I last worked as a fraud detection specialist ferreting out health insurance fraud, first for a major insurer, and last for a consulting firm that did the same thing for health insurer clients. Even though there can be those who will say that's like shooting fish in a barrel, there are subtleties to it. I will say I was pretty good at it.
I won't say I had a total negative reaction to the first sentence in this posting, when the good Samaritan news story broke, but I will say my antenna went up. First, there's the story of a "homeless" guy who in admirable good deed supposedly give his "last $20" to a woman who ran out of gas while exiting a highway.
The first thing that is suspicious is that the guy had $20 to begin with. A nice round number, single piece of currency evenly divisible by ten. I've never been destitute, but my guess is if you were to frisk someone who is truly homeless, or ask them to empty their pockets, you wouldn't find a nice round number of money in their pocket. Or maybe any money.
I looked for fraud using many hooks, one of which was to look for pricing what was a nice round, large number, evenly divisible by 10. When people make up number, they tend to fling out hundreds, even thousands that are nice round hundreds and thousands. And one of the hallmarks of fraudulent reporting is to make up services and claim they were done, usually attaching a bogus large charge to them.
Another clue was the chances of such an encounter playing out: a homeless guy with $20 is in the exact spot that a motorist runs out of gas who has no money in their possession. Not even a gas card? Actuaries do not publish a book on the chances of this happening, but if they did the probability would be several places to the right of the decimal. Try off the chart.
The couple who launched the GoFundMe, Kate McClure and Mark D'Amico, and the "homeless" guy, Johnny Bobbitt Jr., were in fact a trio of conspirators who made the story up with the hopes of using the money from the GoFundMe campaign for themselves.
I'm not familiar with GoFundMe pages, but it looks like they set a goal of getting $10,000 to help Johnny out for his act of kindness. Instead, they suffered what I'll call the Valponi effect. Charles Ponzi gave his name to a method of fleecing that remains with us today. Valponi is the extreme long shot that won the 2002 Breeders' Cup Classic and touched off a Pick-Six and consolation payout that was awarded to a sole ticket holder—one person took down the entire pool. Luck that was manufactured from the insider who past-posted the early bets on the ticket after the results were in. A lot of shady things were happening with that bunch.
The betting done by that "person" was a group of fellows who crawled into the betting system's software, (one worked in the IT shop that processed the bets) changed bets, made bets in remote off-track betting parlors, and found themselves ashen-faced when they emerged as the only ones winning the payouts. Ding, ding, ding. Bells went off.
Valponi was such a long shot that there was only their winning ticket, and their consolation ticket. Thus, they collected the entire pool. If a more modestly priced horse were to have won the Classic, then there would have been multiple winners across the country who would have been claiming the payout that would have been significantly smaller since it would have been shared by many.
Homeless guy parts with last $20, news media parades the feel-good story several times to counteract the news of mass shootings, politics, forest fires, hurricanes and floods. Aim for $10,00, hit national news with the story, and collect $400,000 plus. Talk about stepping in do-do. Printing money. Ding, ding, ding.
Obviously I'm not the only one who thought the trio of Kate, Mark and Johnny might be telling a story. Turns out the couple hatched the plot having met Johnny in a casino. After the money came in like a tidal wave and the couple weren't giving Johnny what simple math told him he should be getting, Johnny started complaining that he wasn't getting all the money they collected. A different kind of attention started to be drawn to the trio. Turns out, he got $75,000 and Kate and Mark started living large and hitting casinos "hard" with the rest. Poof, gone is the money.
Didn't this bunch ever see the movie 'Goodfellas' or any other crime movie on Turner Movie Classics? In 'Goodfellas' after the Lufthansa score a participant is roughly scolded for showing up with his girlfriend sporting an expensive fur at the mob watering hole. Wasn't he told not to go splashing money around, especially on broads? You're supposed to lay low and not attract attention.
And then there's the "no honor among thieves." Johnny's not getting the one-third cut, or one half cut. He's being chiseled by the chiselers. He starts talking. Where did my dough, go? Loose lips sink ships.
News shows spent some time trying to inform the public about charities and charitable causes. Contributor beware. My wife has a distant cousin who started a GoFundMe page to supposedly help pay for her husband's workplace injury that may or may not have occurred. With no national attention for a sprained ankle, she collected $250. No Valponi effect there.
The showman P.T. Barnum famously said "there's a sucker born every minute." And now they log on.
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