He SCAMMED banks for $45 million, but I really want his Panoz!

i felt about 51 sure that i was never gonna see that money again in searching for panos i came across what was a very promising panos on the internet but it was a little bit odd because there was only four or five really bad pictures and the description of the ad said something to the effect of the the buyer will pay for enclosed insured shipping anywhere in the 48 states so i i messaged him and i said well did you mean something else by this did you mean to say that you guys are paying for it and they said oh yes absolutely and the response was that the car was actually in portugal but that they would arrange delivery anywhere in the lower 48 and that the person selling the car was an attorney representing the car on behalf of his client and he was you know here's his florida bar number and all of these different things and he would be escrowing the transaction to make sure that it was secure and safe for the buyer and all my spidey senses you know red flags go ding ding ding ding ding ding because like the the biggest scam with scammers is the word escrow so i'm like oh my gosh this is totally a scam it's it's all the same language so i i look the guy up i look up his bar number yep it's legitimate he also said he was a retired special agent now he didn't say what division or government agency but it definitely wasn't the fbi apparently he was just a special agent with a local police department or sheriff's office and you know in charge of investigating a certain type of crime so but he was using that to certainly gain more trust i verified his florida bar number and we started corresponding via email and his domain name matched and his email address his phone number everything matched up with what was listed on the florida bar association's website and he had been practicing law for 10 years and didn't have any complaints against him and things like that so i made an offer and it was an offer i thought was pretty low but i didn't want to completely just blow my chances of getting this out of the water because i did actually want the car and unfortunately they took the offer immediately which made me think one of two things one i offer too much or two that's also the sign of a scammer is they'll take whatever offer you give them because typically legitimate sellers want top dollar for their car and if they get an offer they think they can get more until they'll negotiate back and forth so with the help of my wonderful wife we started doing searches on the car the owner the attorney everything searches on the attorney didn't really come up with much but i was really hard-pressed to verify his law enforcement background uh other than a couple of real obscure old forum posts but i wasn't super concerned about that because he was a registered attorney and they operate under certain rules and if you give them money for escrow that's held in their ielts account they cannot you know mismanage those funds they cannot distribute them they can't use them for any purposes other than what's intended and you know they they are highly scrutinized by their local bar association the owner of the car however was a different story so i looked up his name and and is the case with most scammers they'll modify their name slightly so in this case he went by pedro which was his first name but his full name was pedro pete and he had been convicted previously of a major ponzi scheme under the name pete so we'll call him ponzi pete and he had essentially created hundreds of shell companies and he didn't scam consumers but he scammed banks so he ended up going to prison i requested a copy of the title because i wanted to make sure okay you still you actually own this car and it was a title in some company name that i looked up the address and it was actually a registered dealer in florida and they were still active but their website was down their location on google earth was you know an office building it like they didn't exist anymore and i had actually heard of of the dealer name in the past and remembered maybe them going under something it was it was extremely odd because the license was still active but it was signed off to him personally there was a lien on the title and the lien was cleared just by somebody you know signing their name which you can do on the front of titles is it's very sketchy because a lot of times the bank just stamps their financial institution name and a representative signs it off you have no way of knowing like you could buy the bank stamp and just have your mom sign it off and so i had no guarantee that that wasn't what had happened and it was signed over to him personally and he was just going to reassign it to me and i said well i you can't do that because you're a private individual you have to title it in your name and i wanted him to anyway because i didn't know that the person signing it off for that corporation was part of that corporation it actually turns out i googled that name and it was his wife and he said oh well that's my company so it was his company that signed his wife was a representative of the company that signed it off to him and anybody's there was just a signature signing off the lien so i'm like you're gonna you're gonna convert the title into your name because this is all too sketchy now meanwhile the car is still in portugal he's got a florida title for the car and the car is in portugal so i sent somebody over to look at the car in portugal and he also had a eleanor clone and a hot rod and like a couple of jet skis and a golf cart a bunch of really random stuff to be stashed in a garage in portugal so he went over and uh met up with paolo lots of peas and paolo was the caretaker of the portuguese panos my contact went over and inspected the car and paolo got it running and i got feedback from my guy over there that paolo was definitely willing to be on the take for whoever would line his pockets went over verified that the car actually existed ran that the vin number matched things like that so you know step one