Robert Evans and Shireen the Machine dissect the Krassensteins' Ponzi schemes, their 2016 federal raids, and their offensive political activism, including a children's book featuring derogatory caricatures. The discussion pivots to Jacob Wohl, whose 2017 lifetime NFA ban followed fraud investigations, fake Mossad intelligence firms using celebrity stock photos, and a botched defamation scheme against Robert Mueller involving fabricated sexual harassment stories. Ultimately, both grifters exploited financial desperation and political unrest, revealing how their schemes collapsed under journalistic scrutiny and FBI intervention. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Two Grifters and a Tale00:03:29
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, friends.
I am Robert Evans, and this is yet again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
Now, my guest for today's episode, who is a coming in cold to our tale about several bastards, is Shireen the Machine, Lana Eunice.
I think I'm the first person to give you that nickname, but probably not.
Now, you are a filmmaker whose work is currently being featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, right?
Yeah, it was in New York.
Yeah, it was in New York.
It was in July in New York.
Yeah, it was cool.
That is very cool.
Thanks.
And you are also the co-host of the Ethnically Ambiguous podcast on the Stuff Network, the very network that we're all a part of.
Correct.
So that's cool.
Yeah.
How's it going?
You know, I'm glad to be here, but I'm also terrified to be here.
Do you like conmen?
Do I like conmen?
I like watching movies about conmen.
Well, then you might like that.
You like grifts?
I mean, I feel like a grift in my own life.
You know, I'm just a fraud.
Yeah, that's how everyone who gets to do what they like for a living feels.
The President's Scam Network00:15:41
It's natural.
Does the name Jacob Woll mean anything to you?
You know, I've heard it about, but I could not tell you anything about him other than he's white.
He is white.
And the working title of this episode is A Tale of Two Grifters.
Even though there's more than two grifters, I just, you know, I was trying.
I'm trying to force it.
I'm trying to force it.
All right.
Let's talk about some grifters.
So grifters and conmen thrive in times of unrest and chaos.
This is obvious enough that I'm probably wasting a little bit of my time by even saying it.
The current president of the United States is a man who ran a fake university that defrauded thousands of people out of tens of millions of dollars.
But we're not talking about him today.
Our subjects for this episode are grifters of a much lower and a much sadder cast.
Let's start by talking about the Krassenstein brothers, Brian and Edward.
You know about these guys?
Please tell me.
Together, they have more than 1.3 million followers on Twitter, and they operate a left-wing media.
Empire is not the right word.
Can I ask a question?
Do they have a shared Twitter?
No, they have two different Twitters.
Sorry, I'm judging very hard.
But they retweet everything each other says, and it's really a big deal.
It's your own identity stuff.
You know, you're left-wing, you're right-wing, or whatever.
The Krassensteins are like the shrillest and least effective chunk of the...
They're like the drumpfront chunk.
Donald Trump again, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That kind of thing that should have been played out two years ago, but is still, yeah, they're crapulant.
So they're frequent and vociferous critics of President Donald Trump.
As of the writing of this episode, Brian's Twitter image is a graphic of an impeachment clock with the president's face on it.
So not a lot of subtlety.
But starting back in 2003, the Krassensteins worked a different gig, running the websites talkgold.com and moneymakergroup.com.
Which seems a little bit scammy right off the bat.
It's going to get scammier.
So both of these sites were presented as independent aggregators of different online investment programs.
Basically, someone would visit moneymakergroup.com and read about different opportunities and various investment programs and whatnot.
Most of what the Krassenstein brothers hawked through their websites were what are called high-yield investment programs, or hy-ups.
According to Investopedia, quote, a high-yield investment program is a fraudulent investment scheme that purports to deliver extraordinarily high returns on investment.
High-yield investment schemes often advertise yields of more than 100% per year in order to lure in victims.
In reality, these high-yield investment programs are Ponzi schemes, and the organizers aim to steal the money invested.
Like the pyramid scheme, essentially.
Yeah, yeah.
Like a pyramid scheme with a little dash of lemon.
So the SEC takes a somewhat milder tone towards high-yield investment programs, calling them unregistered investments typically run by unlicensed individuals that are often frauds, but not always frauds.
In an interview with the Daily Beast, Ed Krassenstein really dug into the tiny bit of daylight provided by the word often.
Quote, 100% of hy-ups aren't scams.
I know of several that have been legitimate.
The FBI's definition is not that they're all scams.
It says a large amount are scams, and that is true.
So if you're defending your business by saying only a large amount of it is fraudulent, but I'm a good one.
The Krassenstein brothers defended themselves from charges of being scammers and charlatans by basically claiming that they didn't actually run any of these scams.
They just took ad dollars from the people who did.
And in Ed's words, freedom of speech protects advertisers, which sort of true, partially true.
Of course, in actuality, sites like talkgold.com and Moneymaker Group were in a little bit more of like a swampy area.
On TalkGold and Moneymaker Group, moderators hosted discussions of various high-up opportunities.
Through paid ads and organic comment threads, users would be informed of various potential high-up investments.
Eventually, many of the hy-ups would stop paying out, as all Ponzi schemes do, and high-up threads would begin racking up customer complaints into the thousands.
The moderators would then move those high-up threads into a separate section of the website marked closed programs and scam warnings.
Basically, the business is that these guys operated a giant website where they would talk about different Ponzi schemes that you could invest in.
And then once enough people realized that it was a scam, they would move it to a section of the site that said it was scams.
It's like, oh, we got, we're protecting them.
We spotted this one.
We're protecting you.
Like, that's their scam.
Don't worry.
We got this.
But they're getting money from all of these people in order to host them on their site.
So they're scammers.
They're scammers.
Yeah, I'd say so.
Yeah.
Or they're legally distinct from, but ethically the same as scammers, I would say, in order to protect ourselves legally a teeny bit.
By August of 2017, the scam warnings section of their site had more than 13,000 threats.
But investigators found that only a minority of the scams advertised actually made it over to the scam warnings section, which means the Krassensteins probably guided their readers to, quite literally, tens of thousands of fraudulent investments.
One of the hy-ups on TalkGold.com was the Leopard Fund, which was created by a guy who was convicted of five counts of wire fraud in 2012.
CSM Finance, another hy-up scam, asked its investors to download special software that, in reality, was a virus that stole money from their Liberty Reserve accounts.
Now, Liberty Reserve, it was like a digital currency exchange before Bitcoin.
And the guy who found that was actually busted back in 2016 and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
So this whole ecosystem is nothing but scammers.
And they're essentially positioning themselves as like scam brokers.
Right.
Rather than operating a scam themselves because that's too risky.
Yeah, exactly.
It like separates them from actual accountability.
Yeah, exactly.
Just enough that they're probably not going to go to prison.
Which, of course, if you're in the scam business, that's really where you want to reach.
Yeah.
Just outside of prison.
Yeah, getting all the benefits, but not actually going in.
Yeah, exactly.
