The Harvard Professor Who Almost Had His House Stolen By His Lover, And More Of The Week's Best Scam Stories
It seems like we're living in a society that's full of scams, hoaxes and questionable practices committed by individuals or corporations these days. Some scams are purely horrible, some are more incredible than egregious, and some are just really, really weird.
Welcome to Cons And Pros, a weekly roundup of the most outrageous scam stories we have come across this week.
A Casanova Captures A Dine-And-Dash Dater
For years, the misdeeds of Paul Gonzales, the infamous LA dine-and-dash dater, had gone on with impunity. After asking women out to expensive restaurants, Gonzales would then ditch his dates and leave them to foot the bill.
Last year, Detective Victor Cass, called "Casanova" by his co-workers, decided to stop him. And in a compelling piece for The Daily Beast, Jeff Maysh recounts how Cass managed to ensnare Gonzales and how Gonzales' scams affected his victims:
Cass interviewed Martha Barba, who said Gonzales invited her to an after-dinner fireworks show at the Rose Bowl in July 2016, but disappeared after telling her to "order dessert." "I was embarrassed… I felt humiliated… and my self confidence, you know… just wondering what did I do? Did I say something?"
After paying the $180 bill, the single mother said she struggled to pay her rent.
Other victims said they were still struggling to deal with their emotions. After her date with Gonzales, Irene Rodriguez said she had trouble trusting anyone, and quit online dating forever. Another victim said: "It just makes you feel like a piece of crap."
While Cass managed to apprehend Gonzales in the end, his failed attempts to capture Gonzales, which includes a botched honey trap, is almost just as compelling to read.
"We had a female officer create an online dating account," he [Cass] told me. "We had her go on Bumble and create a profile to see if she could lure him and save all the text messages… We wanted to see if Paul bites."
[…]
"The experience for women online is vastly different than for men," explained Cass. "An attractive woman can set up a dating site and instantly — like within 20 minutes — can have 50 contact requests or messages. Our officer was horrified at what these guys sent her." Cass said the unnamed officer is gay, and was appalled at the wild messages she received from men. "Crazy statements, outrageous things," said Cass. "Dick pics."
The Friendly Neighborhood Scammer-Man
Nextdoor was designed to be a platform to foster communication within a neighborhood, to help people find their lost pets or a good baby sitter. And now, unfortunately, it has become a perfect platform for scams too.
In Westminster, Colorado, 72-year-old Pam Ruffin was looking to repair her fence and contacted a company named Eagle Eye Fence, which multiple users on Nextdoor recommended, according to a report by ABC 7. Two contractors visited Ruffin and offered to fix her fence in exchange for a check for $11,800 to pay for supplies. She never saw them again
A family in Texas also looked to Nextdoor for a contractor, only to have the remodel of their kitchen backsplash botched when he hired four inexperienced teenagers for the job, reported KBTX.
[BuzzFeed]
Watch Where Your Tips Are Going
Earlier this week, The New York Times published an article by Andy Newman detailing his stint working as a food app deliveryman. While Newman's article is focused on the trials and challenges of the job, it also shed light on the slightly shady tipping policies of one food delivery company, DoorDash.
Essentially, what Newman revealed is that when a customer tips a DoorDash courier, the tip goes to the company, rather than the courier.
DoorDash offers a guaranteed minimum for each job. For my first order, the guarantee was $6.85 and the customer, a woman in Boerum Hill who answered the door in a colorful bathrobe, tipped $3 via the app. But I still received only $6.85.
Here's how it works: If the woman in the bathrobe had tipped zero, DoorDash would have paid me the whole $6.85. Because she tipped $3, DoorDash kicked in only $3.85. She was saving DoorDash $3, not tipping me.
Since the publishing of the article and the backlash it has generated from consumers, DoorDash has announced it will be modifying its tipping policies.
The Disgraced 'Love Mother'
In 2005, Li Yanxia became famous in Chinese media for adopting several children in her hometown and establishing an orphanage called "Love Village." At that time, many applauded her for her altruism and she was dubbed "Love Mother."
In a disturbing turn of events, BBC has reported that Li has been convicted of fraud, forgery and extortion. And her philanthropy involving helping orphaned children is also suspect.
They found she had been carrying out illegal activities since 2011. She also manipulated some of her adopted children into hindering work on construction sites — in one instance, making them run under trucks so construction could not continue. Li then blackmailed these construction companies.
The 54-year-old was also found to have gained money on the pretext of building up the "Love Village."
[BBC]
The Most Gullible Man In Cambridge
While the romantic scams of Paul Gonzales were fairly straightforward, the paternity trap scam that Harvard Law professor Bruce Hay got himself embroiled into is far more convoluted and the motives of his two alleged scammers, Maria-Pia Shuman and Mischa Haider, far less clear.
Writing for The Cut, writer Kera Bolonik writes about how Hay, a professor who, ironically, teaches "Judgment and Decision Making" at Harvard, fell victim to a "campaign of fraud, extortion, and false accusations," according to the words of his lawyer.
What began it all was Shuman claiming that she was pregnant with Hay's child, a claim Hay later found dubious. The extent of the fraud that then followed is flabbergasting to read, especially the part where Shuman and her friend Haider "steal" Hay's house away from him by gaining access to his computer and accounts to create a fake lease.
[W]hen Hay and the women returned to Cambridge two days later, Hay and Zacks's [Hay's wife] beautiful Italianate home on a quiet corner of Mount Vernon Street had been emptied of his family's furniture, cookware, toys, documents, books, Zacks's mother's and grandmother's heirlooms — and everything replaced with the women's furniture. When Shuman had gone MIA in Quebec, Hay believes, she wasn't seeing a doctor. She'd been overseeing the complicated move, all $10,000 of which had been charged to Hay's credit card.
The next day, Hay called the Cambridge police. When the officer accompanied him to his house, the women came to the door — his door — and furnished a lease renting them the $3.2 million home for two years for $1,500 a month. He says Shuman had used his laptop while they were in Quebec to send an email to her lawyer from his Harvard account, in which he purportedly said the "lease" "looks good."
[The Cut]
It's a harrowing tale, and it also drives home the point that book smarts can only get you so far and doesn't make you indefensible to schemes and scams like this.
