Bitcoin Blood Gangs and The Greatest Scammer of All Time
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It's an early June morning in Dubai, and six fully kitted out SWAT teams are on the move through the halls of one of the city's most exclusive condos. I mean, you know, it's Dubai. It's fancy. But these cops aren't messing around, and they look like they're fully ready to engage in a firefight full of automatic weapons. I mean, they look like they're about to take down a terrorist cell. The United Arab Emirates and Dubai clearly want to send a little bit of a message.

Dubai can kind of seem like a lawless place when it comes to international criminals just setting up shop there. It's just kind of wild. I haven't spent that much time there, but it sounds like it's a combo of Beirut in the 80s and Casablanca in the 40s, just all sorts of big money criminals based there, terrorist groups, mafiosos, white collar criminals, spies.

You know, to be a fly on the wall of a seven-star hotel bar in Dubai. In some of our episodes, we've actually talked about various mafiosos who have set up shop there to avoid extra-legal situations like the Kinahan cartel. But now, in 2020, they've started cracking down on some of the more explicit criminals, including a Belgian-Moroccan drug lord accused of killing 11 people. This operation, dubbed Fox Hunt 2, is launched in coordination with American law enforcement. The cops here don't end up facing any resistance, though.

Their targets aren't known for their violence. Instead, these cops just barrel into these spotless luxury apartments and handcuff a bunch of really godly-dressed Nigerian men, drip down in luxury brands and jewelry. When all is said and done, they'll end up arresting 12 people, finding $40 million in cash, 13 luxury cars, 21 computers, 47 smartphones, and apparently a list of 2 million victims on one of the phones or hard drives.

And when the operation is finished, the Dubai police will release a four-minute video cut like it was directed by Ridley Scott. I mean, you can go look it up online. We are talking people looking at multiple computer screens, Matrix-style graphics. You kind of half expect one of the people to just start saying, enhance, enhance as it's playing. I can't even get a handle on what $40 million in cash looks like. Is that like a briefcase or is it like a palette or what? How do you fit that in a house?

They didn't show it, but I imagine it's kind of like that breaking bag scene. Yeah, yeah. The man at the center of this operation, the big target, is Raymond Abbas. But most people know the 38-year-old by his Instagram and Snapchat name, Hush Puppy. The complaint against him filed in court accuses Mr. Abbas of leading a transnational network of cyber criminals whose targets included a U.S. law firm, a foreign bank, and an English Premier League football club. You may not know him, but there's a decent chance you may have actually gotten an email from him.

Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, and today we are telling the story of the greatest scammer of all time. I am one of your hosts, Danny Gold. I'm here with Sean Williams. And, yeah, we've got a fun episode for you today. He's still in New Zealand. One more day. One more day. The main character in episode 12 that we did, the most...

narco in the world just got busted. So Sean's been talking about that all day to various news agencies. But, you know, I think it was about time we did a good old-fashioned scamming story. Yeah, they did. And we'll get to, yeah, and we'll get to a bunch of the, like, you know, dummies shooting each other in nightclubs next week again. I personally love a good scammer, especially if they're operating out of a, you know, seven-star hotel in Dubai. Yeah, too right. I actually lived there for a year and I could tell you some stuff about some pretty shitheads

shady shit that goes on there. Plus like, I think we, every single episode we've done seems to have a connection there. Like the Indian one had a connection. The Nigerian mafia had a connection there. Like everyone goes through that place. Uh, maybe I'm going to do my own episode about Dubai in the future. I reckon it'd be a good one. Yeah. And you've never actually told us what you were doing there, but, uh, you know, I don't know if the statute of limitations or anything like that is, is, uh, is going on. Yeah. I should keep going. But, uh, yeah.

In 2015, I actually started hearing this story about some scammers that I guess would fall under a criminal phenomenon. And to this day, I'm upset I actually never got to it because it's one of the more ingenious and fantastic crime stories I've ever chased. Now, it's not exactly about Hush Puppy, but it's the same sort of milieu, I guess you would say. So back then, scamming was all the rage, especially credit card scamming.

I mean, it wasn't exactly like a new thing, right? People have always scammed credit cards. Catch Me If You Can, great movie. We all love a good Leo movie. But it was becoming increasingly popular to the point where, you know, you started hearing SoundCloud rappers making scamming anthems. And it was really having a moment in like the hip-hop zeitgeist, if you will. And there were these stories going around about these advanced methods, about the use of Bitcoin, just all this stuff. Yeah, and I'm going to post, I go chop your money to social media right after we record this because that is...

