The $50k Scam I'll Never Forget

I was at my son's birthday party when I got the call. My heart dropped into my stomach.

It was a scam. It was all a scam from the beginning.

At worst, we lost $750k. At best, $50k. I did NOT see this coming...

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It happened during the spring of 2022. We owned a business that sold cr*pto mining hardware and hosting services.

Selling the hardware was the easy part. Finding a place to host them was the hard part.

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Way more demand than supply.

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I finally found a facility in San Antonio that looked really nice. I got on the phone with the owner, Kevin Lowmax.

He spoke the language of the industry and sounded very kind. His prices were good but not great, right in line with what we'd pay.

They were 2 weeks out from being able to deploy $700k of our machines.

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The day arrived, and we had to pay a $50k deposit. This was industry standard. We did our due diligence, and everything checked out...except one thing...

The owner's name. Kevin Lowmax. I couldn't find any record of him.

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Kevin LOmax was the name of the protagonist in "The Devil's Advocate" 🚩🚩🚩.

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But LOWmax, with a W, was nowhere to be found.

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In any other industry this is a major red flag, in our industry it was a yellow flag.

This was cr*pto, after all, and people are very very secretive. (and often shady)

Most of the guys holding 8-10 figures of cr*pto, no one knows even exist. So I overlooked it, but treaded lightly.

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We were going to tour the facility when we went to drop off the miners. If anything looked off, we'd cancel the contract, get our deposit back and drive them back.

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There was no other way to do it.

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I sent the money, thankfully via bank wire and not cr*pto, ironically enough, and then on Friday afternoon my team loaded the hardware up in a box truck and drove down south.

Kevin went silent. He told me beforehand he'd be flying back from Florida. Later I learned this simply bought him some time.

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The wire had to go out on Friday, right before banks closed for the weekend...

He went completely off the grid and then blocked my number.

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I had an employee call him and he answered, acting like nothing was wrong. Alarm bells were going off everywhere.

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Tragically, the truck broke down an hour away, and we wanted to tell them we'd be late. He offered to come get the hardware for us, but we declined. This was BEFORE he ghosted us, the timeline is a bit off.

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We eventually made it to the facility and everything was gated up.

We didn't hear machines running. It was just an old data center, no longer operable. No employees.

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I later learned the marketing materials he sent me were a data center offering memorandum he swiped from Loopnet and changed out the info on.

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It was all a fraud. I was sick. And angry.

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I stayed up all night and did some digging.

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This guy had been scamming since he was 11. He started with runescape gold and posted YT videos of him bragging. His real name was J**** Pr***. And would you believe he lived only about an hour from me?

So I drove over there and staked out his apartment. He worked at McDonald's and owned a motorcycle.

I matched FB Marketplace pictures of the inside of his apartment with an approximate unit number, based on amenities that Zillow said it'd have.

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And then I ****redacted***** which helped me learn more info about him...

I turned it all over the the cops, the bank and the FBI.

No one really cared. $50k? Psshh. Child's play.

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I bought domain names of his first and last name and his name + the word "scam." What scammer doesn't even own their own domain name?

I put all the evidence I had on him on these websites.

I found years' old message board posts of people complaining about getting scammed by him. Dozens of pseudonyms...

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He'd always been a scammer, though and through.

I assembled a massive dossier on him and handed it over.

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Months later he did the same thing with $500k worth of hardware on someone else.

The victim was in Wisconsin, and ended up finding his stuff being sold on eBay from a serial number that he had logged.

That was enough evidence to get the cops to notice.

The rolled up on his storage unit and recovered most of the stuff.

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Eventually the bank recovered about 90% of my money. What a small price to pay for a dumb mistake. It could have been so much worse.

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And yes, this is his mugshot.

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The more you do business, the more you'll get stolen from. It sucks, but it's business!

That website I made to reveal him and his scams was "business" #67.

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I made 4 YT videos and podcasts detailing each of the 73 businesses I've started over the last 15 years. The last one of the series is linked below.

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Would love your follow @mhp_guy if you like stuff like this.

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Apple Podcasts: https://tkopod.co/ac

Spotify: https://tkopod.co/sc

‍All other podcast apps: https://tkopod.co/oc

‍YouTube: https://t.co/z5DuLCHSZ0