So that same year, 2016, federal agents raided several homes in Fort Myers, Florida that were owned by the Krassenstein brothers.
They took computers, financial records, and a bunch of other stuff.
Much of this was later returned.
But late last year, the DOJ seized about a half a million dollars worth of their assets on suspicion of massive wire fraud.
I found a breakdown of the DOJ's asset forfeiture case on the site BehindMLM, which essentially seems to act as a watchdog group for the whole MLM industry.
Since everything to do with these kinds of scams is purposefully complex, I've relied on them and the Department of Justice to actually help me break down what the Krassensteins were doing.
Behind MLM describes their websites as, quote, easily the two largest publicly accessible Ponzi promotion platforms on the internet.
The Department of Justice alleges that the brothers actually ran a huge constellation of websites, all purporting to report independently on the high-up marketplace while actually just being funnels to direct rubes to scams in exchange for kickbacks.
Quote from the Department of Justice.
The Krassenstein's various high-up-related websites overlapped extensively in their functionality.
For example, TalkGold.com and MoneyMakerGroup.com serve substantially identical functions, and GoldRaider.com and WebLife.org served substantially identical functions.
To the casual visitor, it would have appeared that these sites were being operated independently from one another.
The Krassenstein's network of apparently unrelated high-up sites promoted the appearance of a thriving high-up industry with numerous independent players.
They're fucking shady.
They're fucking shady as hell.
And yeah.
So when Ed Krassenstein was asked, in essence, if the fact that they'd consented to forfeit half a million dollars and seize property to the DOJ meant that he and his brother were guilty, he said, quote, this was an agreement we made with the government because the cost of fighting the civil complaint would have likely cost us more money stress than what the government was requesting via the forfeiture.
We both have newborn children and couldn't keep dragging on this civil matter any longer and as attorney fees were adding up.
This is why civil forfeiture is such a hotly debated topic in America, which really pisses me off because civil asset forfeiture is fucked up for a lot of reasons, namely the fact that it's primarily used as an excuse for cops in the South and the Southwest to take cash and vehicles from brown people and anyone who's not white.
And like, then, you know, it'll be like the case of the state of Arizona versus a 2007 Toyota Camry or the case of Texas versus $14,000 in cash.
What's happening here is the Krassensteins were caught committing massive wire fraud and the DOJ rightfully took the...
Yeah.
But you see the little...
What year was this when this happened?
2016.
That's not a long time ago.
That's not a long time ago at all.
It's a kind of appropriation, right?
Like getting caught for committing a really shady act and then trying to attach yourself to a legitimate injustice.
I don't know what the word for that is.
They're posers, man.
I don't know what's a better word than that, but like they're obviously awful people.
Yeah.
They're just using oblivious people to their advantage.
It's just like, yeah.
Yeah.
Oblivious and desperate.
Like you wouldn't be on those sites unless you were desperate.
And speaking of Oblivious and Desperate, starting in, you know, the end of 2016, the beginning of 2017, all of us were a little bit desperate because the Krassensteins, since they seemed like they couldn't scam in the old way, realized that with all of this desperation over the election of Donald Trump and all of the fear and the left and big chunks of the center, there was another opportunity for them to make a bucket of money.
So they landed on making themselves into figureheads of the hashtag resistance.
Whoa.
I hate them.
Yeah, they're pretty shitty.
Both brothers built up their vast Twitter following by repeatedly tweeting variations of Impeach Trump.
At one point, Brian posted it 11 times in a single tweet.
They also followed over 400,000 accounts, you know, to get people to follow them back and such.
On his LinkedIn profile, Brian currently calls himself a Twitter personality, which you've erred if you list that as a thing on your resume.
Now, the former finance advisors have rebranded themselves now as journalists.
In 2017, they launched a news website called Independent Reporter at IR.net, a website that used to be titled Investor Relations, but was repurposed in order to capitalize on the profitability of partisan news.
Here's Think Progress.
Quote, among the nine writers listed on the site, two are the Krassensteins, three haven't written anything in six months, and two haven't contributed anything since 2015.
The two remaining writers, Whitney Hippolyte and Heidi Milkert, have likewise written nothing on the site since 2015.
They are also the Krassensteins' wives.
Oh.
It just got worse and worse the more you talked.
It's about to get so much worse.
So last October, the Krassensteins embarked on their griftiest grift yet, a children's book titled, How the People Trumped Ronald Plump.
They brought children into this?
Yeah, they did bring children into this.
Here's how they explained the genesis of their opus in the book's press release.
Oh, no.
President Trump is a counterexample to the examples I try to set for my children, co-author Ed Krassenstein stated.
It's difficult when we teach our children how to act one way, but then the president of the United States acts the complete opposite way.
This man is supposed to be a role model for our kids, but in my opinion and in the opinions of many other parents, he's simply teaching kids bad lessons and poor morals.
I mean, like, yeah, it's all well and good, but knowing where it's coming from makes it like awful.
No, knowing that it's like, this is a guy who committed massive wirefrag.
Come on, dude.
You can't take anything he says seriously after this.
No, no, no, no.
So that's what Ed claims led him and his brother Brian to write a humorous children's book, which is essentially Bill is trying to make sense of and explain the actions of President Trump through a character named Ronald Plump.
They're very, very clever.
Right.
Rhyming.
They know how to rhyme.
They do.
Well, they don't even know how to rhyme that good.
It gets really bad in a second.
Here's another quote from the press release.
Quote, Ronald Plump is a man who is elected leader of the town Do Work City.
Do you get it?
Because New York?
But do work.
That's not that great.
They're very smart.
They're trying very hard, yeah.
Plump's actions go against the morals which we teach our kids, but in the end, hope, equality, love, and basic human values prevail.
Parents will love this book's humor and storyline just as much, if not more, than their children.
So you have this horrified look on your face.
Oh, I just hate them.
Yeah, they're so gross.
So the thing I'm like thinking about is like not only is like one person has to exist to be awful, like one of the brothers, but not only that, there's another version of him, a brother, that is equally as bad.
And not only that, two women married these people.
Yeah.
So are the women also like complicit in all of this or like are like are aware that their husbands are just like actual garbage scammers?
They have to screw up.
And they're just like, yeah, I put my name on the website.
Do they know their names are on the website?
Like, you think like there's like, not everyone's shitty, but then, like, oh, no, maybe they are.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I think everybody in this case is probably shitty, except for their kids.
Like, well, who knows?
Yeah.
They're teaching them with Robert Plump.
Ronald Plump.
Ronald Plump.
Sorry, Robert, I'm for bringing you into this.
No, it's okay.
But if you think Ronald Plump is not the most creative name for a fake Trump character, it's about to get real bad.
So characters in the book include Weave Bannon, a squirrel who acts as Plump's hairpiece and controls his thoughts.
Even though the book came out more than a year after Steve Bannon stopped working at the White House, the Krassen scenes knew that some jokes are just so good that they never age.
