Job Seekers Targeted in Water Filtration Job Scam, Part 2

The Perfect Scam

AARP

True Crime, Aarp, Fraud, Society & Culture, Scam, Crime, Bobsullivan

4.5 • 980 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In part 2, victims of a nationwide fraud scheme join forces on a Facebook group and share their stories with investigative journalist Lou Raguse of KARE in Minneapolis. Someone is selling water purification devices to entrepreneurs, who think they are getting in on the ground floor of a great opportunity, but then fails to deliver the promised gadgets. Lou discovers the criminal’s identity is Charles Fields, a suburban Minneapolis father who uses a host of aliases to pull off the scheme. Lou and the victims’ dedication, along with the discovery of key evidence in an unusual place, help law enforcement successfully bring Fields to justice.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This week on The Perfect Cam.
0:05.0	The homeowner went out to their driveway.
0:08.0	They pulled the cans out for garbage pickup, and when they opened the lid,
0:12.0	just discovered that sort of mysterious things had been added.
0:16.0	It wasn't their own garbage or recycling.
0:19.0	But they were able to make out a few different names out of what
0:23.3	appeared to be a series of shredded records like had gone through a paper shredder and one of the
0:29.7	names that they recognized appeared to be charles fields and what appeared to be his unfolding fraud
0:35.6	scam appeared to be his unfolding fraud scam.
0:43.2	Welcome back to the perfect scam.
0:45.2	I'm your host, Bob Sullivan.
0:51.4	When we left our story, someone was selling water purification devices to hundreds of entrepreneurs around the country who never received the gadgets they'd bought.
0:55.7	The seller used the names like Michael Brun and David Mueller, and he said his company was called
1:01.5	WaterTech or Mile High H-2O or a host of other names. But the victims had joined forces
1:08.2	on a Facebook group and realized they'd all been told the same story.
1:12.9	And now they've told their story to investigative journalist Lou Vergoose of K-A-R-E in Minneapolis,
1:19.4	who is determined to discover the criminal's real identity.
1:23.5	So it interviews dozens of victims, the entrepreneurs who thought they were getting in on the ground floor of a great opportunity.
1:32.1	They thought that they would be good at it. And the whole thing was they were going to be selling a water filtration device.
1:39.5	They would be either selling it or holding little seminars to recruit other people to sell it,
1:46.0	teaching them how to sell it. And the catch was they needed to buy one of the units themselves
1:52.9	in order to know how it works and be able to sell it essentially. And that made sense to all of
	...

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