This week on The Perfect Scam.

I mean, just the depth of the kinds of fraud, this is like they were running like a big megamol of fraud or something.

I think network is the better word. It's just crazy. It's like this whole fraud ecosystem.

There's all kinds of different types and just the sheer number of people that are involved

is staggering. There's so many people that it takes to make these schemes work.

Welcome back to The Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. You know Summer is starting to wind down when you start to see those back-to-school sales

signs pop up everywhere.

This time of year probably makes many of you think about buying a new backpack or dropping

off someone you love on a big college campus or maybe moving someone into a dorm room,

maybe even sending pizza money

to that hungry, lonely student. I doubt it makes many of you think about an international crime

ring. But in today's story, you'll find out why a small college town can be the perfect

place to operate a huge scam,

to recruit a small army of young students into a scheme that can steal from hundreds of victims,

and why what might seem like pizza money transactions can mask millions of dollars in fraud.

We've plucked today's story from our archives while we work on all new episodes of The Perfect Scam.

Today we're taking you to a small, pastoral college town in western West Virginia.

So far west, it's right on the Kentucky border.

When the leaves turn in the fall, you can imagine why someone would call it almost heaven. Huntington, West Virginia, is famous as the home of Marshall University, which in the 1970s

suffered one of the saddest disasters in the history of U.S. sports.

A charter flight crashed, killing most of the school's football team back then.

A great movie, We Are Marshall, starring Matthew McConaughey, tells that story.

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