May 5, 2022 • 30 mins
When Lizzie’s husband Jesse calls up salon owners Lauren and Geneva to tell them that his wife has been stealing from them, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Suddenly, Laguna Beach PD’s fraud detective Jordan Mirakian is fielding calls from a number of victims. He learns that Lizzie used an elaborate system of phony emails, invoices, bank accounts, and even voice-disguising technology to con her victims out of hundreds of thousands. But it’s how she gets inside the life and finances of a winery owner that hits a diabolical new low.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Lizzie definitely wanted to be somebody that was seen. She
was very charismatic in Lizzie Maulder is a c p
A in exclusive Laguna Beach, dazzling small business owners far
and wide. And she came in and she said all
the right things. She had the right look. She had
this really great front office with ocean views. It was beautiful.
(00:26):
And she had this placard on the wall that said
she went to Pepperdine. Oh so she had like a
degree on the wall, a degree from Pepperdine with her
name on it. Pretty soon, Lizzie Maulder starts doing the
books for the ultra high end salon powered by Toni
and Guy in Newport Beach. She always let you know
how great she was, how much money she made, how
(00:49):
she just was so busy. But what she kept on
selling to us was what you guys are a small business.
I can handle you. And not long after that the
chaos kicks in. She said the direct deposit was set up.
It never happened. My staff called me saying the electricity
is off, and I'm like what we had run out
of all the money and thousand dollar check came out.
The count the credit card didn't go down, so she
(01:11):
was supposed to use that ten grant to pay down
the credit card. And literally days after that incident, a
desperate phone call from Lizzie Mulder's husband Jesse blows a
gigantic hole in who everyone thinks Lizzie Mulder really is.
And he said, it looks like she's been stealing money
from you, and she's been doing it for about a
year and a half. Apparently there's a detective there that's
(01:32):
been looking into her. He was crying and he said,
I don't know what I'm gonna do. We have these
two little girls, and I'm just I'm afraid and I'm
sad for them because their mother has done this, and
she's done it to several businesses that I'm finding. I'm
(01:58):
Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Khan The
O C Savior Episode two. It's totally fine. Laguna Beach
is not only a wealthy city and a breathtakingly beautiful city,
(02:19):
but it's got a really low crime rate. There's only
an average of one murder reported every year and seventeen
robberies for a city of almost twenty five thousand people.
That's not bad. At all. But there's one type of
crime that's egregiously under reported and underinvestigated in Laguna Beach,
(02:39):
and that's fraud. So when you work the fraud desk,
which is what I was assigned, that's the that's the
death that nobody wants. Why is that? Today he's a
sergeant in the Seal Beach Police Department, but back in
Jordan Moracian is a fraud detective for Laguna Beach p D.
Fraud is you're essentially a an accountant with a batche
(03:01):
It's a thinking man's game. Correct, It's like chess. There's
no blood at the crime scene, there no prints. It's
like numbers. Numbers, numbers follow the money. Yeah, Yeah, that's
a lot harder to do. It is hard to do
because you're dealing with people who either a or smarter
than you, or be think they're smarter than you. So
(03:22):
it's a very complicated web, especially with the ability to
wire money, internet, credit cards, identity thapp There's so many
pieces that go into fraud. It's hard to find the
right evidence to get a conviction. Correct. Detective Miraqian is
a muscular guy in his forties, clean cut, with piercing
(03:44):
blue eyes, a real g I Joe type in the
overarching fight of good versus evil. Miracian is the epitome
of the good guy. To me, though, and I think
to all victims of con artists, he's a freaking superhero.
They say, in my line of work, you shouldn't take
things personal, but I made it personal just the arrogance
(04:05):
of Lizzie Moulder. It made it easier for me to
go after her because I just didn't like her. By
the time Lizzie Moulder's husband, Jesse, calls to warn the
salon that his wife is stealing from them, Detective Mirackian
has already been looking into Lizzie for months. It was
listed on my thirty one cases that I was already
(04:27):
investigating Jesus one cop as in us getting thirty one
cases one detective. Now most of those are cases that
we close out immediately. You know, someone stole my credit
card and used it at Target. Did the bankery in virtue? Yes, Okay,
then you're no longer a victim. That's a good point.
As complicated as fraud is, fraud is also if you're lazy,
(04:50):
which some detectives are, fraud is a good place to
hide because you can take a ton of cases and
close them out. You never have to really do anything,
and you don't do meeting and it looks like your
clothing cases. You know, go to target, pull the video,
post the video somewhere and and everybody's happy. The bank
(05:11):
doesn't care that they reimburse their client. The client got
the money back in their account. Nobody cares except the
bad guy. It just gets away. Bad guy gets away,
and and bad guys in the fraud game and white
collar crimes get away every single day. It makes more
sense to commit white collar crime than it does to
(05:32):
go in and rob a liquor store or bank, because
you're you're probably not going to get prosecuted. And I'm
guessing Lizzie Mulder knows that and it's actually planning on it.
What she's not planning on, though, is her husband Jesse
calling her victims off to warn them. Geneva Mendoza was
stunned when her business partner Lauren got that call from
(05:54):
Jesse explaining that his wife, Lizzie Mulder is robbing them blind.
