he needed to fit all the parts. and it's really no different i don't even know why you're why you're giving this case to us elon musk every year tells engineers we're gonna have self-driving by the end of the year that's a goal it don't necessarily hit it but it's a goal we're gonna have driving machines that take a we're going to break your blood and and do all of the tests you could ever ask for and does did it do that no but it's it's a vision is that even her fault it feels like it's the employee's fault for not following through on the ceo's mission thank you they should be on trial and they'd be guilty if i was a lawyer i would say you are a lawyer and a judge if i was in a

1:37:54Atrioc:courtroom you are in a courtroom i would say that the difference is that she from day one said i have this technology it does work and sold off of that and that's different than elon saying we will have this stuff in a couple years we don't have it yet i don't see a difference i don't see a difference either i appreciate your point but uh your client's innocent now elizabeth holmes once the wall street journal article dropped everything kind of burst open suddenly the regulators who had basically just been like duped and led astray and lied to and obfuscated finally with this public pressure were able to get in there they investigate the labs they're like this has horrible standards this is not doing what you said you're going to do this is not follow our protocols the company starts to collapse she famously does this presentation at a medical conference to try to redeem herself and says this is what it is see i'm finally revealing it for the first time it doesn't do anything and she is eventually uh convicted in 2022 of uh an enormous amount of investor fraud as well as uh her co-conspirator sunny and it's a whole big disaster this is one of the big famous just disasters of the tech industry of the last uh 15 years and it is truly and genuinely just unadulterated fraud and embezzlement it's ridiculous so it seems a little strange to

1:39:09Aiden:because we've been through a crazy day in this courtroom.

1:39:12Atrioc:Yeah, honestly.

1:39:13Aiden:And oddly enough, most of the clients I've noticed that have come through today have already been dead. They're already dead, which is unorthodox, to say the least. I would talk it's crazy. It's a hint. It is unorthodox. It's not a normal day here in the courtroom. Finally, we've got a living specimen. We come to a case where the woman is currently alive, in prison, relatively young, hasn't been in prison that long. How long was she sentenced for?

1:39:39Atrioc:So she was sentenced to 11 years and three months. Here's the deal, Judge.

1:39:45Aiden:It's a long time. It's just a lot more paperwork if we say guilty. Well, here's the thing. It's like a lot more.

1:39:53Atrioc:I want to make a pitch to you. This is a woman who knowingly, directly defrauded investors, harmed patients, put on this lie for 15 years. However, go to her first tweet. in february 18th 2026 she said you may be confusing in response to jason calcanis for some reason who she's arguing with the host of all in you may be confusing me with tech entrepreneurs who cash out and walk away wealthy i didn't i never sold a share despite all the opportunities to do so never enriched myself i gave everything i had to our company to seeing our mission through down to the last second it lived what i have to give is blood sweat and tears from the torment of my fight over the last 10 years and the abdominal fire in me to realize our vision for affordable, accessible healthcare, to realize change.

1:40:44Atrioc:I want to serve our country. Pain stokes a fire that cannot be extinguished. As I've endured the violence of this journey, I've studied relentlessly over the past eight years. I've studied and studied profound learnings from my failures. And she goes on, you can keep scrolling down to say how she now wants to use AI and innovation to help change big healthcare. for 15 years i worked 20 hour days seven days a week i think she would be dead um she does have children also i want to serve our country i want to apply the lessons learned burned into me i want to help us lead as innovators in health care i want to ensure the dream of affordable accessible health care becomes true in a world of ai for all americans and i just want you to know she said ai I want to invest.

1:41:29I want to invest. She's not guilty. Get her out.

1:41:33Aiden:Put a ticker up and get part of my savings into it. Is this not an insane thing to say when you're literally in prison? You're in prison. Nothing you did provided a product. Aiden, we're missing a financial opportunity here. all birds ai is worth 500 million i'm gonna invest in theranos ai right now not guilty order order our final case of the evening it's been a long day famously usually go through about 10 cases a day and they're all very high profile and long dead lawyers case lawyers judges people and women of the court. People and women. That sounds worse coming out than I had my head. Overruled.

1:42:26You're fine. You're fine. Not guilty. Look, is your client

1:42:30Aiden:dead or not? Is your client dead or not? First question. Hold on. My client is alive. Yes. And the other. No. No. Is it dead? The other has fled. he's fun and uh i come to you with another our last story of the day a company called wirecard a german success story uh wirecard was an online payment processor you can think of them something similar to stripe you know something that lets uh businesses uh interact with credit card payments online, later doing things to like help support mobile payments, kind of financial infrastructure on the internet. And they got their start helping provide these payment service to gambling and adult media sites, because those are spaces online where like equivalent companies often don't want to get involved.

1:43:28Aiden:So they saw a market opportunity there. And then they leveraged that into becoming one of the tech all-stars of the 2000s, especially for germany a company that was looking to compete with the u.s's tech success right and much like elizabeth holmes marcus braun the ceo becomes this powerful tech figure in the media often copying the steve jobs aesthetic as well literally rocking the turtle i think steve jobs is guilty for just making so many copycats.

1:44:02Atrioc:Let's get him in here too. There's a real criminal effort. He fits our crime. He's also dead. We mostly persecute dead people. And Steve Jobs is way more guilty than Marcus Braun.