That's like the daddy of all of the Scammer songs. I'm going to get that one out there.

I mean, some of the ones, like the Pop Out Boys had an anthem. Some of them were pretty good. But I started talking to some people, some of the young kids I know in my neighborhood that I knew who engaged in otherwise questionable activities. And everyone seemed to have a friend or two that was into this. And then I started talking to some cybersecurity experts, some law enforcement sources, and really started to piece things together. So by 2016, this was sort of on the radar. And you had some crews getting broken up and busted with laminating machines.

And law enforcement was starting to catch on, but it was just really something.

You had these young kids, these street crews, kids who were typically involved in drug dealing and gang stuff, now engaged in this scamming that was outsmarting the credit card companies. And this is how it worked. So you know those stories you hear about credit cards being hacked at the Gap or at Target? They're basically credit card transit points, right? All these numbers that get booked in cash registers, whatever it is, or websites. And every now and then you hear a story about them getting hacked, right? It barely makes the news anymore, but

But think how often you used to see Target credit cards hacked, 8 million credit cards on file in the hands of hackers. I had an article loaded up today, or maybe it was from a while ago. I don't know. But it was a Forbes article that was like this week in credit card news, and it was talking about how Sonic was hacked and Whole Foods was hacked. You know, it's nothing new.

And these hackers, they're typically in like Russia or Moldova or Latvia, you know, somewhere in Eastern Europe or the former Soviet states. Yeah, I just got like an email saying that my Bonobos account was hacked. Like, when the fuck did I order anything from Bonobos? Yeah, it's like every day, right? Right. This stuff happens all the time. So these hackers, they would typically put these credit cards up for sale in bulk.

But back in the day, you either had to speak like Russian or be deep in the hacking community to gain access to buying them. You know, they weren't easy to find unless you really knew where to look. This was dark web stuff or how to really cover your communications and financial transactions. It was complicated. You had to know your way around these things.

But then something new came on the scene, something that really exploded in 2013, 2014, and all that time. And that was cryptocurrency. Hey, we've got into crypto finally. I feel like we've been avoiding it in some way, but it's only a matter of time, right? Yeah. I mean, it just factors in so heavy to the story. Yeah. So-

With the invention of crypto, there wasn't this need to sell these credit card numbers on the dark net to have to be super careful. So what do these hackers do? They made these wide open websites that were like eBay, like Amazon. Anyone could use them. They might still be up, but I haven't, you know, I forgot the names. I haven't seen them in a while. They were just there. You know, you could just buy a thousand hacked credit card numbers for like the equivalent of $50 in Bitcoin. You could even search for zip codes and buy credit cards from that specific zip code.

I remember a cybersecurity expert telling me about this, and I was just blown away. And then I went on the site, and it was that easy to do this. So these young street crews in New York, like the kind that would usually be out low-level gangbanging or selling drugs to get by, they wised up to it. And they started using Bitcoin to buy thousands of credit cards, test them out, then use their own printing or laminating machines to make the cards.

Then they would send kids out of state to buy gift cards at places like Saks Fifth Avenue or Bloomingdale's to buy designer clothes. And, you know, some of them would wear designer clothes, some of them would sell them, or they would sell the gift cards or whatever else, and they were making tons of money.

And, you know, why not? Right. The risk for the kind of time you'll see for dealing for violent crimes, for gun possession, when the money is much bigger, much easier and carries way less potential prison or potential for violence than doing this. Like, why wouldn't you get involved in credit card scamming? It's never the skate parks or the community centers these kids needed, right? It's just a Bitcoin wallet.

I mean, look, there's a level of intelligence, I think, when it comes to doing this kind of thing that is admirable. And I remember meeting one of these kids. I actually got hooked up by this dude, Beef, who was like a super producer type. All sorts of connections and made a lot of things happen when I was advised but never got the credit. So, Beef, giving you the credit. He knew I was looking into the story, but none of my sources were coming through. None of them wanted to talk. They were all a little nervous.

