June 9, 2022 • 30 mins
Con artist Lizzie Mulder tries her darndest to spin her elaborate scams as innocent misunderstandings, but Detective Jordan Mirakian soon catches her in documented lie after lie. Especially about one victim she scams named Joe Love. While the criminal case against Lizzie Mulder gets stronger and stronger, the detective’s higher-ups and the Orange County DA’s office order him to close the case—and let Lizzie Mulder walk away scot-free. But what Detective Mirakian does next... no one sees coming.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
So Lizzie agreed to come down to the station and
talk to me. So I'm surprised she said yes. And
why did she say yes? Because she's an egomaniack. Lizzie
Mulder voluntarily goes down to the Laguna Beach Police station
in May of sixteen and for two hours straight tells
Detective Jordan Moraki in all sorts of incredible things because
(00:25):
I don't want to come to with what's really happy.
I didn't want to keep everything right out. I'm not lying. Oh,
but she most certainly is. You know that's how the
whole thing started. Is I not? If I could put
more money through my baby account, I could show that
we call right, would you were trying to employ the
(00:48):
numbers for that was the last option to police option that.
So Lizzie Mulder doesn't own that Laguna of Each home
overlooking the Pacific Ocean after all, even though she brags
to everyone that she does. And she admits she's not
(01:09):
a c p A either. But most importantly, Lizzie says
she never stole anyone's money. I was doing everything I
would never consider a golement. He didn't deignated, But Detective
Iraqian has a mountain of documents, emails, and bank records
(01:29):
that proves she did. Though it might not even matter
because the powers that be are now demanding he closed
the case and let Lizzie Mulder walk away scott free.
The district attorney told me, I don't think this is
a winnable case. It doesn't really have any jury appeal
and quite honestly, it's too convoluted and I don't think
(01:52):
you have enough to win in court. I'm Jonathan Walton
and this is Queen of the Con The O C
Savior Episode seven. I never told anybody now. Lizzie is
(02:22):
one of the best sociopathic crooks I've ever dealt with.
She presents herself as part of the elite class in
Laguna Beach. She has a husband who's a firefighter, which
you know, when when you're married to a cop or
a firefighter, it gives you a certain status, whether you're
(02:44):
male or female, when you're married to somebody in public service,
there are some bragging rights to that. She has two kids,
nice house and Laguna self made. I mean, she's just
a very well put together person when you meet her, right,
But that's all a facade. The whole thing is a facade.
(03:07):
In fact, I would venture to say that her husband,
Jesse Moulder, was and the kids were more of a prop.
When you're committing a crime, especially fraud, and you're facilitating
that crime with an expensive house, a nice car, nice clothes,
two kids and a husband. Every time she would defraud people,
(03:30):
they were part of that package because it made her
look like a stable, upstanding person, a pillar of society,
a working mom, instant credibility. Yeah, she would come in
with the kids, and she had the story, you know,
of being this self made accountant and you know, almost
self taught but went to Pepperdine University, which later turned
(03:51):
out to be completely false, but she had the degree
hanging in her office. You can get those on the internet.
It's not hard. But if you think about it. If
you're a small business owner and you show up, you
know you're going to hire an accountant, and and she says, well,
I work from home because I got these two kids.
You know, I'm a busy mom. And you show up
and they have a two point three million dollar home
(04:13):
in Laguna that where you can see the water, You're
gonna think this is the kind of person I want
to do business with. Successful. In May of six, Detective
Jordan Morakian is sitting down with his suspect Lizzie Mulder,
trying to get to the bottom of things. He's got
about a dozen victims who have come forward saying she's
(04:33):
scammed them, including Jay Avery from Jack Wines, print shop
owner Mike Cochrane, Jen Rodriguez's boss who runs a luxury
experience booking website, and high end salon owner Geneva Mendoza.
You know, usually with fraud, it's one or two scams, right,
it's check fraud and identity theft, or it's identity theft
(04:59):
and credit card and fraud. Lizzie was doing check fraud,
identity of credit card fraud. She was laundering money. I mean,
there were just so many different It was almost like
a Ponzi scheme. Like if one person was like, I'm
going to the cops. I know you're robbing me, I
know you're stealing from me. Um, she would say, well,
(05:19):
hold on one second, let me let me call this person.
I'll get back to you, and then all of a sudden,
deposit would show up in their account. Oh to keep
them at bay, and she would say, look, I got
the money back. It was an oversight. It was their fault.
But there's one victim Lizzie scams in a much more
personal way, an Orange County cowboy by the name of
(05:40):
Joe Love. Who is Joe Love? What a name? Right? Yeah?
He sounds like a porn star, Joe Love. Joe Love.
One of the motivations behind Lizzie's fraud is her love
of horses, and Joe Love is an ex boyfriend. He's
a retired military vet. Was she seeing Joe Love while
(06:01):
she was married to Jesse Moulder or this is an
ext boyfriend from a prior He was an ext boyfriend
prior to Jesse Moulder. Who I think Lizzie used that
relationship to con Joe Love. Oh so Joe Love is
a victim. He's a victim. How much did she get
from Joe Love? Well, Joe Love's father is the real
victim from because he owned the business. So they owned
(06:23):
a horse and feed company out in San Juan Capistrado.
And what she did with Joe Love, and this is
very clever, is she created fake U s d A
grants and told Joe that she was going to apply
(06:43):
for a grant on behalf of the U s Department
of Agriculture for people that own businesses that have to
do with cattle and feed. And then she sends the
email congratulations, you've been selected, right, So she's sending Joe
Love an email impersonating the U. S d A. Yeah,
So Joe Love gets an email and lo and behold,
(07:07):
forty dollars is deposited into his account, and Lizzie fools
Joe Love into thinking that forty dollars is the first
installment of a grant coming from the U. S d A.