If you guys had seen my face when I heard the name Weave Bannon.
Weave Bannon.
I almost walked the fuck out of here.
It's offensive, right?
Oh, man.
I fully expect that a good 20% of people will have had to pull their headphones off of their head just hearing that.
Like it hurt to write.
Weave.
Weave Bannon.
I will never unhear that.
No, you can't.
Other hilarious ripped-from-the-headslines character names from this wonderful storybook include Loudmir Tootin, a fart-themed Vladimir Putin.
Oh, my God.
Who farts rockets for some reason that I don't think has ever released it?
You know, Putin is a better joke on fucking Titan.
The joke's already there.
It's already there.
You're going to make a fart joke.
Poopin is even more clever.
It's not that clever, but it's better than.
Loudmir?
Loudmir.
What the fuck?
What the fuck?
We're not done.
Okay.
So you were complimenting them on their rhyme scheme with Ronald Plump?
Uh-huh.
I'd love to rhyme.
You want to guess what their Jared Kushner stand-in is named?
Flaccid Bushner.
See, that's good.
That's a fun name.
They call him Jared Nepotism.
What?
That was unexpected.
Wait, no.
Yeah.
That was a turd.
We took a turn.
Yeah, it's just poop.
It's just poop that somebody turned into a book.
No, no, no, no.
There's like funny attempts at cleverness.
There's like, oh, I don't know.
I can't think of him for Jared.
Nepotism.
There was more creativity involved in the name you came up with in two and a half seconds than the entirety of the book that they spent months working on.
Thank you.
I will take that as a compliment, but also sad.
So now, the hero of the book is a six-pack having shirtless Robert Moeller stand-in, whose name is Robert Morrill.
Oh, of course.
That almost sounds not terrible next to Jared nepotism.
Yeah.
I'll take Morrell.
Sure.
Now, I was not willing to purchase a copy of this book because I don't want to.
I'm glad you have your own morals.
Yeah.
I have some standards, and this is one of them.
But I did read several reviews of it.
Gizmodo editor Tom McKay was the first person to point out that the book includes a rape sack, which Ronald Plump uses to kidnap Elizabeth Warren.
I'm going to show you a picture from this book.
I want you to just take it in, and then I want you to read the text on the page.
My eyes are so wide and scared.
What the fuck?
You want to describe that?
It'll be on our website behindthebastards.com if you want to look at it.
Saving the Highlight Reel00:05:49
So this obviously, it's Trump.
It's a cartoon of little Trump.
Yeah.
He has something on his head.
That's Weave Bannon.
It's the squirrel that's going to be a single thing.
Oh, he exists on his head.
Yeah.
Oh, he is the hairpiece.
He is the hairpiece.
Oh, I thought he made that.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, Elizabeth Warren is literally busting out of this sack.
A rape sack.
He's like carrying her like he's like fucking Santa Claus.
Yeah.
And she has a shirt on that says persist.
Her arms are jacked.
Good for her.
Yeah, she's buff.
And the fucking thing, he's going into Trump Tower.
He's turned, he like his head's over his shoulder, like, hey, she's getting out of my rape sack.
And then the text on the thing says, Ronald Plump believed that he could every day grab any woman and just take her away away to his tower in his big burlap sack.
Plump took every woman he wanted until one fought back.
Oh my fucking God.
Yeah.
I can do as I choose, Plump insisted.
I almost said Trump.
Plump insisted.
Nevertheless, this woman, she persisted.
Proving a point and proving she's equal.
This woman succeeded in showing the people that women and men are created the same.
And through equality, there's a lot to gain.
I will categorize surface level, good points.
But when you really look at the text, that's reading.
What?
There are way better ways to make the point about sexism than having a rape sec.
I just have this is so troubling.
Yeah.
Is this for kids?
Well, yeah, and that's part of the thing is that like it's, it's clearly written until one fought back.
Yeah yeah, like Elizabeth Warren was the first person also, which is, but it's also like what is a kid gonna get a kid's not gonna know anything about?
Like nevertheless, she persisted, or something like a fucking six year old they're not gonna get the references being made.
It's just, it's maybe the worst writing that anyone's done.
I it's bad.
I'm disturbed.
You should be.
It's really bad.
I thought we've banned was bad enough.
I didn't know his face was on it.
Like we've banned, almost the highlight.
Yeah, it's the saving grace.
That's a little bit of humor.
Speaking of a little bit of humor, you know what I love Shireen, when I get horrified about grifting commercial breaks.
Yeah, commercial breaks, let's head on kids.
Yeah, there's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield and in this new season of the girlfriends oh, my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care, so they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh hell no, I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends, trust me, babe.
On the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman.
I think society is gonna decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world, from power to parenthood kids, teenagers.
I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing, from addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world and I don't think that's gonna stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others, and it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility.
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with Ai.
Listen to mostly Human on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night.
Each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Hedge Fund Fraud Exposed00:15:34
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back and our souls are trying to exit our bodies through our eyes.
Trauma.
Trauma.
Pure trauma.
We keep a reverse pressure flow in this room for that exact purpose.
So I googled around for some other reactions to the book because again, I was not about to read this piece of shit myself.
And I found a Reddit thread about it where one user states, you have to admire their talent for grift.
Ed Krassenstein himself jumped into the Reddit thread and responded to this.
We ordered 2,000 copies.
All profits from the sale of these copies will go to charity.
If I'm a grifter, then I'm grifting for the children who are separated from their parents.
If I'm a grifter, then anyone who promotes themselves for their work on Twitter are also grifters.
At least mine is for a good cause.
And what?
The immediate response to that was someone quoting, we ordered 2,000 copies and saying, literally what a grifter would say.
Yeah, that sounds good.
You're a grifter.
Yeah.
You're a fucking grifter.
Why are you creeping on Reddit anyway?
Yeah.
There's ways to promote your work without being a grifter.
You're just a grifter.
Yeah.
Also show the fucking receipts, Ed.
Yeah, fucking Ed.
Piece of shit.
So, yeah, this book is an eyesore and a piece of unfathomable garbage.
And yes, it's pretty offensive that in addition to trying to appropriate civil asset forfeiture, they're now appropriating the separation of families at the border as like...
These are like causes that deserve attention.
Really serious attention.
Yeah, like, and they're profiting.
That's infuriating.
They're horrible people.
That's infuriating.
Horrible people.
And they are only the second grossest, most shameful, low-rung con artists of 2018.
Because this year's a deathless pit of despair, Brian and Ed Krassenstein actually wound up confronting the only grifter on the planet worse at grifting than they are, a young man named Jacob Wohl.
So they were like, you think you're better than us?
They reported him to the FBI.
We're about to get to why.
Oh my God.
So Jake Woll's story proves that regardless of what side of the political aisle a con artist winds up on, they all have more in common with each other than anyone else.
Wohl was born in 1997.
I've seen pictures of his childhood and stuff.
Played football at school.
There's like pictures of him posing with guns at shooting ranges.