So he had this kid come up, came by and I met him. They called him the Jew, which, you know, as far as stereotypes go, I wasn't really a fan of, uh, but, but I let it pass. So he came to meet me one day and he's dressed pretty well. He's showing me a cell and he has like three different Bitcoin wallets on his phone. And this is 2000, maybe 15, maybe 16. I mean, this is early days, I think for most people, not the kind of thing that like now where it's everywhere, but

That was around the time I think it was like a thousand bucks of Bitcoin. And they also had these Bitcoin ATMs going out, right? And if you looked at where they were on a map of New York City, they weren't going up in Chelsea or the Upper East Side or rich neighborhoods. They were located in bodegas in like East New York and Brownsville and East Harlem. These are much poorer neighborhoods, unfortunately, you know, high crime areas, areas where these little sets and gangs operate at.

I had a detective tell me that some crews were like literally getting into beef over claiming Bitcoin ATMs as their territory. Like they were having shootouts over it. You know, sometimes I like to think that some of these kids held onto their Bitcoin. I think, like I said, it was going for like a thousand dollars back then. And they just got like unfathomably rich, but, uh,

Who knows? I had a friend who was selling Kratom back then, like a ton of Kratom. He used to accept Bitcoin. This is like 2015, 2016. And he was telling me like he really wished he held on to some of it. Like what? Like the drug? Like what is that stuff? Kratom? I mean, that's another episode for another day, but it's a gray area, semi-legal, painkiller slash... We're not going to

we're not going to get into that. That's a story for another day. Got some, some contacts in the world, but, um, I mean, I don't know what the Bitcoin is now, but like, didn't one of the first guys that bought pizza with it, like loses password of 50 million in cash or something. I don't know. Like some crazy shit. Like people just lose their password and about 10 billion bucks or something. There's some stories like that going around right now. I think it's around 30 or 40,000 right now. It's fluctuating, but, uh, yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, it was a legit thing, this sort of scamming that was really big, especially in Brooklyn. A different detective told me that he thought shootings were going down in the borough because these crews were getting so much money that they didn't have the need to

To be beefing over this stuff. And there was a Bloods crew out in Queens, the Mac Ballas who got busted. They had at least $200,000 worth of credit cards being scammed in 2017. I think one of them actually bought a Maserati with some of the proceeds. And this is actually from a New York One story in December of 2016. Quote,

Investigators say alleged gang members printed thousands of illegal credit cards using real and fake names. They bought the card numbers from hackers who sell stolen identification and financial data over encrypted websites, what's known as the dark web. But the thing is that it's not even the dark web, right? I went on these sites. You could have just bought stuff right there. You just have to pay in Bitcoin.

So they go on to talk about how members of other gangs, hood stars and other like big New York City crew, folk nation, 823 Crips, which is, you know, Bobby Shmurda and that sort of pop smoke crew. They were using the Boeys cards to rent expensive cars and buy everything from concert tickets to food. One of the defendants, a man named Tyrone Sexton, was apparently a big fan of the store American Girl, and he allegedly bought expensive dolls. One of the detectives told New York One.

All right. But yeah, 823 is G-Stone, man. They're like, they're a serious crew. Like they're not, they're not, you know, they're not some like bunch of little school kids running around. But I've actually heard stories of other rap groups getting their startup funding, not from drug deals like Jay-Z, but from credit card scamming.

It's just kids these days, man, with their internet and all that sort of stuff. They can't even go out and earn the right way. There was actually the story of a Brooklyn rap group called the Pop Out Boys, who I mentioned before. They did a song called For a Scammer, and then they got busted for scamming, which I think we always tell you in every episode, don't Instagram your crimes, but don't rap about your crimes either. You're putting all these tunes on the Patreon, right?

Yeah, I'll put it up there. I mean, you can YouTube that right now, Pop Out Boys for a scammer. I mean, it's catchy. It didn't really do numbers. So here's a quote from a New York Times article about the Pop Out Boys.

The group recruited friends to shop at Barney's and Saks to buy luxury clothing and accessories. High-end shoes, Balmain jeans, Celine and Goyard handbags. I'm probably mispronouncing all this shit. Prosecutors said the group made 275 purchases at Barney's alone over 55 days, walking off with $258,000 worth of goods. Saks lost $11,000 worth of merchandise in two months.