The second installment of the grant, more dollars, is on
its way. So Joe Love is thinking he's getting a
total of eighty five thousand dollars in grant money, free
(07:30):
and clear from the U. S d A. But first
he just needs to do one thing. So what Lizzie
had done is she convinced Joe Love to take credit,
how eight thousand dollars worth of credit to buy a
bunch of supplies for his business. She said, you need
to spruce this business up by these supplies, sell them,
(07:55):
and then we'll pay off the credit card with the
money you get from the U. S d A. So
she deposited the money into the account, so he thought
he was going to get the rest of it, but
he never got it, and now he's left with this
huge bill of product that he bought. Joe Love never
receives that next dollars from the U. S d A.
(08:17):
Because it's all a scam and it essentially put him
out of business. So the scam was she made him
borrow money that she just took and he still had
to repay that money. But where did she get the
eight grand or whatever to deposit into his account from
her other victims? That's the elements, and then she took
that money back as well. But when Detective Miraqian asks
(08:40):
Lizzie about Joe Love, she tells him a very different story.
According to Lizzie, Joe Love is not the victim here.
She is. As someone who's been investigating scams for years,
I can tell you that is a classic con artist
move to paint themselves as the victim and paint their
(09:00):
victims as the perpetrators. And Lizzie lays it on thick.
Joe not a good guy. He's a bad guy. He
beat the ship and I can with great James, so
a lot of he beat shipped up. Um dude, you
don't want to. Did he even control me? He's real
(09:21):
women are suppos to be kill service. He just wanted
meet around so we get shipped off, so that he
taught so many issues. He was so there was a girl.
She's talking about her two young daughters. She's saying that, yes,
Joe love beats her, but on the bright side, he's
really good with the kids. We really were best friends.
(09:41):
But it wasn't like it helped me best friend. It
was a Jesse's gone. He's checked out mentally. He checked
out around us, and Joe just still that, and you know,
and it got to the point where he was requiring
me to be gone, and I told Jesse it says
I'd been laying in bed at night in the room
that I slept in, and I'd say, Jesse Colling, but
(10:04):
I'd be too fraid Joe would get mad where and
then I have to deal with it. You know. He
usually like beat the crap about of me when I
said something to somebody wrong. Okay, how many times they
beat you? I felt he kicks upon the drive home
last week, he was driving and he kicked me so hard.
(10:24):
I filled the praise of my cap. So you ordered
it to the police. Now, did you tell Jesse the
first time? Told Jesse he goes blood, the hell is
wrong with you? For the solivery? And I said, Joe
keeps me in the car, And I said, I never
wanted to tell you because you wouldn't lose your job
and you feel kill him and I don't. I'm killing
(10:46):
me this step just because I feel like it's a
terrible diarrhea. He's your next boyfriend of yours. He's a
we tried like something a long time ago, and he
just looked fulfilling what Jesse was on. You know, he
was with a filling the dad for the girl. So
(11:07):
you were having I was not okay. That's what I'm
trying to figure out. Joe denied that too. Yeah, we
put together. He did that. He sent him a couple
for marketing pictures. The text I probably okay. We just
set okay. So Lizzie says he's not sleeping with Joe Love,
(11:39):
but that he's filling in as a father figure for
her daughters when Jesse, her husband, is not around. Just
like what most of Lizzie says during this incredible police interview,
her Joe Love explanations are kind of hard to believe. Now,
at the same time all this is going on, I've
got Lizzie and Joe Love going up to NAPA together,
(12:00):
staying in the same hotel room. Okay, so they're blinking,
they're bumping uglies. Look, if I stayed in a hotel
room with an ex girlfriend of mine, we're probably sleeping together.
Hence the hotel room. Yeah. Talking to Lizzie Mulder, Detective
Moraqian already knows the intricacies of how she scams Shoe
(12:24):
Love and his father's company, Love Livestock by using fake
documents and fake emails and dollars in cash she steals
from other victims to trick Joe into believing he's got
an eighty five tho dollar us DA grant coming his way,
and so, at Lizzie's urging, he borrows eight five thousand dollars,
(12:48):
thinking the grant money will cover it. Of course, Lizzie
refutes those facts and doubles down on her I was
just trying to help him routine yahne of credit that
he opened with Love Livestock through you a line of credit,
be it probably I would paint everything that needs to
be paid. Okay, you know four hundred dollars here, six
(13:08):
hundred dollars here, sixteen hundred dollars. It's just it all
has Yeah, so you created that U s D a
document that I saw that said you were rewarded in
the eighty five thousand dollar grand. How to show it?
Death to show his dad for the purposes of buying cattle.
So he was trying to get his dad to what
agreed to buy the cattle on his property in a
(13:30):
length to go cosine on alone or yeah that it
wasn't anything like that. It was basically to keep dad going.
You know. So there's forty thousand. Why did you put
that into Love's account because he needed to buy his
dad toward the business offer? Business reason for you told him?
(13:53):
And that came from someone else, right like USDA, or
did you tell them, Hey, I'm putting forty grand mine
it was my money. That it was just like, let's
buy cattle and so make money. I never had like
a contract was in my mind. I don't want anything
(14:14):
that's happen to him because he's a victim in this too,
because I didn't say he would just give me time,
we can do this. Well, how is he a victim
if you put money into his account. He's not a
victim that way. He's a victim because I said, Joe,
you can't just run the store that's making no money.
He always wanted a rancher. Look at all the rants
(14:37):
that are out there. But there's so many opportunities for vetterate.
I mean, I didn't ask him to take this ship
out of me. I didn't you know. I had poured
it in. I didn't know if this would happened and
they had to walk away. My goal was never to
suck him over to where he would change his life
to put all this money cattle and not have a ranch.
(14:57):
He's the one who wanted to see the big ranch.