of eliminating a scam as a scam is is there a real car so there is a real car there is a title now the other concern was when the car came back in the u.s if there was any outstanding obligation to the government or something like that that this car would be seized because it was in his name and he had been imprisoned for this financial fraud so in searching the court documents from his conviction i found a list of cars and vin numbers that had been seized as part of this perpetuation of a ponzi scheme the shelby gt500 and panos were not on that list so i said okay well good enough start this vehicle is not under some claim by the u.s government but i still wanted as part of the contract to state that you know the car would be in the u.s cleared of customs and essentially like ready for me to pick up so we got the contract hammered out i wired 7 500 to this attorney's account and i felt about 51 sure that i was never gonna see that money again what made it more interesting was after i had wired the money i started doing more research always a good order of operation i found that this attorney had represented another group of portuguese businessmen i think in massachusetts there was this kind of call to action against the attorney by this independent group and it was i don't remember the name of the business doesn't matter but they had set up this uh investment opportunity for portuguese american immigrants and this attorney had represented this this group and essentially was doing let's say more than he should have as an attorney because he was using his background as a special agent and using his automatic trustworthiness as an attorney to say hey this is on the up and up and it wasn't they ended up scamming a bunch of portuguese immigrants out of millions of dollars and everybody involved went to prison for this except the attorney because oh he was just the attorney representing this this group he has no culpability so it was no surprise that he was now representing ponzi p and ponzi pete was uh had not repented of his old ways and had already um let's see this was in february and he had just gotten released from prison a couple months prior to posting this portuguese panos he already had these amazing websites and new shell corporations promising you know amazing profits and you know we'll we'll take your business and and multiply at 100x and and all sorts of things like that and my contact over in portugal said they were doing the exact same thing and and ponzi pete's wife as well had multiple shell corporations over there and it was all just one big perpetuation of his pernicious past so i'm feeling really not good about my uh earnest money deposit and i put in the contract that the car had to be in the u.s and ready for collection within 45 days or i was entitled to a full refund and about 30 days in they still had no proof of pickup from portugal and he actually asked for a contact of mine for importing the car over so i sent him over a contact to assist with that and he said wow that's it's really expensive i'll just do it with my guys and i i think the quote was about seven or eight grand to bring the car over and so then he goes well how about you just pick up the car in portugal i was like the whole point of this was to have the car here so that i'm secure and cleared of any liability or any outstanding liability that you might have and i never called him out as a scammer i just alluded to his past and said what's your proposal so he was gonna give me i think a twelve thousand dollar discount if i picked it up in portugal i'm like well that's obviously some sort of a scam i don't know what your angle is but why would you knock off twelve grand for something that would cost you seven so i said that's fine but i'm going to put the full amount including the 7 500 that i wired to your attorney is that i want to put the full amount in escrow with attorney of my picking so that i'm totally secure and once the car arrives and i have the title then he'll release the funds to you and he obviously didn't go for that which i knew but at this point i figured he was just trying to get more money out of me and i wasn't gonna have it 45 days were up and i said okay send the money back and the attorney said well i gave the money to ponzi pete for the packaging and shipping of the portuguese panos to the u.s no that wasn't what those funds were for but he just said you know you you gotta deal with him to get your money back and i'm like okay that's totally a violation of the contract and numerous laws that you know regulate attorneys but okay so i texted pete and said hey you need to send the funds back okay no problem send me your wiring instructions i'm like ha ha nice try no so i said just you know send me a check to this address and you know we'll be good so he did regular mail and i got the check and it was a starter check it was literally like number zero zero one it was one of those when you open a new account you get five checks and there was no name on it or anything but i called to verify the funds expecting a a laugh from the banker and sure enough they said yep the you know the funds are there so i deposited the check and the next day they had cleared my account so my wife and i took off that day for a much needed trip to florida i think the next day i get an email from my bank says check return due to non-sufficient funds i was like there it is now we're talking saw this coming so i immediately just go off on ponzi pete i let him have it i was like dude you bounced a check on me not cool i went off on the attorney i said you're gonna get in trouble with the bar association like i know you didn't bounce a check but this is mishandling of you know clients funds and yada yada and you know essentially called out ponzi p for being the scammer that he is and was and his response was something the effect of like well don't believe everything you read on the internet i'm like really really you you want me dude you were convicted and he essentially pulled this whole thing of like the government was in this conspiracy