The group used more than 2,000 stolen credit card numbers from banks in France, Canada, Germany, and Dubai, the police said. There we go. Dubai again, man. It just, you know, always popping up. And some Chicago rappers, I think the most well-known is G Herbo. They just got busted on a big credit card fraud charges like this year.

accused of scamming to pay for designer puppies, private jets, trips to Miami, you know, all the normal things. Authorities say that G Herbo and some others, they use text messages, social media messages, and emails to share the account information taken from dark websites in order to bankroll a lavish lifestyle. So yeah, dark websites, they don't really get into how exactly they were doing it, but I think it kind of refers to like the same sort of scheme.

yeah i mean guys if you do get hold of scam cards don't buy designer dogs just invest in real estate come on yeah real estate i mean liquor stores yeah uh laundromats like that's really come on like plan for your future i'm not saying you got to get mutual funds here but like do something anyway i never got to do that story because i parted ways with vice uh soon after due to um

you know, one of the new greasy scumbags in charge, but a colleague who I told that I was working on that story stole it from me and did a half-assed version on it. But, you know, that's how it goes. I mean, you know the listeners want to know more about this, right? They can look up the Vice credit card story. I mean, like, it's out there. You know, have a look. Tell me if you think it's better than what I just talked about and could have... Whatever. We'll keep going here. So we are here to talk about...

The greatest scammer of all time. Though, to be honest, I think Adam Neumann might actually hold that title, even though somehow he did it legally. Elizabeth Holmes had a nice run. She got caught. And that Malaysian guy, how do you say his name? You did something on him, right? Joe Lau? Yeah, Joe Lau, I think. The one MVB guy. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he might be in the running, but they are not our subjects. When we say we are talking about the greatest scammer in the world, we are talking about the billionaire Gucci master himself,

Ramin Abbas, otherwise known as Hush Puppy, who email scammed his way to hundreds of millions of dollars in only a few short years. Our story begins in Dubai. I kind of already told you how it ends in Dubai, but that is where Mr. Hush Puppy and his crew, that's where they were concentrating their work. That's where they were brought down. And I don't know, maybe the Dubai police just saw him as a soft target that wouldn't ruffle any feathers. But yeah, they promptly nabbed him. They shipped him off to the U.S. to stand trial for some scams he ran on people and companies based here, which, you know,

You'll see as we get into Mr. Hush Puppy, he broke some of the most cardinal rules of the Underworld podcast, which is one, don't Instagram your crimes or your fancy lifestyle if you're earning that lifestyle off of crimes.

Don't send unencrypted text messages to your giant criminal organizations detailing all of your crimes and how they're working. And don't target people in the U.S. because that will put you on the radar and they will go after you and they won't stop until they bring you back here and you're sitting in a federal prison cell somewhere. That's 101.

Yeah, that is like Underworld Podcast 101. If you gain nothing else from this podcast, those three rules right there. If you're doing crimes, don't Instagram them or don't Instagram stuff that leads people to believe that you're earning your money illegally. Don't send unencrypted texts detailing the crimes that you're doing. And if you can stay out of fucking with the US, just don't do it because the feds just have that reach, you know? I feel like we're stumbling towards merch where we've got don't Instagram your crimes, but...

That's, dude, that is, I mean, that is. That's a keeper. That's a, I got it. Did you just come up with that literally right now? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. That's going on the list. Like we will, I will sell t-shirts that say, don't, don't Instagram your crimes. I feel like that could do. I mean, there's a couple of rappers. I know that I need to send those to. Yeah. Anyway, we're going to keep it moving, but we're going to have those t-shirts out. I think that's like, that's the most, don't Instagram your crimes. Yeah. And it's actually, it's really interesting how we did all this because it doesn't seem that hard. And he just kind of burst on the scene out of nowhere. We don't know a ton about, about the life of hush puppy, hush puppy.

We know he grew up poor in a tough neighborhood in Lagos in Nigeria. His mother sold bread by the side of the road and his father was a cab driver. There's a Nigerian newspaper, I think it's a website actually, maybe called The Cable,

And they went to his neighborhood and a woman running a food shop there, like a little stall, said he often came to her little stall, little kiosk, and he had to buy beans on credit. So the rags to riches story, it definitely applies here. And as he got older, he started washing cars for cash. A lot of reports have him as a secondhand clothes salesman, though I did see one that said he made money selling secondhand designer clothes to the country's elite, specifically Louboutin. Is that how you say that? Louboutin? Louboutin accessories. Louboutin.