He's the one who the need to write a brand.
So if you're confused, it's because literally nothing you just
heard makes a lick of sense. And this next Lizzie
explanation takes the kick. You ever used any voice changing software? Yes, okay,
(15:17):
and tell me about that. I used that. Joe came
up with that. Joe started that for his dad, and
I never used it for Jack Wine. I never used
it for Laurence. I used it for Joe pretty much.
What about Tony? Guys never and there's no what was
(15:37):
it for to keep going? Like Fred was catching on to,
like everything going on with his USDA stuff. Fred is
Joe Loves father. We didn't do this without Fred. You
don't have the property of there. He bought a property
in Joy for as all inspections to Flad to feel comfortable,
to Cow the nine thousand dollars for you, Terry Cow.
(16:03):
It was a whole state of like like when I
say it, how stupid, I should just see now. I
wasn't to be part of that, but I just did
whatever they wanted me to do. Why I've never let
him say now. I talked to Joe Love a couple
(16:27):
of times over the phone. He doesn't want to be
interviewed for this podcast, but he tells me the scams
Lizzie Mulder pulled damaged him and his family profoundly and
ruined the relationship he had with his father Fred. They
stopped talking over it. Joe wasn't as hurt as Fred,
(16:49):
his father, because you know, Fred was really the business owner. Yeah,
And sadly, Joe Love's father, Fred died before they could
ever reconcile. Joe Love told me he never beat Lizzie
Mulder and he never suggested that she used voice changing
software either. He says he's just another victim of Lizzie's
(17:12):
many scams, and he deeply regrets ever letting her into
his life. So she scammed Joe Love. Did Joe Love
cooperate with you? Yes, he cooperated up to a point,
but he didn't want to file charges. It's not that
he didn't want to file charges, it's that he didn't
really want to be an active participant. I found myself
chasing him down and and I cut bait with him
(17:34):
because he can't. You can't unless he's willing. There's nothing
you can do, right, that's the law. I think Joe
was more embarrassed than anything else. You know, he got
taken advantage of. I will always paint the picture of
Joe Love as somebody who did what every guy that's
in love has done. Right. They fell into that trap.
You know, it's a powerful trap. It loves the most
(17:54):
powerful force in the world, and a good con artist
gets you to love them, because once you love someone,
you overlook a futon without even realized. Correct. Yeah, I
was a victim of that. I think we've all been
victims of that. So Lizzie talks to Detective Moraqian at
the Laguna Beach police station that night for a little
(18:17):
over two hours, but it's later discovered that Lizzie actually
checks herself into a psychiatric hospital weeks earlier, claiming mental illness.
Coincidentally or not, that was immediately after Jesse Mulder first
(18:38):
goes to police and starts calling up victims to let
them know Lizzie's stealing from them. There's two strategies to that. Strategy.
Number one is it paints a picture that you're the victim. Right,
I'm mentally ill. That's why I did this. I have
a problem. But strategy too is when you're in a
psychiatric hospital, police can't come in and get you. I
(19:00):
know you're safe. And for that matter, I can't even
confirm that she's there if I won't give you any
infant now because that's not allowed. Now. The only way
I found out that she was there was Jesse told me.
And what did Jesse say exactly that she threw a
fit and and left in a you know, in a
rage and checked herself into a mental hospital. So here's
(19:24):
what's amazing. My con did the same thing. Victims start circling.
They start showing up to court for another case she's
involved with to stare her down, and she doesn't want
to face them. So what does she do. She takes
an uber to Kedron Hospital, which is like a mental
health hospital here in Los Angeles. She tells them, I
just took a bunch of sleeping pills. I'm gonna kill myself.
They admit her. She gets out of going to court
(19:46):
for weeks and there's nothing anyone can do. She's safe.
And Lizzie Maltre did the same thing. Yeah, it just
didn't work out for her the way she planned because
I think the mental hospital recognized very quickly that thank God,
she doesn't need to be there, because she literally checked
herself in and was out the back door within a
day or two. And while Lizzie's mental hospital trick doesn't
(20:07):
do the trick, fortune really does favor the bold because
she's about to walk away from her crimes altogether. Who
with zero criminal charges. Detective mirachians being told by his
higher ups to close the case, and the Orange County
District Attorney's office isn't planning to prosecute Lizzie Maulder for
(20:28):
scamming all those people, the district attorney told me, and
I don't think you have enough to win in court.
If Detective Miraqian just does what he's told to do,
like most detectives would in this case, Lizzie Maulder walks free,
(20:52):
but Detective Miraqian refuses to close the case. He's put
hundreds of hours of work into it. At this point.
He gives victims his personal cell phone number and they
call him at home at all hours, annoying his wife.
When one victim wants to drop out, he talks them
back in. He's come way too far to just walk
(21:13):
away and let Lizzie Mulder get away. So I started
thinking about it, and I was like, well, you know,
I'll bet she's falsified her income taxes. So I called
a criminal investigator from the I r S. And the
minute he got attached to it, it becomes a federal case. Yeah, dude,
(21:35):
you are fucking amazing. I appreciate the times. If the
d A tells the cop there's no case, it's done,
it's done. But you thought federally I could go. I
could leap frog the d A who says there's no case.
I can't prove it we can't win it, and I'll
and I'll share with you. The d A was pissed,
(21:58):
I'm sure because we kind of may them look bad.
I did inadvertently, but it was like, well, if you're
not going to do your job, then I'm gonna find
somebody that will. My name is James Kim. I'm a
special Asian with Internal Revenue Service criminal investigations. When Detective
(22:19):
Miraculum reaches out to I R S Special Agent James
Kim in July of six, the measured and deliberate investigator
has got dozens of competing criminal cases he's already looking into.
