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Monday, June 11, 2007

Sniff. Everybodyz cruel. After all sorts of rude talk about jobs and other betrayalz, Casey threw up his hands and realized that he had to rely on the kindness of strangerz because even his own family were haterz. So he went off to Australia, and is working on his book. It's a massively focused business effort, you see.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, his wife has been abandoned to face the collectors alone. Casey's latest borrowing venture involved getting corporate lines of credit, guaranteed by a family member. Tough luck for that poor family member!!! It's been used to pay for the Tahoe mini-vacation (on which his wife was not invited), to pay rent, to buy penny stocks, etc, and to pay for the purchase of the corporation used to apply for more credit.

It's not easy to be a finch these days.... Story here, written by one of the guys that was trying to bail Casey out and spent thousands on the deal. Here's another friend in need. Casey's brother called into one of Casey's Talkshoe shows and told Casey that he hoped that he was wrong, but that he thought Casey was trying to construct a situation in which he could leave Galina and make it look like her fault. I think the poor brother was right.

People need to leave the family alone, because there's nothing you can do with a conman like Casey no matter how hard you try - and the harder you try the more he makes a monkey out of you, and in the end he throws his own scat at you. Monkeyz do that, you know. A crook is a crook, and Casey is one dedicated crook.

Pic link

Just to review: Casey bought 8 houses in less than a year. He bought the houses by committing loan fraud. He lied about his income, he lied about his intent to occupy them as his home, and he misrepresented the contracts by doing under-the-table cashback deals which were not disclosed to the banks, thus defrauding the banks into lending him considerably more than the houses were worth. So the reason for doing this was to get large chunks of cash money. He defaulted on the payments quite quickly. He also, in at least one of those deals, got money on the HUD paid to a third party, which gave him most of it back under the table. In addition, he racked up well over $150,000 in unsecured debt. So where did the cashback money (over $100,000) and all that unsecured debt actually go?

Possibly that Downunder auto dealership or car rental place he's photographed at might be able to say. It's major fraud (including RICO charges if the Feds want to slap him with those) and if any of these fool newspapers that kept writing stories on him had bothered to read through his website and listen to the various webcasts, they'd have known that. But they were apparently too lazy to bother.

Then he launched the corporate scam, which is also fraudulent. Now he's no longer in the country. In order to avoid charges, he needs to pay back over $400,000. But, as Casey has often written on his own website, Casey doesn't feel the need to do anything unless there's money for him in it. This is how Casey described the Larchmont deal:
I just had to pay $7,000 non-refundable assignment fee in order to take it over, which I did. I was going to use the $50K cash-back for repairs and pay a few mortgage payments then sell it on a lease option. Too bad things didn’t quite work out that way…

The $50K carrot…

I rushed into this deal because the $50K “carrot” was just too hard to pass up. I needed the money to float the other properties I was buying at that time. I was buying out of desperation without considering the exit strategy too much.

The monthly payment on 330K with 100% financing was a lot more then I can rent it out for, even with a lease option. I would be $1,000 negative every month if I would rent or lease it. The purchase price seemed a little high too. I knew there was no way I could turn around and re-sell for the same price.
Now, there are two possibilities. The first is that Casey and his wife actually spent over $250,000 on living and on this real estate scam in less than a year and a half, including Casey's very expensive real estate seminars. The second is that a chunk of this cash is sitting around somewhere in reserve. He'd have to be a fool to take it with him through customs, so it's sure not Downunder.

Regardless, it's obvious that Casey is able to turn state's witness on a bunch of other people, and it's perfectly possible that he's blackmailing a few of them. Indeed, that would be a very good reason to start the blog, wouldn't it? I don't believe for one moment that he's not scamming right along, even in Australia. If I were one of the people who'd worked on these deals with him, I'd be happy to pay to get him out of the country. It would definitely be cheaper and less of a hassle than paying my own legal fees.

So, is Casey a very good conman or a very bad one? My guess is that he's a very good one. He got some apparently decent and straight people to pay him quite a bit of money during the course of this blogging extravaganza because they believed that he was trying to come out of it and pay everyone back. He borrowed a bunch of money from his own family, and he's obviously going to stiff them. When you are a sociopath, which I believe he is, you have no limits. You'll scam anyone, including your own family. According to the Cnet reporter, his wife thought Casey's own mother had guaranteed the corporate debt. How low can you go?

Remember this, in case you ever run into someone like Casey. Most crooks are decent to their friends and family, and are amoral toward strangers. A true con will do anything to anybody, and feel proud of himself for doing it. Casey is a true con. The only reason I can figure out for posting the picture is that he wants everyone to think that he's in Australia - otherwise it hardly fits with the narrative of spending almost nothing to stay there. So is he? I wonder. If it were me, I'd hop on a ship and get out of there. If I had enough cash, it would be easy to do.