He seems to have grown up pretty affluent, kids somewhere in fucking California.
Class Act.
Yeah, Class Act.
He's a rich little shit who at age 17 started the Wohl Capital Investment Group.
17.
17.
A hedge fund.
His dad helped.
His dad is a stock market analyst.
He never talks about that in the interview.
Yeah.
17 years old.
It's all by myself.
With the help of my dad.
Well, that's how he wanted to get famous as the teenager who runs a hedge fund.
So he started showing up at age 17 on a bunch of financial news shows to be interviewed because it's hard to fill time if you're doing a financial news show.
Here's a clip of him on Fox News.
Jacob, the wall of Wall Street.
I'm not going to see his face.
He's a 17-year-old high school football and basketball player.
And by the way, hedge fund manager.
All right, first of all, before we even get to biotech, we got to ask, how did you get started?
Well, I've always had an interest in finance, and getting started, I thought, what better way than to put myself out there and to just start a hedge fund?
And that's what I did.
You want to describe his face to me, Cherie?
Punchable.
Punchable little fucking insect.
There's a German word.
I think it's like Backscheig or something like that.
I can't pronounce it.
There's a German word that the literal translation is, a face in need of a fist.
That's that.
That's how Jacob Wohl looks.
A face in need of a fist.
In need of a fist.
Like he needs to be punched.
You know, I'm just 17 years old, and I just thought, why not start a hedge fund?
Why don't you fucking fuck yourself?
Are you kidding me?
Also, the fact that he appeared on Fox News, isn't that telling enough?
Yeah, well, he appeared on a lot of shows.
I also watched another interview that Weiss did with him.
In this interview, Woll argued that the capital requirements on hedge fund investors were too high, and that's why the rich keep getting richer, because poor people aren't allowed to invest in hedge funds.
Which seems to me him basically saying I should be able to trick poor people who aren't as financially literate into taking their money.
Like, you can do this too.
I can help.
Yeah, exactly.
That's what he's doing.
I do want to say, I feel like I get in trouble on my podcast for saying fuck a lot, and I don't get taken as seriously, so I'm going to try to not say fuck as much.
What if I just say fuck a bunch of times?
And that way.
That stands out?
Yeah, well, that way, if anyone doesn't take you seriously for saying fuck, then it's just sexism.
There's no getting those people on board either way.
I like this war.
All right, I'm going to say fuck seven times.
Okay, let's do it.
Fuck, I'm going to say fucking like three.
Fucking, fucking, fucking.
Great.
Cool.
All right.
We're good.
All right.
Let's.
Let's roll on.
Okay.
So, so yeah, that's why Jacob Woll thinks that rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poor is because poor people can't invest in hedge funds.
Uh-huh.
That's what they're thinking.
So in pretty much every TV appearance he did, it was noted by someone that his nickname was the Woll of Wall Street.
Barf.
Barf is the only response to that.
Now, in the Vice interview, when they brought this up, he assures the interviewer that he doesn't like that nickname.
He actually hates it.
So we're going to run a clip from that Vice interview and see Jacob responding to talk of his nickname.
So here's the clip from Vice titled, Meet the Teen Finance Guru Who Makes More Money Than You.
Wall Street, how do you feel about that?
I think that most of the behavior you see in that movie is completely reprehensible.
22 billion!
It plays a bunch of clips from the thing.
So he's anti-the wolf of Wall Street in the interview, and he says that, you know, it's gross what they did.
Oh, that's gross.
Don't call me that.
Don't call me that, but also keep calling me that.
Yeah, it becomes very clear throughout his life that that's actually exactly how he wants to be seen.
In 2017, Jacob Wohl interviewed Jordan Belfort, the actual Wolf of Wall Street, for his podcast, Offended America.
In the podcast, he reveals a deep familiarity with Belfort's writing and ideas, and it's pretty clear to me that, in fact, there's nothing Woll wants more than to be seen as his successor.
Back in 2016, as the presidential election heated up, Jacob Woll continued to show up on financial news shows.
He quickly pivoted to identifying as a Trump supporter and became known for claiming on TV that huge numbers of young people were secret Donald Trump fans.
Just for some reference, an estimated 37% of millennials voted for Donald Trump, which is the same percentage of millennials who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012.
There's no evidence for Jacob's constant claims that young people are secretly beloved.
I mean, a lot of far right-wingers will make a lot of claims without any evidence at all.
Really?
Yeah.
I haven't heard of that.
Well, climate change is real.
We were talking earlier today.
I'm cold and I wore a long-sleeve shirt today, but it's mesh.
Well, now, doesn't the fact that you're wearing a long-sleeve shirt disprove climate change?
But it's mesh.
Oh, okay.
So climate change is real again.
In L.A.?
Yeah.
In L.A., this is cold weather apparel.
This is cold weather while the city burns down.
Yeah, R.I.P. By the way, we have a history of doing free ads on this show.
Do you?
Yeah, we do.
So I just wanted to let you know that I'm drinking a cherry lime LaCroix right now, and it tastes exactly like a melted lollipop.
Is that a good review or a bad review?
It's a bad review.
It tastes like if you get those freezer pops, right, and you melt one and then dilute it in water, that's what this LaCroix tastes.
But the thing is, you keep drinking it.
I mean, it's doing something right.
My throat dries out.
It's not great.
Yeah, there's this thing they have in the world.
It's called water.
And it actually quenches your thirst more than like a sugary beverage.
Now, maybe you can help me with this.
I've heard about this water.
I've also heard that fish fuck in it.
And I don't know if I...
That's the reason you don't drink water?
Well, it seems like something disreputable.
Let's get back to Jacob Woll.
So, 2016, the year that Jacob Woll pivoted hardcore into being a very vocal Trump supporter, was also the first year that he ran into trouble with regulators.
Could you appreciate it?
Surprise, surprise.
He wasn't obeying every law.
The 17-year-old hedge fund manager?
The one that loves Trump.
The one that loves Trump.
Wool was the subject of an investigation by the National Futures Association, a non-government but government-authorized regulator that investigates fraud within the industry.
The NFA was interested in Jake because they'd actually read through the promotional material he put together for his new hedge fund, Next Capital Management.
They found that Nex's videos were, quote, unbalanced in their presentation of profit potential and risk of loss.
They also found that Woll had worked as a fund manager before he or his hedge fund were actually registered, which is, you know, a crime.
The NFA report cites the claim of one investor who says he sent Woll $75,000 and was told Woll had grown it to $89,500 in a few months.
The investor tried to withdraw his money, and Woll only sent him $44,000, claiming the fund had suffered sudden losses.
The NFA found that basically his trading account had made a small amount of money, but he was claiming massive losses as soon as people tried to withdraw the money.
Which is, again, a scam.
Yeah, I think you'd classify that as a call that a scam.
Fucking scab.
Yeah.
Sorry.
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
I hate him.
Oh, I said fuck again.
Oh, shit.
No, again.
No, it's fine.