But what jumped out at you? What interested you to
make you think, oh, this is a case for the
I R S. I think the dollar amount, Yeah, the
dollar amount was pretty big. And then the sophistication that
(22:44):
Elisabit Mulder used to defraud her victims. At this point,
Lizzie Mulder has scammed more than one point five million
dollars from her circle of friends and clients, using a
series of elaborate confidence tricks involving forged documents, fake identities,
a secret bank account, and voice changing software. Not to
(23:08):
mention she's ripping off the i r S two. Since
I worked for the Internal Revenue Service, I have to
see if the money that she stole she actually reported
that on our tax returns. So criminals are supposed to
report the money they steal exactly. So um, a lot
(23:29):
of these grand jury investigations involves a di r S
because they're not reporting the proceeds from their illegal conduct. Remember,
it was an i r S investigation that actually put
reputed mobster al Capone behind bars, in for not paying
taxes on his criminal income. Even though he famously robs
(23:52):
and murders scores of people, it was tax evasion that
ultimately sent him away. Now, if a criminal reports their
stolen money as income, does that trigger another investigation? If
not from the i r S, from someone else do
so a criminal could report their stolen income and be okay, yeah,
(24:12):
well that's comforting for all the criminals listening. Just report
what you stole so you don't incur the ire of
the i r S. Not surprisingly, though, Lizzie Mulder doesn't
report the money she steals as income, which, if you recall,
directly contradicts what she tells Detective Morackian during that police interview. Everything.
(24:39):
But if she really is paying herself. Why isn't she
reporting it as income? You know, it's kind of ironic
because her being you know, the tax account. That's something
that she should know, she should have done. So after
I R S. Special Agent James kim sings his teeth
into the Lizzie Mulder case and Lizzie Mulder was also
falsifying tax or to and that's your neck of the
(25:01):
woods too, right, He quickly surmises there's a lot of
meat on this bone, enough to make a federal case
out of so he contacts the Department of Justice. Generally,
the FBI can investigate basically whatever it wants today. Scott
Tenley is a partner in the Orange County law firm
Michaelman and Robinson, working in their white collar Defense and
(25:24):
Government Investigations practice group. But in tween he's an enterprising
U S attorney at the Department of Justice. He kind
of looks like one of those prepossessing lawyers you see
on Network TV crime show Procedurals. You know, one question
might be, well, why is this a federal crime? And
see the federal crime is wire fraud. Once you swipe
a credit card, it pings in another state. Bam, that's
(25:48):
the FBI that's across state line. Exactly. Almost anything you do,
you swipe an a t M card, you send a wire,
it's going to go through the Federal Reserve, it's going
to go through Bank of America and all over the place,
multiple state and these days it's almost impossible not to
be committing a federal crime when you're doing fraud. Once
the Department of Justice gets involved, they use the vast
(26:09):
resources of the FBI to dig deep into all the
alleged crimes of Lizzie malder issuing dozens of new subpoenas
for bank records, email accounts, and cell phone records. So
I think the winery was interesting because it was the
I'm going to help you sell your business. And what
(26:29):
one of the unique aspects of the case is one
of the ways that she made it seem like she
was going to sell the business is she created this
false persona yeah, the Chinese investor, right, and used his
email address to make it appear as if there's this
acquisition activity going on. But then the other big one,
which obviously caught the attention to the i R S
was this income tax Payments dB A where she sets
up a company called Income Tax Payments and then takes
(26:52):
a check made out to her company that says income
Tax Payments to the victim and says, sign this because
I'm going to pay your income taxes. And the signatory
looks at the check income Tax Payments, perfect signs it,
and it's just going right into her account, not to
the r R S. I mean, those are kind of
the two ones that you saw the most. The FBI
agent who investigates Lizzie Malder for the Department of Justice
(27:15):
really builds on and strengthens the criminal case that Detective
Jordan Mirakian put together during his investigation, and U S
Attorney Scott Tenley goes on a lot of field trips
to suss everything out. One of the other things I
remember vividly about this early part of this case is
I went to Laguna Beach Police Department with Jordan's and
Special Agent Kim from the I R S. And he's like,
(27:37):
WELLY sees all these boxes from Lizzie, Um, maybe we'll
find I can't remember, we're looking for bank records. He's like,
let's go look, and so we go to the back
of the Laguna Beach Police Department and we walk into
their evidence trailer. I think I immediately got high from
all the marijuana that they had stored there, and so
(27:57):
we're looking through boxes that I'm like, guys, I think
we gotta do the outside. At one point that was
one of my earliest case memories working with Jordan's. It's
really funny. So they had confiscated a lot of marijuana,
tons of marijuana there and I don't even know if
they sealed in bags. Maybe it was just open, but
it was like that seemed to be most of their
evidence locker at the time. Is really funny. Hi Jink's aside,
(28:21):
Now that the FBI is involved, it's a big freaking deal.
And that isn't long before Lizzie Mulder finds out she's
the target of a federal investigation, and what she does
next shocks everyone. You know, it's a bold move, but
I didn't bat an eyelash. Next time, on Queen of
(28:48):
the Con the o C Savior Lizzie's victims confront her
head on. Lizzie, you're a horrible person. You have no
regard for anyone but yourself. And for the first time ever,
Lizzie Malder speaks publicly about all her scams. As a
mother two young daughters, I fear that my actions will
cause them pain, and I have fear that my legacy
(29:08):
in life will be that the good that I did
in life will not outshine all this bad. Queen of
a con The O C. Savior is a production of
a y R Media and I Heart Media, Hosted by
(29:29):
Me Jonathan Walton, Executive producers Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton
Productions and Eliza Rosen for A y R Media. Written
by Jonathan Walton, Consulting producer Evan Goldstein, Senior Associate producer
Eric Newman. Sound design by Baked ZD Media, mixed and
(29:51):
mastered by Cameron Taggy. Sound editing, audio and studio engineering
by Matt Jacobson. Legal counsel for a our Media, Gianni Douglas,
Executive producer for iHeartMedia, Maya Howard
So Lizzie agreed to come down to the station and
talk to me. So I'm surprised she said yes. And
why did she say yes? Because she's an egomaniack. Lizzie
Mulder voluntarily goes down to the Laguna Beach Police station
in May of sixteen and for two hours straight tells
Detective Jordan Moraki in all sorts of incredible things because
(00:25):
I don't want to come to with what's really happy.