1:44:16Aiden:What is wrong with us? And what you will find extraordinary about this company that made its way through the 2000s, including the 2008 financial crisis and the 2010s, is that they managed to maintain record profits the whole way through. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. A winner. I like winners. Twitch marks flowing in. Eventually, toward the end of the 2010s, they find themselves on the DAX, which is the, think of it like the Dow equivalent for Germany on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. They are one of the 40 major German blue chip stocks, and it's made it. This is kind of the envisionment of tech success in Germany.

1:44:58What percentage of Nike would you say Wirecard was? And AirPods.

1:45:03Aiden:It was probably five Nikes. Five Nikes? I made that up. One AirPod? But I think my client would like that I make things up on his behalf. Especially financial things. And through this whole time period, there's increased scrutiny of Marcus Braun, the CEO, a guy who seems to have a lot of buzzwords and not a lot of substance when it comes to the company's success. but they do manage to keep adding product like online products to their repertoire and somehow expanding the business and a huge part of their growth in profit is as they decide to leave germany and operate in other countries they cannot necessarily get the legal licensing to be able to operate their services in these places so what is the thing that they do they partner with other companies abroad and then form like a relationship or license with them like provide a similar sort of service, you brand under us, you pay us a kickback, and a massive amount of profit from this licensing strategy starts to pour in.

1:46:04Aiden:They're creating foreign headquarters of their company in places like the Philippines, Dubai, and Singapore. And eventually, there is enough raised suspicion that they are audited for, I believe, a second time by a company called KPMG. And they start digging around and they see this report of the amount of money that is coming through from the Philippines branch specifically. And apparently there's$2 billion in accounts in the Philippines. And they go to check on the Philippines headquarters of the company. They go on over there. Excuse me. I believe it's the FT initially investigates to go check out the filipino headquarters of the company what do they find a family's home instead of an office yeah work is family for them it's like this office is a family they meant it callous western values i believe the ft runs an article about this and and wirecard does not like this there's this doesn't make any sense the ft is bashing us and then kpmg coming in for a second audit decides to pursue or look into the banks that hold all this money that is uh that exists on the books of wirecard let's check these accounts out let's look at the representatives at the bank that are listed uh we'll just well they initially come in just thinking like we just want to make sure that this these assets that they're reporting are liquid in the philippines like how quickly can they access these things to make sure that they're accounting all checks out okay what they didn't think they would find is that not only do the are these assets not liquid they don't exist at all they actually don't have any accounts and the people at the bank they reported to work with have no idea that wirecard even is a company at all

1:48:03Aiden:and after and if you it is entirely made up like okay and if you take away the money from these foreign branches of like this this foreign these foreign branches of wirecard the company isn't remotely profitable like it is it's not even close to profitable okay and this story breaks and the company crumbles and Marcus the CEO is arrested. But one other weird, crazy thing on this is his right hand man. I think the COO, Jan Marsalek, is apparently flees upon realizing that the House of Carbs is finally crumbling underneath them. And this guy goes and flees to Russia. Turns out he had ties to russian intelligence and mercenary groups since 2010 often traveling with russian mercenary groups to places like syria to like go shoot guns and have a good time a lot of crime to have friends and hang out with the boys yeah to be safe yeah and to this day my client who's innocent is still hiding in russia interpol seeking him and uh has continued to live there since 2020.

1:49:24Aiden:And that's where the story kind of ends. Marcus ended up going to jail, I believe. And I still claim that he's innocent, of course. And Jan is on the run from Interpol.

1:49:37Atrioc:I hope Jan and the Crypto Queen had a happy ending together. Where did the money come from? The investors. They were just saying that they were making the money.

1:49:46Aiden:Yeah, so they were... What ended up... initially from what i can tell this company did have legitimate origins and as it scaled and the hype grew they expanded the company in ways that they could not sustain or actually pay for but they managed to continue raising money through the hype of the stock where the fraud comes in is as the company got bigger and bigger they claimed these larger and larger sources of revenue from primarily these licensing deals in foreign countries. I'll be it not just that, but the bulk of these ventures were extremely profitable, like disproportionately profitable.

1:50:30Aiden:And it was what made the company look profitable at all, but it was just made up money. And if you took it out of the equation, once it was discovered that, Oh, this money doesn't exist. These relationships with these banks don't exist. There's no customers fueling this business at all. Then the company just collapsed. i'd say having to live in russia is punishment enough

1:50:53Aiden:well case closed

1:50:57Atrioc:guys i have to admit something i was a lawyer the whole time i'm not a judge me too if i'm to confess

1:51:05Aiden:to you guys i actually do know how to put a tie on and i was just joking no you were not That's why I made your client's innocent Your goofy hair in the tie

1:51:15Atrioc:Ladies and gentlemen this was fun Let us know who you think is the most Awful scammer of all time And did we get anything wrong And next week join us we will be putting Aiden's dead grandparents on trial

1:51:26Aiden:If you want an extra 60 minutes of the show You can go to patreon.com slash lemonade stand Where we will be doing a more normal episode That's the real scam The real scam is Subscribe to Patreon on iOS Don't do it Don't do it. Go on desktop, use Android, do something else.

1:51:42Atrioc:And do not subscribe to HRX Twitch channel. He doesn't even thank you when you subscribe. He didn't say anything. I should be treated like royalty over there. We're all part of the legal system. Let's not throw each other under the bus.

1:51:53Aiden:We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for watching. Case closed. Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. The message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just$15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three-month plan, equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.

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