But he soon fell sway into a rising industry in Nigeria at the time. Something that we've covered the origins of in the past, the 419 scams or the Yahoo boy stuff. I'm not going to dive into it too much here, but if you want a good primer on those scams, the famous Nigerian print stuff, the whole history of that and the crazy Nigerian cult gangs that run that racket...

Sean went deep into it. I think it's episode four and he spent some time in Nigeria tracking it. Sean, you can kind of go into it for a second here if you want. Yeah, these guys again. I mean, like folks can listen to the episode. We've got loads and loads of information in that. But these scams kind of prop up the entire Nigerian mafia, really. Like they're the base level that all of them do. And now they do like way more sophisticated scams, like these company email scams and stuff like that. But yeah, just listen to the episode. Join the Patreon.

get the knowledge yeah maybe we'll help you learn how to scam or not get scared i don't either one you know it's all good probably probably learn not how to get scammed yeah let's just say yeah i don't know look i'm a little loose right now i'm actually in the cat skills i got a couple glasses of malbec i've been down in so we're gonna we're gonna get things might get saucy right now on the podcast

I'm fully behind it. Hush Puppy himself, he started off doing the Yahoo Boy scams, you know, the typical ones that we've talked about, the war vet lover, whatever it is. But apparently he learned about the bigger deal stuff after a trip to South Africa. He soon made his first big score. He even Instagrammed the gold Rolexes he bought with the money. And then he moves to Malaysia where he continues running these scams. But it looks like he didn't really hit the big time until a few years later when he relocates to Dubai.

And in Dubai, his star really rises. From a Nigerian website, This Day Live, there's a quote, For many Nigerian socialites, politicians, and celebrities, Hushpuppi was the go-to guy to explore and enjoy optimally the Dubai nightlife. Whenever Hushpuppi went to the club, whether in Lagos or Dubai, or anywhere in the world, he made it rain with expensive champagnes and cognacs, and he usually had for company.

Some of the finest species of the woman folk flowing from all over the world. These are their words, not mine. I'm just saying it right now. Of a truth, he came to national consciousness when he blew $30,000 on drinks at the popular Keylox nightclub owned by Sheena Peller, now a member of the House of Representatives. He became the toast of high society and top society ladies and celebrities therefrom. Was this article written by a scammer?

No, it was written... I mean, it might be translated from like the Nigerian sort of pidgin English, but either way, you get the idea, right? It's great. This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who's been a teacher for a

who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.

Through the power of spending lavishly on Instagram, where he soon had 2.5 million followers, this guy basically made himself into an international superstar celebrity. And like, how is, speaking of that, like, how is Dan Bilzerian, like, not in jail right now? I mean, all his money is just stuff that his dad embezzled, right? Like, how, can we say that? Like, are we, are there libel laws in the US? I feel like they're pretty airtight. You might be screwed. I feel like I'm good. No, I'm delighted to call Dan Bilzerian a massive scam artist.

It's like trust for a cosplayer. I just, I don't get it, man. Like how, why, but it's kind of like, like this guy too, right? He was bragging online about all his luxury lifestyles, just insane stuff. And then you just wondered how he didn't get caught. And then he did. Yeah.

So who knows? So Hush Puppy, he's just as global superstar at this point. He's palling around with high-level politicians, big-time musicians, you know, DeVito, WizKid, literally just calling himself the billionaire Gucci master. His Instagram account is wild.

All luxury vehicles, eating fancy foods in private jets, just like really gauche, heavily branded designer shit, posting stuff like, started out my day having sushi down at Nobu in Monte Carlo, Monaco, then decided to book a helicopter to have facials at the Christian Dior spa in Paris, then ended my day having champagne and Gucci.

It's all very like rise and grind, go and get it. If I did it, you can do it too. I'm not posting this to be a dick. I'm just posting it to inspire like that. All that kind of nonsense. You're taking a shit on Silicon Valley in this episode and I'm fully, fully approving of it. It's not even Silicon Valley, man. I mean, those guys know better, I think. Well, some of them don't. Some of them are all about like their yachts and stuff like that. But for the most part, I feel like people know better. I mean, there's guys who get their whole MO is doing stuff like this, but yeah.