I didn't want to keep everything right out. I'm not lying. Oh,
but she most certainly is. You know that's how the
whole thing started. Is I not? If I could put
more money through my baby account, I could show that
we call right, would you were trying to employ the
(00:48):
numbers for that was the last option to police option that.
So Lizzie Mulder doesn't own that Laguna of Each home
overlooking the Pacific Ocean after all, even though she brags
to everyone that she does. And she admits she's not
(01:09):
a c p A either. But most importantly, Lizzie says
she never stole anyone's money. I was doing everything I
would never consider a golement. He didn't deignated, But Detective
Iraqian has a mountain of documents, emails, and bank records
(01:29):
that proves she did. Though it might not even matter
because the powers that be are now demanding he closed
the case and let Lizzie Mulder walk away scott free.
The district attorney told me, I don't think this is
a winnable case. It doesn't really have any jury appeal
and quite honestly, it's too convoluted and I don't think
(01:52):
you have enough to win in court. I'm Jonathan Walton
and this is Queen of the Con The O C
Savior Episode seven. I never told anybody now. Lizzie is
(02:22):
one of the best sociopathic crooks I've ever dealt with.
She presents herself as part of the elite class in
Laguna Beach. She has a husband who's a firefighter, which
you know, when when you're married to a cop or
a firefighter, it gives you a certain status, whether you're
(02:44):
male or female, when you're married to somebody in public service,
there are some bragging rights to that. She has two kids,
nice house and Laguna self made. I mean, she's just
a very well put together person when you meet her, right,
But that's all a facade. The whole thing is a facade.
(03:07):
In fact, I would venture to say that her husband,
Jesse Moulder, was and the kids were more of a prop.
When you're committing a crime, especially fraud, and you're facilitating
that crime with an expensive house, a nice car, nice clothes,
two kids and a husband. Every time she would defraud people,
(03:30):
they were part of that package because it made her
look like a stable, upstanding person, a pillar of society,
a working mom, instant credibility. Yeah, she would come in
with the kids, and she had the story, you know,
of being this self made accountant and you know, almost
self taught but went to Pepperdine University, which later turned
(03:51):
out to be completely false, but she had the degree
hanging in her office. You can get those on the internet.
It's not hard. But if you think about it. If
you're a small business owner and you show up, you
know you're going to hire an accountant, and and she says, well,
I work from home because I got these two kids.
You know, I'm a busy mom. And you show up
and they have a two point three million dollar home
(04:13):
in Laguna that where you can see the water, You're
gonna think this is the kind of person I want
to do business with. Successful. In May of six, Detective
Jordan Morakian is sitting down with his suspect Lizzie Mulder,
trying to get to the bottom of things. He's got
about a dozen victims who have come forward saying she's
(04:33):
scammed them, including Jay Avery from Jack Wines, print shop
owner Mike Cochrane, Jen Rodriguez's boss who runs a luxury
experience booking website, and high end salon owner Geneva Mendoza.
You know, usually with fraud, it's one or two scams, right,
it's check fraud and identity theft, or it's identity theft
(04:59):
and credit card and fraud. Lizzie was doing check fraud,
identity of credit card fraud. She was laundering money. I mean,
there were just so many different It was almost like
a Ponzi scheme. Like if one person was like, I'm
going to the cops. I know you're robbing me, I
know you're stealing from me. Um, she would say, well,
(05:19):
hold on one second, let me let me call this person.
I'll get back to you, and then all of a sudden,
deposit would show up in their account. Oh to keep
them at bay, and she would say, look, I got
the money back. It was an oversight. It was their fault.
But there's one victim Lizzie scams in a much more
personal way, an Orange County cowboy by the name of
(05:40):
Joe Love. Who is Joe Love? What a name? Right? Yeah?
He sounds like a porn star, Joe Love. Joe Love.
One of the motivations behind Lizzie's fraud is her love
of horses, and Joe Love is an ex boyfriend. He's
a retired military vet. Was she seeing Joe Love while
(06:01):
she was married to Jesse Moulder or this is an
ext boyfriend from a prior He was an ext boyfriend
prior to Jesse Moulder. Who I think Lizzie used that
relationship to con Joe Love. Oh so Joe Love is
a victim. He's a victim. How much did she get
from Joe Love? Well, Joe Love's father is the real
victim from because he owned the business. So they owned
(06:23):
a horse and feed company out in San Juan Capistrado.
And what she did with Joe Love, and this is
very clever, is she created fake U s d A
grants and told Joe that she was going to apply
(06:43):
for a grant on behalf of the U s Department
of Agriculture for people that own businesses that have to
do with cattle and feed. And then she sends the
email congratulations, you've been selected, right, So she's sending Joe
Love an email impersonating the U. S d A. Yeah,
So Joe Love gets an email and lo and behold,
(07:07):
forty dollars is deposited into his account, and Lizzie fools
Joe Love into thinking that forty dollars is the first
installment of a grant coming from the U. S d A.
