A Hiker's Trail of Lies: Part 2
The Perfect Scam
AARP
4.5 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 September 2018
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jeff has lived for decades as a couch-surfing con man preying on the kindness of the outdoors community. He spins tales of hikes he's never completed and exploits the sympathy of his marks with sad stories of his past to rip them off. Now Jeff's lies are finally catching up with him. After stealing a car and credit cards, the con man has turned fugitive with the police hot on his trail.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the perfect scam in part two of our through hiker scam story. |
| 0:04.0 | This week we pick up with con man turned fugitive Jeff Caldwell. |
| 0:08.0 | If you haven't listened to part one, now is a great time to do that. |
| 0:11.0 | I feel sorry for death. |
| 0:13.2 | Something happened to him that made him take this past. |
| 0:16.4 | You look through their history of emotional violence |
| 0:21.0 | that they've inflicted on people and the hurt that they've caused. |
| 0:24.7 | Like I would never trust this person. |
| 0:28.6 | For AARP, the Perfect Scam Podcast, I'm your host Will Johnson Johnson joined once again by my co-host |
| 0:33.6 | the AARP Fraud Watch Network Ambassador Frank Abagnale Frank I will great to be |
| 0:37.7 | with you we're picking up this week on a story we started last week the |
| 0:41.4 | saga if you will of of Jeff Caldwell, an outdoor guy, a mountain man, and a |
| 0:46.2 | con artist who had a long history of pretending to be someone he's not, taking advantage of women |
| 0:51.2 | along the way, and in this story taking his victim's car and credit cards. |
| 0:55.2 | As we ended up last week that woman Melissa Trent is thinking about taking matters into her own hands. |
| 1:01.2 | If you come across somebody on a dating site you like, not you, but somebody, one of our |
| 1:07.4 | listeners, and you're interested in them and maybe you want to get together with them. |
| 1:12.4 | I mean, can you do background |
| 1:13.5 | checks on say what are the services that are out there that you're aware of that |
| 1:17.8 | people can I mean obviously you can Google somebody yes there's nothing you |
| 1:20.9 | can't find out today about someone that That's what I mean. The resources that are available at someone's fingertips today and all the services that are available to do background checks on individuals. |
| 1:31.0 | This is why I'm very surprised when I get a lot of emails from young |
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