against him and all this stuff oh i'm not a bad guy like okay but he blamed the bank he's like oh these effing banks they don't know what they're doing he's like oh i'm headed down there right now i said great what branch i'll meet you there i think that like threw him for a little bit of a loop because he didn't realize like i'm local and i was just like listen let's let's meet up in an hour you can just give me cash let's meet at your local branch you know let's do this oh well i'm i'm out of town whatever of course you are so some lady calls me who is apparently his girlfriend so i don't know what happened to his wife but his girlfriend called me thick portuguese accent and says oh well you know i'm getting it handled i'm at the bank there was some error like you need to just redeposit the check like come on i wasn't born yesterday so my bank calls and they said yeah well we we redeposited the check and it actually looks like it's going to clear so that the check had actually been written from this girlfriend's account it wasn't even ponzi pizza county he's probably not allowed to have bank accounts so the check ended up clearing and i was absolutely perplexed at that turn of events because i thought that money was never going to be seen again so i said you know well fine let me know when the car actually gets here and i'll still be interested in buying it so i kept checking in every few weeks and said hey is the car here yet and at some point he said yes the car's in the u.s okay can i buy it no response so a couple weeks later i saw a post on instagram of a yellow panos on a flatbed and i looked up the name of the company and sure enough it was portuguese so i messaged the person said hey when was this taking this a couple weeks ago that's odd so i poked ponzi pete via text message and he said oh no the car's already sold about the deuce i wanted it okay whatever so then my contact in portugal checked in he said hey any update what's the status of the deal it's like i totally forgot to to update you so i told him the whole back story and so he was a master sleuth over there he had actually helped me get a lot of information on the portuguese side of things and so he checked in with the tow company and he found uh posts from their page that showed the the eleanor clone and the panos being picked up by their driver and transported somewhere so i was like okay but he said well i don't think they left the country i don't think they're sold they just got moved based on his conversations with them so then he asked about the attorney because i told him this whole story and he said oh yeah that attorney is super shady because he's named in all these documents over here and he's essentially using a status as an immigration attorney to help these coyote organizations in perpetuating illegal immigration and or maybe human trafficking just the deeper you went the crazier the story got and there's nothing specifically to tie the attorney to anything because he had kept his nose clean but there's just a lot of you know connections that could be made and again it's it's uh kind of like where there's smoke there's fire type of thing my contact said okay well paolo is still the guy who's handling these cars and i had previously sent a message to paolo asking him what the update was because i wanted to see if his story matched up with ponzi pete and he just didn't respond you know previously when he thought there was a prospect of a payday he had been super quick to get back to me and he just you know i saw that he had seen the message haven't heard from him since but apparently he's still in charge of the cars and my contact actually found out from the tow company where the cars were and sent me like a google street view of this kind of ratty shack with a garage door where all these cars had moved so they're still out there i didn't get scammed and as much as i would have missed the 7 500 and and every amount of money lost is is painful i think at least it would have maybe made a better story because i would have said all right like i'm looking at this going if i get scammed at least i can say well now i've got a good punch line right the the scam expert finally got scammed somebody got him and it would have been i don't want to say worth it but i would have at least given them their proper due and say okay well that that was a well executed scam and certainly far beyond the level of a normal scam and you don't deserve to keep the money but whatever i'll i'll i'll defer to to having been bested ponzi pete's portuguese panos is still out there and it has not been procured by me and maybe someday it will but uh as of today we we haven't seen the end of the story although i i think it's possibly the end of the story for me because they've stopped responding and claimed that it's sold and it's hidden away in a garage somewhere over in portugal we'd like to thank patrick adair designs for their support of the vinwicki channel this month patrick and his team make some of the most amazing rings out of the most exotic materials on earth they make rings out of superconductors and meteorites and stardust and all the things that you can imagine including old parts from broken exotic cars they've got over 20 000 customers and patrick decided to document his journey and the ways that he makes his rings and the cars that he enjoys on his own youtube channel so he's part of our youtube family he's coming by to tell some stories soon but check him out at the link in the description below and use the code benwicki for a 15 discount thank them for their support of the channel and find you an awesome ring [Applause] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 315,414

Keywords: Doug, Doug Tabbutt, Switchcars, Car Scams, ponzi scheme, messing with scammers, vinwiki, car stories, panoz, aiv, roadster, portugal, international, scheme, scam, fraud, business, shell corporations, marketing, vehicle title, car shipping, negotiation

Id: CaMFLodJg9k

Length: 21min 5sec (1265 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 27 2021