And what are you thinking as this is you're hearing
all this? I said, I I effing knew it. I
don't want to say, you can say I I yeah,
I literally that's what I said. Just was shaking my
head and I was fuming, and Lauren was crying, and
(06:17):
I mean, that's just our dynamic anyway. So I was
so upset, so immediately I just started acting, and I
started going through our accounts and I start going through
check by check by check, I had found forty seven checks.
And then when we all when we went really went
through it, um, it was seventies seven checks. When all
(06:39):
was said and done, how much money did she get
from you? But that theft doesn't happen all at once.
In the same way that my con artist, the Irish heiress,
scams me out of nearly a hundred thousand dollars a
little at a time, Lizzie Malder does the exact same
thing to the Newport Beach salon. It was so chaotic
(07:02):
every two weeks, it gave me so much anxiety to
even go into work. Remember the payroll problem where every
two weeks the salon's employees were supposed to get their
paychecks deposited into their bank accounts by a d P
their company. Lizzie supposedly hires to do payroll every two weeks.
It never happened. She would even set us emails saying, see,
(07:24):
they said that it was set up, and we would
get all these emails from a DP. But I'm using
quotation because you thought it was from a DP. Yeah
it was, yes, So she would create emails from a
DP from all kinds of people, setting saying like showing
proof that she did talk to these people. She would
show the full email threads of back and forth, and
(07:48):
these people never existed. So it was just a way
again for us to kind of shut up and like go, okay,
well I don't know what's going on. So then we
would call on our behalf and say that's what I
would do. I would would say, Lauren, I'm just gonna
call a DP and see what's going on without Lizzie,
you know. And they would say, nope, we haven't talked
to anybody. And I'm like, really, why I have an email? Well,
(08:12):
we don't see any emails on our end, And I said, well,
how do what are we gonna do to get this
direct deposit set up? And they said we have to
do a B and C. So of course I had
to go through Lauren. Lauren asked Lizzie, where's this document
that we need? You know, So it just became this
whole thing where she had to get looped back in,
and then that's what would create the whole thing again.
So every two weeks she would rush in because the
(08:35):
direct deposit wasn't there. Of course it wasn't there because
she wasn't doing it. She created that drama herself. Yes,
so she can come in and write manual checks to
the staff, yes, but what was she was doing was
she would do this entry into the ADP platform and
it wouldn't save so all the taxes were still left
in our account. The staff thought their taxes were being
(08:58):
taken out and documented, but they were just receiving a
manual check. So at least they got paid with their
taxes were left in our account. And what Lizzie did
with that extra money which was sitting there, you know,
it was a substantial amount of money. She would write
these checks that would say income tax payments, and at
any time we had two checks a month because of
(09:22):
all these payroll checks. It creates a lot of confusion.
Once in a while, I would see a payroll or
an income tax payment check and she said, yeah, that
was just going to pay the taxes, and that made
sense to you, of course, like, you know, why would
I doubt that. Of course it's going to pay the
tax it's got to be going to the I R S. Yeah,
But lo and behold, she had created a bank account
(09:45):
called income tax Payments, and so she was just you know,
taking the money that way, and that was all the
staffs taxes. If you, like most of us, don't totally
grasp how payroll tax his work, let me break it
down for you because that confusion is a big part
(10:05):
of why Lizzie Scam worked. Here, your employer withholds a
portion of your paycheck and holds onto that money in
order to pay taxes to the government on your behalf.
Those payments for things like Social Security, Medicare, income tax,
et cetera, get tallied into the W two forms you
used to follow your taxes. But at Geneva Salon, none
(10:29):
of those payments were being made to the government. They
were being made to Lizzie's phony company. And you don't
have to be a c p A to understand that
is a big problem. So come time for you know,
getting the W two's out, the first set that they
got was completely off. They were very wrong, and they
(10:50):
were all numbers based on what Lizzie had phonally created.
It's like she just randomly went through and created a
whole bunch of numbers and they were not accurate because
so it took a lot of time and and a
lawyer to get it all compiled. That whole scam that
she created where she pretends to be doing your payroll
with the direct deposit was just a way for her
(11:12):
to get those income tax payment checks into her own account.
But that's not the only way Lizzie Mulder tricks money
out of the salon. Remember the blackout. My staff calls
me saying the electricity is off, and I'm like what.
So I start looking on my phone for Edison's number
(11:32):
and I get a numbers started calling in and it
was very muffled. It sounded really strange. You know, this
is Edison calling. We heard that you got your electricity
shut off. We wouldn't do that. You're actually on auto pay,
so there's no reason why that would happen. This is
this is a fraudulent action. So what was the real story?