It's fine.
That's why we did the whole me saying fuck a bunch.
Right.
Okay, so now I can say it again.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
You get at least five or six fucks banged.
Okay, I think it's a good thing.
Seven now.
Yeah, cool, cool.
The Daily Beast looked through an old archived version of Nex's website from before the investigation, and they found evidence that Woll may have slightly misrepresented his credentials to investors, namely by claiming he had any.
He wrote on his website that he had, quote, greater than 10 years trading experience across many asset classes.
In order for this to be true, Woll would have needed to start investing as an eight-year-old.
Oh, my God.
My dad taught me so much.
I've been doing it for 10 years because I've been listening to my dad.
All his phone calls.
Here's a quote from the Daily Beast.
NFA agents showed up at Nex's supposed offices, which turned out to be a Los Angeles home, where no one answered.
Wool did not return their emails or phone calls.
When the NFA returned to the home the following day, the exam team noticed someone at the second floor window who appeared to be taking photos or a video of the exam team, according to the filing.
They soon received a stern phone call from Woll's father, a lawyer, who allegedly threatened to call the police on the regulators, warning them to stay away or else.
So.
Yeah, that's a...
You're hiding some.
Sounds totally legit.
Yeah.
2016 was not a great year for Jacob Woll's career as a hedge fund manager.
That year, the Arizona Corporation Commission also gave his businesses a cease and assist order.
The ACC claimed that he had violated the Securities Act by selling unregulated securities.
Yeah, see, some of Woll's former clients were Arizona residents who say that he told them he managed 178 different accounts with up to $100,000 in assets.
The ACC believes Woll had roughly 13 accounts worth as much as $500,000.
So he was basically claiming that he was running like 178 different accounts that had more than like $100,000 or something each.
I'm credible.
I'm credible.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Clients who became suspicious of his company and demanded their money back regularly got about half of what they put in out.
So he was, you know, stealing, you could call it.
I call that stealing.
So the ACC took issue with Wool's other business, Montgomery Assets, a real estate investment firm.
One of the Craigslist ads he posted claimed that the company owners had 35 years' experience flipping homes.
The Daily Beast notes that Woll and his partner had a combined age of 45.
Wow.
One Montgomery Assets client claimed that Jacob sent her a letter about a volatility event that he said was about to hit the market.
Wool advised her to sell her other investments, all of her other investments, and invest all of her money in his firm.
Now, while all this was going on, Jacob began to create a stir on social media, where he was also increasingly active.
In between hosting a conservative podcast and offended America.
Yeah.
People might be offended because of the theft.
That tends to offend people.
People are mad because you're stealing from Jacob.
Taking the money?
Between that and making increasingly bizarre claims about millennial infatuation with Donald Trump, he started doing everything in his power to look exactly like a 200 teens version of Jordan Belford.
On April 15th, 2016, Value Walk, a site that writes about investment firms and the like, published an article about the corporate culture at NEX, which is again his hedge fund thing.
It posted a clip from a company promotional video, which lists an attractive young Instagram model named Jennifer Cole as his director of fun.
Director of fun.
Director of Fun!
It's a job to make sure everyone's having a good time.
It's a cool company.
It's my coach.
It's like Google.
We'll give you a one.
And one friend in a house in Laurel Canyon scamming people.
It's also a hot girl.
It says, look, she's hot, and it's an investment fund.
I'm a teenager.
Millennials come.
Now, Value Walk's report also noted that his website listed Rachel Fox, an actress who played someone named Kayla on The Desperate Housewives, as the inspiration for his company's investment strategy.
What?
Quote, in an interview with Value Walk, Fox claimed not to know Woll and said she only learned of his trading program through a Value Walk article.
Weird to lie that an actress is the...
Like a public figure.
Like she can deny that claim.
And she had, she had done some work investing in hedge funds at some point in her career, but like she was nobody's big name.
Like it's a weird thing to lie about.
You just googled like celebrities that also invested.
No, a good conman would lie and say that it's someone like Warren Buffett.
But they'd say that they'd been tutored in some vague way that would be hard to disprove.
And like you pick someone who's as busy as Warren Buffett and isn't going to say anything.
Busy and old, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
You don't pick a social media active actress.
Like, what are you doing, Jacob Woll?
He's a dummy.
He's a stupid, stupid man.
Boy.
Yeah.
For sure.
For sure, boy.
Scumboy.
Scumboy Jacob Wool seems to have had a thing for hiring models to just sort of hang around his businesses.
Twitter users put together a number of Craigslist ads from his real estate firm asking for models and such.
An Orange County ad stated, quote, we need models for promo modeling events, including conferences, trade shows, seminars, etc.
We also have other modeling opportunities, including bikini modeling and fashion modeling, if you fit the type for that sort of modeling.
That's nice.
Uh-huh.
The Daily Beast did a domain registry search on Mr. Woll's businesses and found something rather interesting.
Quote: The website registry database domain tool shows a number of websites registered to Wool's name.
Some are definitely Woll's, including the domain for his short-lived media outlet, Offended America, and domains that are described in the ACC filing as belonging to his businesses.
Others with names like wollgirls.com and MelanieRiosManagement.com, the name of a porn actress, appeared to solicit more salacious business.
In response to this, Woll stated, Fake websites and Craigslist ads were posted by trolls of mine in 2016, and I immediately reported them to the FBI, Wool told The Daily Beast.
He declined to specify which websites and ads were the alleged frauds and declined to answer further questions.
Yeah.
Convenient.
Convenient.
The Daily Beast also talked to the mother of one young woman who was featured as a wool girl.
She claims that Jacob lied to her daughter and said that he could make her famous by building a professional modeling website for her, and that she agreed.
Exploiting Young Women Online00:05:06
But instead of doing that, this lady's mother says, quote, he took some of her photos either from Snapchat or Instagram that she had posted and created a page for her called The Woll Girl of the Month.
From there, he put up photos and made the page seem inappropriate and dangerous.
So, the would-be model's mother actually wound up calling Jacob and confronting him on the phone.
Quote, I thought he was probably an older man trying to exploit a young woman.
When I contacted him on the phone, I could tell he was young and idiotic.
I told him, You take that site down, you take any reference to her out of your world, or else.
He got very scared and was like, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, and apologized profusely and took it down.
Wow.
What a little bitch.
I like that lady's mom.
I like you gotta, you gotta confront a little shit like this.
Yeah.
I mean, she would have done it anyway, even if he was an old guy.
But the fact that he was a young guy made her even more like she just talked to him like a fucking mom.
Yeah, yeah, which is the right way to talk to a child.
Yep.
Yeah.
So we're gonna get on to how Jacob Woll got banned from the finance industry forever.
Good fucking riddance.
Then we're gonna talk about how he decided to take on Robert Mueller, which is maybe biting off a little bit more than he should have tried to chew.
But before we do that, let's talk about.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Levy, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop.
