From "Tinder Liar" to Musk, a brief history of scams posing as rich people

Text/John Hyatt

Arthur Lee Cofield Jr., a 31-year-old prisoner, persuaded Charles Schwab's customer service representative that he was Sidney Kimmel, a 94-year-old billionaire, and then stole $11 million from the billionaire's bank account. Arthur Lee Cofield Jr. transferred the stolen money to a company in Idaho for an ounce of gold coins, then rented a private jet to transport the coins to Atlanta, and finally bought a $4.4 million house with the help of two accomplices.

According to prosecutors, Sidney Kimmel, who is worth about $1.5 billion, is not the only tycoon Arthur Lee Cofield has targeted — the wife of wealthy inventor Herbert Wertheim also lost $2.25 million. U.S. attorney Scott McAfee said at a December 2020 bond hearing: "Mr. Kofeld has found a way to gain access to the accounts of high-net-worth individuals (frankly, billionaires) across the country." ”

It's unclear how many wealthy Arthur Lee Kofield Jr. targeted and how many U.S. attorneys were targeting the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia. Attorney's Office of Northern District of Georgia declined to comment.

But one thing is clear: by pretending to be a rich man, scammers can make a lot of money. Aside from Willie Sutton's famous quote about why he robbed a bank — "because the money is there" — scams can be aimed at people who may have heard of the rich but aren't familiar enough to tell if the people they're dealing with are really the rich. Sometimes, scammers may just want to show off and be famous, they just want to tell their friends that they have made a deal as a rich man; Other times, it's pure greed. They think they can share a little of the rich's wealth, or use the rich's connections to become rich. Sometimes, they do get away with it.

The story of "Tinder liar" Simon Leviev has aired on Netflix. The man disguised himself as the son of Lev Leviev, a 66-year-old Israeli diamond magnate, and swindled a total of about $10 million from many women. Forbes estimates that Lev Leviv's wealth in 2018 was $1 billion. Anna Sorokin is another liar who became the protagonist of the Netflix TV series. She disguised herself as the fictional German heiress Anna Delvey and stole $275,000 (and nearly got a $22 million loan). While Anna Sorokin doesn't claim to be associated with any particular wealthy family, at least one acquaintance believes her father was a "big man in the oil industry" (he actually ran a small cold and warm business).

In another extraordinary case, Hargobind Tahilramani, a 41-year-old Indonesian man, was accused of posing as a super-wealthy Hollywood executive and philanthropist and swindling more than $1 million from about 300 people. In 2020, the person was arrested in the UK and could be extradited from the UK to the US. He allegedly impersonated women like billionaire producer and philanthropist Gigi Pritzker, Wendi Deng, the ex-wife of Fox Chairman Rupert Murdoch, and Christine Hearst Schwarzman, the spouse and corporate lawyer of private equity mogul Stephen Schwarzman. The Hollywood Reporter first reported on Hargobind Tahilramani's elaborate hoax in 2018, a story that went down in history in the form of short films and podcasts, and books about it are coming soon.

Of course, not everyone who impersonates a rich man will be brought to justice. As the founder of Virgin Galactic, the name and portrait of British billionaire Richard Branson have been used for fraud on several occasions. In 2017, a scammer posing as Richard Branson stole $2 million from an American businessman who thought he was providing emergency loans for disaster relief after Hurricane Irma hit the British Virgin Islands. It is unclear whether the case has been resolved and the tycoon's spokesman could not confirm it. In 2018 and 2019, Richard Branson twice warned that counterfeiters were promoting financial and cryptocurrency scams, and he became an advocate of anti-scam — Virgin now runs a "Report a Scam" portal and personally narrates an animated video to warn people against counterfeiters. Last November, Richard Branson asked then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson to crack down on fraudulent online advertising.

A spokesperson for the Virgin Group told Forbes in August 2020 that Richard Branson's impostor issue officially began in 2017 "after a wave of Bitcoin-related fraudulent activity," and that the spokesperson's team "handled" "hundreds of fake websites and scammer cases."

If scammers were drawn to Richard Branson's fame, the problem plaguing the wealthy philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Mackenzie Scott, is generosity. Since mid-2020, she has donated $12.7 billion to more than 1,250 organizations. Her frenzied donation was so widespread and discreet that many of the real recipients considered her surrogates to be scammers. Unsurprisingly, Mackenzie Scott's donation sparked a real scam operation. According to the New York Times, her impersonators tricked people into paying thousands of dollars as fake employees of a fictitious foundation in exchange for promised millions of dollars in "donations."

Chuck Feeney, a former billionaire who gave away his entire fortune, experienced similar problems. The co-founder of retail giant Duty Free Shoppers has repeatedly warned that scammers would impersonate him or an employee of his foundation.

In recent years, as scammers have flocked to the cryptocurrency market, rich impersonators have followed suit. Zhao Changpeng, the first CEO of digital asset exchange Binance and one of the richest people in the cryptocurrency space, complained last month that a large number of people who impersonated him were peddling fraudulent investment scams on Twitter. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, last year, scammers impersonating Elon Musk, the world's richest man, stole more than $2 million from cryptocurrency scams over a period of 6 months, when Musk was obsessed with Dogecoin. Dogecoin is an emoji cryptocurrency, and Musk has hyped it up on Twitter and promised to use it as a form of payment for Tesla.

More worryingly, future wealthy counterfeiters may engage in deepfakes, i.e., digitally modified videos to explain false realities. In May, Bitvex released a deepfake that looks like Musk. The fake Musk advertised Bitvex as a "new investment project" in a blunt voice on stage, and the reward offered to investors was "30% dividend every day for the rest of their lives."

"Gee, it's definitely not me." The real Musk later wrote on Twitter.