If you're doing it illegally, it's just not wise. So he also pissed off a lot of his fellow Nigerians because they saw him as someone who gave the country a bad rap, who just set a terrible example for young people, both because of the consumerism and just the general shadiness.

It's actually a real problem there. I've seen financial outlets talk about how the country's legitimate businesses suffer because of their reputation as being a place of scammers and hucksters. And he just kind of elevated that at a really big level. And for years... There's an interesting thing about in Lagos where all of the buildings along the streets have signs saying, like, this building is not for sale. Because so many scam artists are doing fake sales of buildings at the moment. It's a big, big problem there. So yeah, everyone fucking hates these guys.

Yeah, I mean, I can see how they would ruin a rep for anyone. So it's a giant country with plenty of legitimate businessmen. It's just a shame that this is what it gets known for, you know? Yeah.

For years, there were debates about how he made his money. He never really said anything about it. Some newspapers had columns about him. Even some Nigerian rappers recorded songs basically calling him out, talking about how he was a fraud and how shitty he was. Every now and then, he talked about how he made his money as a real estate investor, but I don't think anyone was really buying it. In 2017, he accidentally posted an email address that had a credit alert.

People traced it back to a woman in Houston, but the speculation just kind of died out after that. He kept quiet. And the dude just kept posting. And he kept getting more internationally famous for his Instagram, which like for the millionth time, don't do that because people start asking questions. And then feds start asking questions. And it's just the dumbest way imaginable to live and to get caught. Like the sheer audacity of people like this, it just shocks me. Gucci loafers still feel good if you don't post them on IG.

You're still driving a Maserati if there's no TikTok made about it. You're 37 years old, man. Like, you're not a teen. There's no excuse for this. Be smarter. I'm so mad. This applies to everyone, by the way. Guys, we don't give a shit what you had for brunch. We just care what podcast you're paying for. Okay. Actually, I do. I like seeing now. I mean, 10 years ago, maybe. But now I like seeing the meals that people are eating. I'm just saying, like...

There's levels, right? If you're 40 years old, you shouldn't be making TikTok videos pointing to different things. If you're a criminal, you shouldn't be – I feel like I keep harping on this because I'm just getting deep into the wine. I'm getting angry. This is good. I like it. No, he actually got caught because of his Instagram and his Snapchat. I'm going to get to that, but that's how he actually got caught.

Anyway, so you look at the YouTube of this guy. There's so many videos of him and the luxury cars and the jet set lifestyle. Other people are making videos about his cars. And it just raises flags, especially when you can't pinpoint where the money is coming from. And I keep talking about this. Like I know rappers, I spent a lot of time in St. Louis. We talked about that.

I know these kids are posting up on IG with the stacks of money. And I'm like, you run like two Airbnbs and you have 20,000 plays on Spotify. Nobody thinks you're getting that money legally. Like,

like smarting up and you're not inspiring anybody to get up and grind except for the feds who are going to be like, Oh, I'm going to bring this guy down. He's got a lot more money than me. Or maybe like someone who's looking to rob you, but like, it's not speculation. The social media stuff is how hush puppy got caught. And I want to get to that, but let's actually go into how he scammed and made what's estimated to be hundreds of millions of dollars. Because I gotta be honest, like,

It sounds easy, like really easy. But I guess he must have been like really good at it. Do I understand it? I don't really know. He mastered what's known as a BEC scam, which is business email compromise. Basically, it means he conned his way to get access to a business email account, used it to poke around, and then trick an employee from that company or a different one to wire money to an account that he controlled.

You know, like sending you an email that looks like it's from Facebook saying you need to change your password. And you look at the actual email and it's from John4895731 at ru.com. So he would do all that to people's work email addresses, get in there, figure some stuff out, and wait until money was being discussed or flying around. And he gets in there with a bank account he controlled.

you know, to some other business guy on email. I think, I don't know, does that make sense? Like, I don't know, man. If I understood financial crimes, I'd be doing them. Like, I wouldn't be podcasting. You know what? I've got like a great report on this stuff. I know it's like dry, but I'm going to stick it on the Patreon so people can like get into this because it's like,

It makes $12 billion a year or something in the US. It's like massive, massive money. So it might be white collar and we like talking about gangsters who shoot guys and stuff, but nah, this is big stuff. I'm going to stick that report up so everyone can kind of get a lowdown. Can you summarize it for the people? Yeah, I mean, a summary would be pretending to be an official email address so that company people send you cash. So...