Even if you did a lot of redistribution, you know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world of AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Moda.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
Hipster Coffee Shop Lies00:14:58
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat.
Just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
We're talking about Jacob Woll, the wool of Wall Street.
The worst grifter I may have ever heard of.
Which normally I like to talk about more impressive people in this, but he's just so bad.
I couldn't stop him.
I don't like, I mean, grifter sounds like a badass thing, though.
It does sound like that is like a shitty, shitty thing to be.
He's the living human embodiment of a single spam email.
That's what Jacob Woll was.
Okay, so in early 2017, Jacob Woll received a lifetime ban from the NFA.
For his part, Woll portrays the National Futures Association as basically a group of butthurt activists.
Because the NFA isn't a government body, he basically says they're just a bunch of busy bodies and they're not a government agency.
They don't have any real authority to regulate things.
And he'll do this in interviews.
He did it in the Vice interview and they don't really push it.
So they kicked him out after all this shit went down because they were like the regulator, the team that wanted to investigate.
Did they ever actually investigate?
Oh yeah, yeah, they did and they gave him a lifetime ban because he broke a bunch of laws.
Okay, good.
And he would basically say like, well, they're not a government body.
It's just a bunch of busybodies.
But the fact of the matter is the NFA is a self-regulating body for the futures industry.
Membership in it is required by law for traders and major buyers.
Congress has given this non-government organization the ability to regulate the industry.
They are very much authorized to do this shit.
Fucking rich people think they can do whatever the fuck they want.
Yeah, and Jacob Woll did for a long time.
Did for, well, about a year.
He didn't get that long.
That's a good point.
Yeah.
In his teens.
I will say he got caught pretty early.
Yeah.
What with his incompetence?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Also, in 2017, the Arizona Corporation Commission issued a cease and assist order against Woll for wildly misleading investors and misrepresenting the size of his businesses.
He was ordered to pay $32,919 in restitution and $5,000 in penalties.
Wool's attorney asked for a four-week continuance because his big shot client, who lived at the same Laurel Canyon house his company used as an office, couldn't make the first payment.
Which I just like.
Did his dad?
I'm going to guess his dad's probably paying footing the bill for a lot of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So an Arizona Central article written about Woll's legal trouble revealed that, quote, Wool's troubles in Arizona began in 2015 when two residents of the state contacted Woll after seeing his media appearances.
They note that Woll called the ACC a racketeering organization full of angry Democrats.
And while it is true that the ACC head was accused of accepting bribes in exchange for votes on a utilities issue, the man accused is a registered Republican and wasn't actually convicted.
Anyway, so Jacob Woll.
I also just think it's funny that his need to be on the news and known as the teen investment guru is what got him caught.
Right.
Yeah.
That's not going to be the last time you hear about that.
That sort of thing.
That's why he's like a millennial trash, though.
You know what I mean?
Like he wanted the fucking verified check mark, you know?
Yeah, as the millennial investment expert and stuff.
Yeah.
He thought that was the path to good money.
And if he hadn't been so dumb, it might have been.
If he'd been a little bit more careful.
But he was not, and he's dumb.
Now, in spite of the fact that Wool's love of publicity had now definitely destroyed several of his businesses, Jacob was not yet ready to give up the line light or to give up social media.
In fact, over the years, his Twitter presence has grown to more than 175,000 followers.
Some of those probably hate followers.
Up until very recently, he was most renowned for posting numerous stories of his trips to what he called hipster coffee shops in Los Angeles, where he claimed to repeatedly overhear young Democrats secretly admit their admiration and love of Donald Trump.
Oh my god.
Get a fucking hobby, dude.
Are you serious?
Yeah, I'm really serious.
What's like a better way to show that you're unemployed and like a living husk of nothing?
Like I'm gonna go to every coffee shop and then pretend to hear things.
And then lie about what people say.
Oh my god.
Well, it's also somebody pressed him on like what he was talking about when he said something was a hipster coffee shop and he was like talking about a coffee bean in Westlake.
There's like a thousand coffee beans around the world.
It's not a silver coffee shop.
It's a big name Billy and Hipster Coffee Shop.
It's not the one in fucking Westlake.
Yeah, it's not a coffee bean.
Yeah.
Where you go to get coffee when you can't stop.
You have to.
Yeah, yeah, when you have to.
The coffee bean.
Sometimes you just need coffee.
So during this time, Jacob started to write for Gateway Pundit, a fake news website run by a former John Deere catalog model with no relevant experience in politics or journalism.
Gateway Pundit is regularly cited in Fox News.
For an example of the level of quality in Gateway Pundits reporting, at one point, they picked up a story about how the Kremlin thought Barack Obama was literally insane.
According to Media Matters, the story originated from the European Union Times, an anti-Semitic website with a section devoted to Jews.
So, like, it's...
What?
This is just the quality of the website he's working with.
They pick up stories from anti-Semitic.
I think you just keep saying words, and I'll be like, that sucks.
And you'll keep talking, and I'll be like, wait, that's stupid.
And then I'll just like, I'm just, my face is just a permanent, like, like, hello, darkness, my old friend.
That would be good theme music for this show.
So there's something unsettling to me about the fact that once finance was closed as a grifting opportunity and real estate, I should add, Jacob Woll immediately landed on journalism as the next way to try to make his mark.
He founded his own website.
Of course he did.
The Washington Reporter, which, you know, he called despite the fact that he lives in Los Angeles.
He claimed that The Washington Reporter was nonpartisan and his website included a code of ethics prominently displayed on the site.
Unfortunately, Splinter News revealed that the code of ethics on his website was plagiarized entirely from ProPublica.
Oh my God.
Stole his website's code of ethics.
He's plagiarized.
Yeah.
His code of ethics.
You can fucking Google that.
Like, try harder.
Yeah.
Now, I didn't write every single paper in college, but I made it look like I did.
Yeah.
You fake it a little bit better than that, Jacob Wool.
Fucking asshole.
So when asked about this point by Gizmodo, Woll replied, I didn't create that part of the website, but if our policy is similar to that of another reputable site, I think that's fantastic.
Oh my God.
It's the exact same.
Yeah.
Gizmodo went on to note, quote, Woll said he would not respond to further questions about this non-news.
Gossip about whether or not I date Instagram models is none of your concern, he said.
No one had accused him of dating Instagram.
I was just going to say, like, what?
It's the last slide of the Gizmato article.
No one had accused him of dating Instagram models.
That's a good article right there.
It's some good, that's some good journalism shade.
No one accused me of having giant dick.
Yeah, stop talking about my giant penis.
So during 2018, Woll's biggest claims to fame were, of course, his constant tweets about hipster coffee shops and the fact that Donald Trump retweeted him, I think, twice, mostly because he would just say nice things about the economy under Trump.
But then, on October 17th, a woman named Lorraine started emailing reporters around the U.S.
She claimed to have worked with special counsel Robert Mueller when he was a lawyer in the 1970s and said that she had been approached by a guy named Jack Berkman.