The second installment of the grant, more dollars, is on
its way. So Joe Love is thinking he's getting a
total of eighty five thousand dollars in grant money, free
(07:30):
and clear from the U. S d A. But first
he just needs to do one thing. So what Lizzie
had done is she convinced Joe Love to take credit,
how eight thousand dollars worth of credit to buy a
bunch of supplies for his business. She said, you need
to spruce this business up by these supplies, sell them,
(07:55):
and then we'll pay off the credit card with the
money you get from the U. S d A. So
she deposited the money into the account, so he thought
he was going to get the rest of it, but
he never got it, and now he's left with this
huge bill of product that he bought. Joe Love never
receives that next dollars from the U. S d A.
(08:17):
Because it's all a scam and it essentially put him
out of business. So the scam was she made him
borrow money that she just took and he still had
to repay that money. But where did she get the
eight grand or whatever to deposit into his account from
her other victims? That's the elements, and then she took
that money back as well. But when Detective Miraqian asks
(08:40):
Lizzie about Joe Love, she tells him a very different story.
According to Lizzie, Joe Love is not the victim here.
She is. As someone who's been investigating scams for years,
I can tell you that is a classic con artist
move to paint themselves as the victim and paint their
(09:00):
victims as the perpetrators. And Lizzie lays it on thick.
Joe not a good guy. He's a bad guy. He
beat the ship and I can with great James, so
a lot of he beat shipped up. Um dude, you
don't want to. Did he even control me? He's real
(09:21):
women are suppos to be kill service. He just wanted
meet around so we get shipped off, so that he
taught so many issues. He was so there was a girl.
She's talking about her two young daughters. She's saying that, yes,
Joe love beats her, but on the bright side, he's
really good with the kids. We really were best friends.
(09:41):
But it wasn't like it helped me best friend. It
was a Jesse's gone. He's checked out mentally. He checked
out around us, and Joe just still that, and you know,
and it got to the point where he was requiring
me to be gone, and I told Jesse it says
I'd been laying in bed at night in the room
that I slept in, and I'd say, Jesse Colling, but
(10:04):
I'd be too fraid Joe would get mad where and
then I have to deal with it. You know. He
usually like beat the crap about of me when I
said something to somebody wrong. Okay, how many times they
beat you? I felt he kicks upon the drive home
last week, he was driving and he kicked me so hard.
(10:24):
I filled the praise of my cap. So you ordered
it to the police. Now, did you tell Jesse the
first time? Told Jesse he goes blood, the hell is
wrong with you? For the solivery? And I said, Joe
keeps me in the car, And I said, I never
wanted to tell you because you wouldn't lose your job
and you feel kill him and I don't. I'm killing
(10:46):
me this step just because I feel like it's a
terrible diarrhea. He's your next boyfriend of yours. He's a
we tried like something a long time ago, and he
just looked fulfilling what Jesse was on. You know, he
was with a filling the dad for the girl. So
(11:07):
you were having I was not okay. That's what I'm
trying to figure out. Joe denied that too. Yeah, we
put together. He did that. He sent him a couple
for marketing pictures. The text I probably okay. We just
set okay. So Lizzie says he's not sleeping with Joe Love,
(11:39):
but that he's filling in as a father figure for
her daughters when Jesse, her husband, is not around. Just
like what most of Lizzie says during this incredible police interview,
her Joe Love explanations are kind of hard to believe. Now,
at the same time all this is going on, I've
got Lizzie and Joe Love going up to NAPA together,
(12:00):
staying in the same hotel room. Okay, so they're blinking,
they're bumping uglies. Look, if I stayed in a hotel
room with an ex girlfriend of mine, we're probably sleeping together.
Hence the hotel room. Yeah. Talking to Lizzie Mulder, Detective
Moraqian already knows the intricacies of how she scams Shoe
(12:24):
Love and his father's company, Love Livestock by using fake
documents and fake emails and dollars in cash she steals
from other victims to trick Joe into believing he's got
an eighty five tho dollar us DA grant coming his way,
and so, at Lizzie's urging, he borrows eight five thousand dollars,
(12:48):
thinking the grant money will cover it. Of course, Lizzie
refutes those facts and doubles down on her I was
just trying to help him routine yahne of credit that
he opened with Love Livestock through you a line of credit,
be it probably I would paint everything that needs to
be paid. Okay, you know four hundred dollars here, six
(13:08):
hundred dollars here, sixteen hundred dollars. It's just it all
has Yeah, so you created that U s D a
document that I saw that said you were rewarded in
the eighty five thousand dollar grand. How to show it?
Death to show his dad for the purposes of buying cattle.
So he was trying to get his dad to what
agreed to buy the cattle on his property in a
(13:30):
length to go cosine on alone or yeah that it
wasn't anything like that. It was basically to keep dad going.
You know. So there's forty thousand. Why did you put
that into Love's account because he needed to buy his
dad toward the business offer? Business reason for you told him?
(13:53):
And that came from someone else, right like USDA, or
did you tell them, Hey, I'm putting forty grand mine
it was my money. That it was just like, let's
buy cattle and so make money. I never had like
a contract was in my mind. I don't want anything
(14:14):
that's happen to him because he's a victim in this too,
because I didn't say he would just give me time,
we can do this. Well, how is he a victim
if you put money into his account. He's not a
victim that way. He's a victim because I said, Joe,
you can't just run the store that's making no money.
He always wanted a rancher. Look at all the rants
(14:37):
that are out there. But there's so many opportunities for vetterate.
I mean, I didn't ask him to take this ship
out of me. I didn't you know. I had poured
it in. I didn't know if this would happened and
they had to walk away. My goal was never to
suck him over to where he would change his life
to put all this money cattle and not have a ranch.
(14:57):
He's the one who wanted to see the big ranch.
He's the one who the need to write a brand.
So if you're confused, it's because literally nothing you just
heard makes a lick of sense. And this next Lizzie
explanation takes the kick. You ever used any voice changing software? Yes, okay,
(15:17):
and tell me about that. I used that. Joe came
up with that. Joe started that for his dad, and
I never used it for Jack Wine. I never used
it for Laurence. I used it for Joe pretty much.
