Welcome back to the perfect scam. I'm your host Bob Sullivan and we come back to this season at a very special moment.

This is our 100th episode. That's a hundred stories of pain, struggle,

sociopathic criminals, heartbroken victims, but ultimately, triumph.

Because we know every time a victim tells their story they save countless

others from being victimized by the same crime and they often help put

criminals behind bars. We know this because we have heard from so many of

you through the years. After millions of downloads from all those listeners, we

get emails, comments, social media posts from people thanking our guests for

telling their stories.

Why?

Because when it was their turn to be targeted by a criminal with a romance scam or a virtual

kidnapping or a Ponzi scheme they'd heard the story before and they just said no.

That's my favorite thing about hosting this podcast, hearing from what we call

near misses, people who have been inoculated against scams because they've heard

the stories before. And in fact a little later on you're going to hear

from some listeners with their near-miss stories. I love a good happy ending. But before

that we're going to revisit some of our favorite moments from the first 100 episodes of The Perfect Scam.

Here we go.

I've never seen anybody hide on plain sight like this.

I felt like I had been dressed into the deepest, darkest, blackest pit I could never have imagined.

The Ponzi scheme succeeds often by the power of the personality,

of the person that's running it,

...