Now, Jack Berkman is another grifter.
We don't have enough time to get into heavy detail here, but prior to this, his main claim to fame was that he investigated the murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich.
He claimed to have found a man named Luke, who he said was an intelligence industry veteran who knew that the DEA and ATF had murdered Seth Rich, presumably, in order to help Hillary Clinton somehow.
This is some like House of Card Season 1 type of shit.
Yeah, some bullshit.
He held a big press conference to have Luke tell his story on the phone to the assembled world media, but Luke never called.
So it was just a press conference with no source.
So you can see why reporters immediately suspected something fishy now that Berkman's name was involved.
So weirdly enough, the Lorraine story didn't hold up at all to scrutiny.
No one by that name worked at the firm with Mueller.
The journalist checked into this.
But Berkman did post on social media around that time asking for women with stories about being sexually harassed by Robert Mueller to come forward.
And then, well, here's a quote from website, The Cut.
Ed Krasserstein at the Hill Reporter said that when he was looking into the Lorraine claims, he received a threatening phone call from a man claiming to work for Surefire Intelligence.
When Krasserstein reached out to Berkman, Berkman told him he's familiar with Surefire Intelligence and that they do a lot of good research and that it's run by Jacob Wohl.
So this is a little bit messy, but Surefire Intelligence is essentially a fake intelligence company that Jacob Woll on its surface is supposed to be operated by former Israeli Mossad people, but is really just Jacob Woll.
So they started reaching out to a bunch of people saying that they basically had an accuser of Robert Mueller that was going to come out and give speeches.
And obviously a bunch of people started poking holes in this straight away.
Oddly enough, fucking the Krassenstein brothers were some of the first people to, I guess because they got emails about this, report that came to his defense?
No, They were some of the first people to connect this stuff with Berkman to Surefire Intelligence and Jacob Wohl.
And then reported it to the FDA.
No, they came to Robert Mollow's defense.
I'm saying.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Robert Moore.
Robert Morrow.
This is how the other scammers come into this, is they come to his defense, they reveal that Jacob Wohl and Surefire Intelligence are connected to this emerging scheme, and then they report him to the FBI.
They're not the only people who reported Jacob Woll to the FBI, but yeah, that's the fucking crap.
They just want to dig their nose in.
They just, yeah, they had to get involved.
So now, as soon as Surefire Intelligence dropped into the news cycle, open source journalists began digging into its digital footprint.
People from, I think, the Daily Beast called several of the phone numbers associated with the business, and it was Jacob Woll's mom, who didn't seem to know anything about the scheme.
Oh my god.
His mom picked up.
He gave your mom's phone number.
Well, it was just he hadn't even intended to give a phone number, but like he had registered the business to try to do things to make it look legitimate.
And he gave like family cell phones and stuff.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
But hold yourself accountable.
Put your own fucking cell phone.
Yeah, yeah.
Eric Toller, an editor for Bellingcat.
This would be awful to be his mother.
Yeah.
It would be anyone related to him.
Eric Toller, an editor at Bellingcat, looked into Shearfire's extensive website, which was posted shortly before the allegations came out.
And he found a number of interesting things.
So on its surface, the website looked pretty kind of legitimate, but it all sort of fell apart once you did any sort of digging into it.
Their Tel Aviv station chief was a picture of Israeli supermodel Bar Raffelli.
Their investigator Donald Treehorn was a stock photo model with grayscale applied to it.
Their LA-based investigator Mark Teller was really Nick Hopper, a British model.
And Simon Frick, their Zurich-based financial crimes investigator, was a picture of Oscar-winning actor Christoph Walsh.
This just infuriates me because like you can get away with stuff if you're just a little smart.
I'm glad they didn't get away with it.
But like, okay, for example, when I was in high school, my AP English teacher hated me because my older sister was like, she was like the star child.
And then I had him and he was like, you're never going to be as good as your sister.
So I plagiarized every paper that she had ever written because I found it on the computer and I just submitted it as my own the entire year.
And he gave me lower grades than her, even though it was the exact same paper.
Wow.
But you see, I got away with it.
Yeah.
And then on my senior speech, I cried because he made up a story about going blind.
But like, I love that we're getting a little bit of ear grifting in here.
But, oh, yeah, I'm a fraud.
But the point is, you're a grifter.
Thank you.
I'm a grifter.
They're all grifters.
But the point is, if you want to fucking be smart, don't put a well-known celebrity's photo as supposed to be like a representative of who you have behind, like backing your fucking company.
Are you kidding me?
Like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
And fucking Jane Mayer of Dark Money found out, he, I forget the name he had, but he posted the name of the person who supposedly ran his firm.
And he came up with a fake name, but the picture was just Jacob Wohl, but the picture reversed and darkened.
It was just a picture of the family.
Who did have his face?
What dummy with like paint, MS paint is like running your fucking thing?
It makes me furious.
He clearly knew enough to know that if you alter a photo somewhat, it makes it harder to trace back on Google image search.
So the reverse image search.
So he did a couple of small changes, but he didn't do it well.
And like the picture of Christoph Waltz was like clearly Christoph Waltz.
Like if you've seen him in a movie, you wouldn't pick him up.
That's not Zurich-based financial crime.
There are lesser known actors also.
Like there are lesser known people than Bar Raffaelli who used to date the R DiCaprio.
Or like, are you serious?
Like that's the people that you infuriates me.
That's someone who's gotten away with a lot of stuff.
Yeah, infuriates me.
Another thing that other people noted is that like the investigator that Jacob pretended to be to communicate with a number of journalists was Donald Treehorn, which is of course a reference to the Big Lebowski's Jackie Treehorn.
Because I think Wool thinks he's so smart that he's the only person who's watched one of the most popular films ever made.
Yeah, he's just a dumb kid.
He's just a dumb kid.
I'm really glad he was dumb enough to get caught though.
Very glad.
Very glad.
I'm just because he kept saying Surefire and stuff.
I just imagine the site is like on Angel Fire and GeoCities.
Like that's my knowledge of his site is just like pure.
So as all of this broke, another woman, Professor Jennifer Taub, came forward and said that Berkman and Wohl had also reached out to her to try and solicit stories of sexual harassment by Robert Mueller.
She immediately sent the email they sent her to the Department of Justice, which again, part of the FBI investigation that's now looking into Jacob Wohl and will hopefully lead to some serious consequences for him.
I'm not generally a big fan of prisons, but something bad should happen to Jacob Wohl.
He should go somewhere.
He should go somewhere, not good.
Yeah.
Yeah, something bad should happen to him.
Kick out the rest of the non-criminal marijuana fucking people and bring him in.
It could just be him and Paul Manafort in prison, lying to each other.
And the two fucking brothers.
Yeah, fuck it.
Throw the Krassensteins in there, too.
Fine.
That way it's bipartisan.
Yeah.
So, Jacob Woll and Jack Berkman were not about to give up just because they'd been caught committing crimes and trying to fraudulently claim that an FBI special prosecutor was a sex criminal.