This would make a great computer adventure game, wouldn't it? Where In The World Is Casey Serin?


Comments:
I think you may be ascribing too much intelligence and forethought to Casey.

Now granted, it may seem hard to imagine that someone could be such a fool over such a sustained period of time. But there are a lot of fools in this world, and a lot less con men.

Since his behaviour can be described by either idiocy or (deliberate) criminal intentions, I go with Occam's razor and assume he is simply a fool.

Have you read something that suggests to you he did all this with malice aforethought?

I get the impression of a surfer-of-events who does no planning or thinking since it would take actual effort. Sure, he ends up following a criminal path anyway, but calling him a (deliberate) con man seems overkill. He's not that smart.
 
Morning Mama from the SOHO office....

I disagree about leaving the family alone. They need to pass along those warm feelings long after the creditors have forgotten.

Do you know why Captains go down with their ship?

It gets rid of bad Captains.
 
On further reflection, I guess my argument boils down to:

"Casey is an unintentional con man."
 
CF - I think Casey's idea of being the captain is that you have first rights to the lifeboat.
 
Frank - one of the things I get paid to do is BSA which has a lot to do with fraud and money-laundering detection. Well, Casey is an excellent case study for that, so I have followed the saga pretty closely since about a month after he first put up his blog.

There's no question that with the round of three in early 2006 he crossed over the line into big time loan fraud. He did simultaneous purchases, with fraudulent applications, with fraudulent appraisals, with undisclosed contracts. In addition, he structured the purchases so that he COULD get away with this. He had to do them all at one time so that the purchases wouldn't flag his creditors that it was loan fraud. (As soon as it shows on credit reports and on public records creditors would realize that these weren't purchases of a personal residence. There was nothing at all unknowing or accidental about it - it was relatively sophisticated. He had to have help to do this; one person can't carry off such a scheme by himself, but he also had to be a very active participant. And don't forget that cute little dodge in which the cashback payment was shown on the HUD to the shell business.

But even the first purchase in 2005 was federal fraud. It's just that the later doings crossed the line from plausible deniability (I was just doing what I was told) to being a regular line of business.

The corporate scheme just showed that he hasn't changed his ways, although even I am shocked by him sticking his family guarantor with it.

If you read the Larchmont post I linked to, you'll see that he goes out of his way to say that he bought the deal from another person. Right after that he gets money to go abroad.... I really do think he's blackmailing people.

I don't think he's coming out and saying it, but I think he is. It occurred to me pretty quickly after I first read the blog that it was an attempt at blackmail, but I just didn't see him as gutsy enough. Now I think he is; it took some nerve to do the corporate scheme.
 
Remember this, in case you ever run into someone like Casey. Most crooks are decent to their friends and family, and are amoral toward strangers. A true con will do anything to anybody, and feel proud of himself for doing it.

And something else to remember: A TRUE SOCIOPATH IS AN EXPERT AT CAMOUFLAGING WHAT THEY ARE. I grew up with one in my immediate family; when he wasn't tormenting me to suicide just because he could, he was The Sweet Little Angel, So Butter-Wouldn't-Melt-In-His-Mouth Sincere. (Screen the movie The Bad Seed sometime, and skip the tacked-on Deus ex Machina ending -- you'll recognize the tack-on in the last two minutes.) So Sweet, So Sincere, So Concerned, So Compassionate -- until the instant you have outlived your usefulness. (And even then, the spin is on to all who have not outlived their usefulness to make it ALL your fault.)

To this day, I kick myself for not being born a sociopath like him.

The Headless Unicorn Guy
 
How click fraud may have occurred...

An expanded explanation-
My Defcon 15 proposal on click-fraud, inspired by my experience with IAmFacingForeclosure.com...
 
" A TRUE SOCIOPATH IS AN EXPERT AT CAMOUFLAGING WHAT THEY ARE"

Well, Casey's kind of failing at this, too. After he trashes Australia, all that's left is China! Maybe we can get him DoD funding as a secret weapon of mass financial destruction!
 
M-O-M:

Glad to see you're monitoring this.

Your link is what got me into this...I blame YOU.

Regards
 
If you see him in your world wanderings, Bilgeman, give the punk a nice kick in the nuts for his wife and mother's sake, willya?
 
M-O-M:

"give the punk a nice kick in the nuts for his wife and mother's sake, willya?"

Heh...

Blunt AND Pointed...sounds like a job for me.

Regards;
 
The other true sign of the con (for me anyway) was the continued mention of how he is a Christian and wants to do the right thing. His actions of course show that this is a lie on his part and just designed to gain some sympathy. That's the point that I stopped reading his blog. And he's still scamming his way along.
 
Yep. I caught that too. The truth is not in him.
 
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