This series is about my investigation of a mail fraud ring that attempted to scam my firm, the history of its bad actors, and the methodology that I used to look into it. You can see the whole chapter index here.

More than seven years ago, I became irritated at a fraudster trying to scam my office and started to write about him. Seven years and fifteen posts later, the slow-grinding wheels have ground their last on the case. Earlier this week, David Bell — the central figure of this Anatomy of a Scam series — was sentenced to 108 months in federal prison after his guilty plea to mail fraud and wire fraud. There's no parole in the federal system any more; Bell will do at least 85% of that time, or about seven and a half years. He'll be on "supervised release" — the modern federal equivalent of supervised parole — for three years after that, and will be at risk of being sent back to prison if he's caught engaged in fraud again. He's scheduled to surrender in March.

This is not a typical result. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of con artists out there, and they frequently escape detection. When they are detected, they frequently escape prosecution, and when they are prosecuted, they frequently escape with mild sentences on lesser charges, leaving them free to victimize again. This sort of hard-time outcome is rare despite the amount of harm these people inflict. The government simply doesn't have the resources to mount this sort of investigation against any but the worst of the worst.

But I don't want readers to take that grim message away from this series. Rather, I want people to see that they can take initiative themselves — that they can use the techniques and research tools I've discussed in this series to track down the people trying to scam them, to spread the word about them, and to inform law enforcement about them. The best defense against con artists isn't the government, because government doesn't have the resources. The best defense is self-reliance, healthy skepticism, involved communities, and public-spirited private investigation that can be broadcast far and wide through modern tools.

Last 5 posts by Ken White