They continued to double down on their scheme.
In the immediate aftermath of everybody busting into the fact that sheerfire intelligence was the fraud, Jacob Woll updated his Twitter bio to Bragg, head of the most well-known opposition research firm in the world.
That's not even technically true because being mocked on Twitter for two days does not count as being well-known.
Oh my God.
And then, because sometimes, sometimes, God is good, Wohl and Berkman held a press conference.
The Worst Con Job Ever00:08:48
Okay.
Where they claimed?
Yeah.
And during this press conference, which they hyped up to the extent of their very tiny abilities, they claimed that they would present a credible accuser and her allegations against Bob Mueller.
During the press conference, Wohl and Berkman appeared with no accuser, claiming that she had backed out at the last minute.
But Wohl insisted this was all totally real.
And he also insisted and stated openly that he didn't normally believe women when they came forward with allegations of sexual assault in order to claim that this one was extra credible.
Like, he just did everything in the grossest way possible.
I was waiting for you to be like, and then came out Bar Rafaeli and Galcado.
No, he did present a picture of his credible accuser with her face blurred out of him standing next to her that he, in order to prove to people that she was real.
And his mom was like, why did you listen to this photo?
It was funny.
It's worse than that.
So Internet Sleuts did find the original unblurred version of the photo and realized it was a picture of Woll with his former girlfriend.
Oh.
Oh my God.
Berkman and Wohl handed out summaries of their evidence to the assembled press, presumably to help people write stories about what they were just sure was going to bust Robert Mueller down to size.
But in the summaries they handed out, it turns out they misspelled the first name of the fake woman that they brought forward on multiple occasions.
Oh my god.
Also, Berkman's fly was down the entire press conference.
Fuck yeah.
That's the best thing you've said.
That's the best thing you've said all day.
Cherry right on top.
That's the best thing you've said all day.
Yeah.
After the disastrous press conference, a writer with abovethelaw.com received an email from Surefire Intelligence partner Donald Treehorn, who claimed that they'd always wanted Professor Taub to leak their email to the FBI.
Quote, I want to clear something up.
Ms. Taub was chosen with great care.
We chose her precisely because we thought she might act the way she did by running to the special counsel.
We knew she would not miss this opportunity to get her 15 minutes of fame.
Please note that we did not send emails to any other people requesting information on Mueller, only Miss Taub.
We performed extensive research on her mindset, academic position, and political activism.
It was a bit of a long shot, and she was the only person we sent this email request to, but it worked.
She did our bidding, and more so than we could ever have expected her to.
Wow.
As of recording to this episode, Jacob Wohl is still under investigation by the FBI.
He's also banned from working in the finance industry.
Well, okay, I do have something to contest.
You said that the Krassenschit brothers are the second worst.
They've been doing this for their whole lifetime.
They're the worst.
Well, but they're...
He's only a baby.
But he's worse at it.
He's already gotten caught, too.
Yeah, well, that's why I'm saying he's worse than they are.
He's like worse, like as far as he got an F.
They got an A.
I got away with it.
Well, I wouldn't say they got an A because they got caught too.
A for asshole.
I would say he got an F minus and they got an F. He's the worst con man in America, and they're the second worst con men collectively.
Yeah.
They're so awful.
Everyone's a bad person.
You know what's bad when they come for each other.
You know, you know what's bad when they're like, he's a con man.
Yeah.
When the second worst con men report the worst con man to the FBI, that's special.
It's a special time in America.
There's so much that I just want to erase from my memory.
Well, I can't.
It's going to be on record forever.
It will be.
Grifters.
Grifters.
So.
Grifters.
It's okay if you're a fraud.
You know, I think Robert was right in the beginning of this episode.
Like, a lot of people that have creative fields, you feel like a fraud a lot of the time.
Yeah.
But just don't be a fucking grifter.
Yeah.
Don't, or if you're going to be a grifter, be a good grifter.
Be like El Roberts.
Or like, yeah, be like Robin Hood.
Like, no, not Robin.
No, no, Scientology is not a good form of.
I didn't say it was.
It's an impressive grift, though.
It's not like it's not.
It's a disturbing, destructive, and dangerous grift, but at least it's not dumb.
That is impressive, to say the least.
But if you're going to grift, be a Robin Hood character and don't take advantage of the poor.
And the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
No.
Steal from rich people is what we say.
Yeah, if you're going to steal, steal from the rich.
Like we're saying, you can knock as many cars over as you want, as long as they're Teslas.
Exactly.
As long as they're Teslas or Infinities.
I would say Ben's.
Ben's is the one I would go after.
That's like old money.
You know, that's old money.
Tesla can be like new money, you know?
Yeah.
But Ben's is the old money.
Yeah, Ben's is old money and a Rolls-Royce.
Cadillacs.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Cadillacs.
I feel my grandma drove a really old one.
Oh, no, she drove a Lincoln Town car.
I always get those two.
Oh, Audis, maybe?
I don't know.
I don't know.
Maybe, maybe.
Maybe.
I don't care what car you drive.
Just don't hit them unless they're driven by someone that's a dick.
Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah.
Hit people's cars if they're dicks.
That is the official message.
Also, don't cheat.
Don't commit crimes.
Don't cheat.
Don't commit crimes.
Don't commit crimes.
Unless they're for English class that teacher you hate.
All right.
Shireen, you want to plug some pluggables?
Yeah, I'm Shireen.
Fantastic.
I'm the co-host of Ethnically Ambiguous.
It's a podcast on how stuff works or stuff.
The network that this is also on.
You can find us on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts.
We're everywhere.
We're on Twitter, EthnicallyAMB, A-M-B.
We're on Instagram, EthnicallyAnbig, A-M-B-I-G.
I am on Instagram at Shiro Hero, S-H-E-E-R-O-H-E-R-O.
And then on Twitter, I'm Shireen Y, S-H-E-R-E-E-N-W-H-Y, because why not?
And this has been Behind the Bastards.
You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com, where the sources and such will be for this episode.
You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at at Bastardspot.
You can find me on Twitter at IWriteOK.
And that's all of the things that I have to plug.
So get on with your life.
Go do some.
Oh, nope.
That's not all the things.
Sophie is making frantic gestures at me.
Merch.
You can buy merch at the RT Public store behind the Bastards, TeePublic.
We got great shirts.
You can also get...
You can get.
Okay, I'm going to help you out.
You can get any design as a shirt, a mug, a poster, a tote, a tank top, a sweater, a hoodie, a baseball tee, a phone case, a laptop case.
The fucking options are endless.
And even if you want to donate a little bit or support a little bit, a sticker can do just fine.
Yeah, a sticker can be fine.
You're welcome, Robert.
That's fine.
Yeah, thank you.
Thank you.
I love about 40%.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones's Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, bachelor star Clayton Eckard was accused of fathering twins, but the pregnancy appeared to be a hoax.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Mancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trapped.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.