Yeah, that's pretty much it. But like. That actually is it. I have like two more pages explaining this. We cut them out, but I'm going to keep going anyway, you know, because I wrote this out and I want to keep it going. Here's a quote from U.S. State Attorney Nick Hanna. BEC schemes are one of the most difficult cyber crimes we encounter as they typically involve a coordinated group of con artists scattered around the world with experience with computer hacking and exploiting the international financial system.

So they did this hundreds of times, but one of the ones that U.S. law enforcement got him for was scamming a $900,000 out of a law firm based in New York City by tricking a paralegal into wiring money supposedly intended for one of their clients, like who's doing real estate financing, into a bank account that they control. And according to the Daily Beast...

The paralegal emailed a Citizens Bank email address to verify instructions for the wire transfer, but it was a spoof email set up by Hushpuppi. So about half the amount is instantly wired to a Canadian bank account. An image of the wire transfer was shared between the group of Hushpuppi and his friends. They say, did it hit? And the guy's like, yeah, it hit. And this is over text message. So again, incriminating themselves. Shortly after sending the verification email, the paralegal will see the fax and

which is part of the law firm's instructions with the wire details, which requested the funds be wired to a Chase bank account instead. But the fake fax was sent by, you know, the hush dog himself. And following the policy, the paralegal called the number of the fax to confirm the wire instructions, which goes to another number controlled by the scammers. And having done their due diligence, the paralegal sends $900,000 to the Chase account. As soon as the funds land in the Chase account, triggers a second wire, $400,000 goes to this bank in Canada, and

Abbas takes a picture of it. Hushpuppet takes a picture of that transfer. He sends confirmation via his Snapchat account to his accomplices. Score. And the remainder of the funds, they get transferred out as well to other bank accounts. The law firm doesn't realize the funds have been sent to the wrong account until later that month when the client who should have received the funds checked their account and discovers the money for the refinance had never been deposited. I love how clown show these guys are in a text message. Like, hey, did you get that money we stole?

Yeah. They are going down. It's...

And look, guys, I'm really trying here to make financial crimes rundown, like the rundowns seem exciting. I know they're boring. Like I'm not, I'm not fucking Michael Lewis. Like, what do you want from me? But people keep wanting us to do white collar crime episodes. And I'm like, we're trying, but they're also boring. They don't make for good podcasts. So this guy, Crane Hassled, who is a guy who works for an anti-scamming tech production company called Agare, he says the bad actor would redirect emails to the bad actor's email account, craft emails to the customer that look like they were coming from the vendor, and then

indicate that the vendor had a new bank account, provide updated bank account information, and the money would be gone at that point. The cash trailer allegedly disappeared after his accomplices called money mules convert the money into the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. We're back at Bitcoin.

So another one of the crimes in the arrest affidavit is stealing $15 million from a foreign banker trying to. And then there's $125 million from an English soccer team, which it doesn't say the team, Sean. I have no idea which one it is. Oh, God, I really want to know. That's a huge amount of money. It's a lot of money. And I'm no rocket scientist, and I imagine there's an art form to this, but it just doesn't seem hard.

Like they really just create email addresses that are letters off from like ones that legit law firms or businesses use and then just trick people into sending money to bank accounts that the criminals control. Like that's it. And the bank accounts where the money is stolen from, they're operated by low-level conspirators. Those are the money mules. They then convert that money from the bank account into Bitcoin and they send the Bitcoin to Bitcoin wallets that are controlled by Hush Puppy and the other higher-ups.

Does that make sense? Yeah. It's just like a switch and bait. It's just so simple. Yeah. But I guess like this dude was really good at it. So how did they finally get caught? Which is the feds used his Instagram and his Snapchat against him. They just like open sourced everything. And it's wild.

From CNN, in the affidavit, federal officials detailed how his social media accounts provided a treasure trove of information to confirm his identity. His Instagram, for example, had an email and phone number saved for account security purposes. Federal officials got that information and linked that email and phone number to financial transactions and transfers with people the FBI believed were his co-conspirators.