What about Tony? Guys never and there's no what was
(15:37):
it for to keep going? Like Fred was catching on to,
like everything going on with his USDA stuff. Fred is
Joe Loves father. We didn't do this without Fred. You
don't have the property of there. He bought a property
in Joy for as all inspections to Flad to feel comfortable,
to Cow the nine thousand dollars for you, Terry Cow.
(16:03):
It was a whole state of like like when I
say it, how stupid, I should just see now. I
wasn't to be part of that, but I just did
whatever they wanted me to do. Why I've never let
him say now. I talked to Joe Love a couple
(16:27):
of times over the phone. He doesn't want to be
interviewed for this podcast, but he tells me the scams
Lizzie Mulder pulled damaged him and his family profoundly and
ruined the relationship he had with his father Fred. They
stopped talking over it. Joe wasn't as hurt as Fred,
(16:49):
his father, because you know, Fred was really the business owner. Yeah,
And sadly, Joe Love's father, Fred died before they could
ever reconcile. Joe Love told me he never beat Lizzie
Mulder and he never suggested that she used voice changing
software either. He says he's just another victim of Lizzie's
(17:12):
many scams, and he deeply regrets ever letting her into
his life. So she scammed Joe Love. Did Joe Love
cooperate with you? Yes, he cooperated up to a point,
but he didn't want to file charges. It's not that
he didn't want to file charges, it's that he didn't
really want to be an active participant. I found myself
chasing him down and and I cut bait with him
(17:34):
because he can't. You can't unless he's willing. There's nothing
you can do, right, that's the law. I think Joe
was more embarrassed than anything else. You know, he got
taken advantage of. I will always paint the picture of
Joe Love as somebody who did what every guy that's
in love has done. Right. They fell into that trap.
You know, it's a powerful trap. It loves the most
(17:54):
powerful force in the world, and a good con artist
gets you to love them, because once you love someone,
you overlook a futon without even realized. Correct. Yeah, I
was a victim of that. I think we've all been
victims of that. So Lizzie talks to Detective Moraqian at
the Laguna Beach police station that night for a little
(18:17):
over two hours, but it's later discovered that Lizzie actually
checks herself into a psychiatric hospital weeks earlier, claiming mental illness.
Coincidentally or not, that was immediately after Jesse Mulder first
(18:38):
goes to police and starts calling up victims to let
them know Lizzie's stealing from them. There's two strategies to that. Strategy.
Number one is it paints a picture that you're the victim. Right,
I'm mentally ill. That's why I did this. I have
a problem. But strategy too is when you're in a
psychiatric hospital, police can't come in and get you. I
(19:00):
know you're safe. And for that matter, I can't even
confirm that she's there if I won't give you any
infant now because that's not allowed. Now. The only way
I found out that she was there was Jesse told me.
And what did Jesse say exactly that she threw a
fit and and left in a you know, in a
rage and checked herself into a mental hospital. So here's
(19:24):
what's amazing. My con did the same thing. Victims start circling.
They start showing up to court for another case she's
involved with to stare her down, and she doesn't want
to face them. So what does she do. She takes
an uber to Kedron Hospital, which is like a mental
health hospital here in Los Angeles. She tells them, I
just took a bunch of sleeping pills. I'm gonna kill myself.
They admit her. She gets out of going to court
(19:46):
for weeks and there's nothing anyone can do. She's safe.
And Lizzie Maltre did the same thing. Yeah, it just
didn't work out for her the way she planned because
I think the mental hospital recognized very quickly that thank God,
she doesn't need to be there, because she literally checked
herself in and was out the back door within a
day or two. And while Lizzie's mental hospital trick doesn't
(20:07):
do the trick, fortune really does favor the bold because
she's about to walk away from her crimes altogether. Who
with zero criminal charges. Detective mirachians being told by his
higher ups to close the case, and the Orange County
District Attorney's office isn't planning to prosecute Lizzie Maulder for
(20:28):
scamming all those people, the district attorney told me, and
I don't think you have enough to win in court.
If Detective Miraqian just does what he's told to do,
like most detectives would in this case, Lizzie Maulder walks free,
(20:52):
but Detective Miraqian refuses to close the case. He's put
hundreds of hours of work into it. At this point.
He gives victims his personal cell phone number and they
call him at home at all hours, annoying his wife.
When one victim wants to drop out, he talks them
back in. He's come way too far to just walk
(21:13):
away and let Lizzie Mulder get away. So I started
thinking about it, and I was like, well, you know,
I'll bet she's falsified her income taxes. So I called
a criminal investigator from the I r S. And the
minute he got attached to it, it becomes a federal case. Yeah, dude,
(21:35):
you are fucking amazing. I appreciate the times. If the
d A tells the cop there's no case, it's done,
it's done. But you thought federally I could go. I
could leap frog the d A who says there's no case.
I can't prove it we can't win it, and I'll
and I'll share with you. The d A was pissed,
(21:58):
I'm sure because we kind of may them look bad.
I did inadvertently, but it was like, well, if you're
not going to do your job, then I'm gonna find
somebody that will. My name is James Kim. I'm a
special Asian with Internal Revenue Service criminal investigations. When Detective
(22:19):
Miraculum reaches out to I R S Special Agent James
Kim in July of six, the measured and deliberate investigator
has got dozens of competing criminal cases he's already looking into.