One post displayed a birthday cake top of the Fendi logo and a miniature image of him surrounded by tiny shopping bags. Investigators used that post to verify his date of birth on a previous U.S. visa application. I mean, that's amazing. Come on, man. I mean, to start off like it's not all from that. One of his money mules actually got busted in the U.S.,

They got his iPhone. They got it open. There was a UAE number in there under the name Hush that connected to a Snapchat. And that's when they started going into the social media. Quartz talked about it. They said the FBI found and reviewed Hush Puppy's Instagram account, where he also mentions the same Snapchat username and styles himself as a real estate developer and matched his post of photos from his passports and other identification documents.

The account gave the detectives insight into their target's lifestyle of substantial wealth. All right. So now the T-shirt is don't Instagram your crimes. And I want that birthday cake on it as well. It's going to be amazing.

I mean, they're just giving up the info, man. It's like, you know, one of those Twitter posts where it's like, your porn star name is your mother's maiden name. And the street, you're like, come on, man. People are using that information for a reason. Don't give them that information for free. So his partner gets knocked too. This guy who went by Mr. Woodbury,

He did the same kind of, you know, all that stuff on social media. He gets arrested a month after he had posted for his 29th birthday in front of a yellow Lamborghini and a quote saying, stop letting people make you feel guilty for the wealth you've acquired. Yeah, he gets the chair for that comment alone for me. I mean, come on, man. Like, you're just laying it out for them. That's bad. So yeah, not only did they use just all this evidence obtained from the Snapchat and Instagram, but the feds actually got put onto him because he was bragging so much on Instagram.

And maybe we need to reclassify this as like not, not the greatest scammer to like the dumbest scammer, because I don't know, man, he hasn't really earned that title. Like he's got nothing on the God, Adam Newman, who just like,

I mean, he did it all legal or Joe Lowe, Joe Lowe, whatever his name is, who was somewhere in China living like the champion huckster he is. I think my favorite story from him is that he was making like a zillion wire transfers between all the scam companies and a bank was finding like, like, what are you doing?

over one of the transfers, like you're sending all this money. And he told them, this is true. He told them in my culture, you send the elders money and then they send it right back to you as a show of respect. And the bank was like, oh, okay then. Like, oh, it's part of your culture. We'll just let this move go through. It's just, it's just legendary in my culture. You know? That is definitely BDE. One MDB, BDE. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a power move.

So Hushpuppi right now, he's facing a minimum of 20 years.

He's locked up in prison in California. They're trying to claim the U.S. had no authority, that he was kidnapped from Dubai. And his lawyer gave us one of the great all-time excuses, which is that he got his money from promoting luxury brands on social media. This is a quote. He's a social media influencer with millions of followers, with millions of people that respect and loved him. And he loved them. And that's what he did. In today's society, that's a business. I mean... Beautiful. You gotta love it. And I guess...

That's a good segue to let you know that, yeah, we're ending the episode, but we, we're influencers. You know, we want to advertise your brands. We got, we got influence on the podcast. Hit us up to advertise with the underworld podcast. We will, uh, you know, tout your, tout your goodness. I mean, we have no morals left. You know, we're two freelance journalists.

We've been doing this for too long. We should have gotten out and gone to like communications or PR a long time ago, but we didn't. Now we're edging closer to middle age. Like if you want us to sell cluster bombs on this or, you know, whatever it is, pesticides, anything, weapons, like we'll do it. We're ready. Hit us up. I've got nothing to add. Perfect.

Yeah. I, yeah. Anyway, um, it's a bit of a bit of an episode right there. I'm going to let you guys go. Thanks for joining us again. Thanks for all the support on the Patreon. Uh, we really appreciate things are going up every day and, um, Oh, check out the YouTube channel. We literally just put these up and we're doing some mini episodes, uh, to try to get things going there too. And, uh, thanks again for listening and for all the support. We really appreciate it.

Yeah. Tune in, tune in next week, I guess. Sean's going to have something. What are we doing? New Zealand? Yeah. Documentary coming up. I've got a little mini in-person reporting thing going on. Yeah. I'm going to speak to a guy who's one of the leaders of black power, which is one of the big gangs here. So it's going to be really cool. Oh, I've actually got something going. I can't talk about this right now. I'll tell you afterwards, but if this happens, we are going to have an episode. Let me tell. Anyway. All right. That's it. Thank you guys. Podcast.

We're gone. See ya.