But what jumped out at you? What interested you to
make you think, oh, this is a case for the
I R S. I think the dollar amount, Yeah, the
dollar amount was pretty big. And then the sophistication that
(22:44):
Elisabit Mulder used to defraud her victims. At this point,
Lizzie Mulder has scammed more than one point five million
dollars from her circle of friends and clients, using a
series of elaborate confidence tricks involving forged documents, fake identities,
a secret bank account, and voice changing software. Not to
(23:08):
mention she's ripping off the i r S two. Since
I worked for the Internal Revenue Service, I have to
see if the money that she stole she actually reported
that on our tax returns. So criminals are supposed to
report the money they steal exactly. So um, a lot
(23:29):
of these grand jury investigations involves a di r S
because they're not reporting the proceeds from their illegal conduct. Remember,
it was an i r S investigation that actually put
reputed mobster al Capone behind bars, in for not paying
taxes on his criminal income. Even though he famously robs
(23:52):
and murders scores of people, it was tax evasion that
ultimately sent him away. Now, if a criminal reports their
stolen money as income, does that trigger another investigation? If
not from the i r S, from someone else do
so a criminal could report their stolen income and be okay, yeah,
(24:12):
well that's comforting for all the criminals listening. Just report
what you stole so you don't incur the ire of
the i r S. Not surprisingly, though, Lizzie Mulder doesn't
report the money she steals as income, which, if you recall,
directly contradicts what she tells Detective Morackian during that police interview. Everything.
(24:39):
But if she really is paying herself. Why isn't she
reporting it as income? You know, it's kind of ironic
because her being you know, the tax account. That's something
that she should know, she should have done. So after
I R S. Special Agent James kim sings his teeth
into the Lizzie Mulder case and Lizzie Mulder was also
falsifying tax or to and that's your neck of the
(25:01):
woods too, right, He quickly surmises there's a lot of
meat on this bone, enough to make a federal case
out of so he contacts the Department of Justice. Generally,
the FBI can investigate basically whatever it wants today. Scott
Tenley is a partner in the Orange County law firm
Michaelman and Robinson, working in their white collar Defense and
(25:24):
Government Investigations practice group. But in tween he's an enterprising
U S attorney at the Department of Justice. He kind
of looks like one of those prepossessing lawyers you see
on Network TV crime show Procedurals. You know, one question
might be, well, why is this a federal crime? And
see the federal crime is wire fraud. Once you swipe
a credit card, it pings in another state. Bam, that's
(25:48):
the FBI that's across state line. Exactly. Almost anything you do,
you swipe an a t M card, you send a wire,
it's going to go through the Federal Reserve, it's going
to go through Bank of America and all over the place,
multiple state and these days it's almost impossible not to
be committing a federal crime when you're doing fraud. Once
the Department of Justice gets involved, they use the vast
(26:09):
resources of the FBI to dig deep into all the
alleged crimes of Lizzie malder issuing dozens of new subpoenas
for bank records, email accounts, and cell phone records. So
I think the winery was interesting because it was the
I'm going to help you sell your business. And what
(26:29):
one of the unique aspects of the case is one
of the ways that she made it seem like she
was going to sell the business is she created this
false persona yeah, the Chinese investor, right, and used his
email address to make it appear as if there's this
acquisition activity going on. But then the other big one,
which obviously caught the attention to the i R S
was this income tax Payments dB A where she sets
up a company called Income Tax Payments and then takes
(26:52):
a check made out to her company that says income
Tax Payments to the victim and says, sign this because
I'm going to pay your income taxes. And the signatory
looks at the check income Tax Payments, perfect signs it,
and it's just going right into her account, not to
the r R S. I mean, those are kind of
the two ones that you saw the most. The FBI
agent who investigates Lizzie Malder for the Department of Justice
(27:15):
really builds on and strengthens the criminal case that Detective
Jordan Mirakian put together during his investigation, and U S
Attorney Scott Tenley goes on a lot of field trips
to suss everything out. One of the other things I
remember vividly about this early part of this case is
I went to Laguna Beach Police Department with Jordan's and
Special Agent Kim from the I R S. And he's like,
(27:37):
WELLY sees all these boxes from Lizzie, Um, maybe we'll
find I can't remember, we're looking for bank records. He's like,
let's go look, and so we go to the back
of the Laguna Beach Police Department and we walk into
their evidence trailer. I think I immediately got high from
all the marijuana that they had stored there, and so
(27:57):
we're looking through boxes that I'm like, guys, I think
we gotta do the outside. At one point that was
one of my earliest case memories working with Jordan's. It's
really funny. So they had confiscated a lot of marijuana,
tons of marijuana there and I don't even know if
they sealed in bags. Maybe it was just open, but
it was like that seemed to be most of their
evidence locker at the time. Is really funny. Hi Jink's aside,
(28:21):
Now that the FBI is involved, it's a big freaking deal.
And that isn't long before Lizzie Mulder finds out she's
the target of a federal investigation, and what she does
next shocks everyone. You know, it's a bold move, but
I didn't bat an eyelash. Next time, on Queen of
(28:48):
the Con the o C Savior Lizzie's victims confront her
head on. Lizzie, you're a horrible person. You have no
regard for anyone but yourself. And for the first time ever,
Lizzie Malder speaks publicly about all her scams. As a
mother two young daughters, I fear that my actions will
cause them pain, and I have fear that my legacy
(29:08):
in life will be that the good that I did
in life will not outshine all this bad. Queen of
a con The O C. Savior is a production of
a y R Media and I Heart Media, Hosted by
(29:29):
Me Jonathan Walton, Executive producers Jonathan Walton for Jonathan Walton
Productions and Eliza Rosen for A y R Media. Written
by Jonathan Walton, Consulting producer Evan Goldstein, Senior Associate producer
Eric Newman. Sound design by Baked ZD Media, mixed and
(29:51):
mastered by Cameron Taggy. Sound editing, audio and studio engineering
by Matt Jacobson. Legal counsel for a our Media, Gianni Douglas,
Executive producer for iHeartMedia, Maya Howard
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