So we weren't on auto pay. Lizzie actually used a
(11:54):
service that was a phone service where you can change
your voice, you can change the number, you can say
the number is coming from whatever. So Lizzie had googled
Edison's number and she found that generic number and put
that in as the call number for me, and she
disguised her voice saying whatever she needed to say. And
so of course I looked it up and it went
(12:16):
straight to Edison's website. It was Edison's. Yeah, it was
Edison's phone number. Yeah. An app. Yeah, it's like some
kind of app or something that you can pay I
don't know, five dollars or something to disguise your voice
and do phony calls. And I'm sure she did that
for the bank, you know, now now that I think
about it, she probably did it for any of the
(12:37):
other vendors that we talked to, because there was a
lot of times we would have let me get Lizzie
on the phone and the call would drop, you know,
for different different various it is on the phone. Yes, yeah,
so you're talking to a vendor who you think is
a vendor, but it's really Lizzy pretending to be the
vendor using this voice change. Yes. And then another thing
(12:58):
happened with where they called Aauren, and it was some
southern accent. It was a Southern woman accent that called
Lauren for another some some kind of thing that we
had a bill pay, you know, and kept on saying like,
it's totally fine. And that's a statement that Lizzie would
always say, it's totally fine. So even though the voice
(13:20):
is different, Lauren knew that that's the way that Lizzie
would say that. That's her catchphrase, it's totally fine. So
at that point Lauren was like, yeah, that's weird. But
never in a million years would you think, oh, that's
Lizzie with a voice changing technology. No, even when when
Jordan told us that, we said, oh, okay, that makes sense,
(13:42):
but it just it was weird. I thought that she
called a service and had an actor called or something,
but it was actually her. So the depths of deception,
she knows no bounds. And that's certainly not news to
Detective Jordan Miracian. She was using voice skising technology where
she would call people with a voice like as a male.
(14:06):
And how did you find this out? Did you witness
her do that or you found the app on her phone?
We found the app um during the search. Warrant for
her phone. But we had a number of victims say,
you know, he spoke to someone at the I R
S and they spoke to someone at the bank. Yes,
it sounded like a weird voice, but it was a man,
and it sounded like Lizzie Moulder because we all have
certain dialect, like certain phrases gave her away that tipped
(14:28):
people off, like wait a minute, it's a different voice,
but that's a Lizzie phrase. Huh yeah, God, because Mike
on artists impersonated people with texts and emails and she
created this whole life. She was best friends with Jennifer Aniston.
She had an inherance coming in and she's barristers in
Ireland or sending her emails up. But it was all her.
But she never had the uh skill set to use
(14:51):
voice changing software to actually talk to people as a
different as different people. But that Lizzie Moulder like one
up there on that Geneva and Lauren get sucked into
the whole Lizzie Mulder run around bait and switch scam
for two years. Money Airmark to pay the electric bills,
(15:15):
pay vendors and pay taxes gets diverted into Lizzie's bank accounts. Instead,
she steals nearly three hundred thousand dollars from the salon
that way, but in reality, the salon ends up losing
much much more. Not only did she take that cash
from us, that was actually you know, for various vendors.
(15:37):
Like I said, there's lines of credit all over the place.
We ended up having to take another two fifty dollars
and loans to pay all these big things, you know,
pay the bank back, pay all the taxes. We had
to send all that to ADP, what to send it
to I R S, Social Security, you know, everything that
you have on your check. We had right big checks
(15:57):
to that. It's what happened as a result of what
storey extra money, all the extra money we had to
take loans out, and that we have, you know, another
two dollars of debt, new debt on top of not
having any money. That's not money that we could use
for putting back into the business. That's just staying afloat,
you know. And then we have to pay that money back,
(16:19):
and then we start losing staff because they don't trust us,
so then it's even harder to make that money back.
So we end up being basically slaves to our business
because we just we have to earn enough money to
provide for our staff and provide for ourselves and pay
it all back. It's it's going to take the span
of our lease truly to pay back what Lizzie stole
(16:42):
from us. And it's just insane to go through that
kind of thing, and it's it's part of our story.
And that's what I try to say to anybody that
if you have something that you might be embarrassed about
because you were vulnerable and somebody took advantage of you,
you have to get the word out. You have to
tell people because you could be saving somebody else from
the same thing. And I know for a fact that
(17:02):
this has whatever we've said has resonated for somebody, and
they've said that sounds familiar from something that I've gone
through with my bookkeeper or my whatever they are. The
red flags are all the same. Yep, All con artists
are using the exact same playbook, only the names and
places change. But scamming the salon isn't what puts Lizzie
(17:26):
Mulder on the radar of the Laguna Beach Police Department.
In fact, by the time Detective Jordan Miracium starts investigating
the salon scam in he's already knee deep untangling a
wide array of Lizzie's cons based on other victims complaints.
This is the first interview I've done where I've been
able to really talk about all the things involved in
(17:51):
this case. And it all starts in October when a
man by the name of j Avery and his wife
Marla walk into Laguna Beach p D. And everybody thought
we were crazy when we would tell them what happened.
So many people made me feel like I was nuts.
But that's how it started. I catch up with a
(18:12):
couple over zoom. They're living in Utah. Now is it
a zoom for us and it's just a podcast or
wild people be able to see? Oh no, yeah, it's
just audio. I mean the zoo is so we can
look each other in the eye and talk. Yeah. Yeah.
But if ever a couple should be seen, it's these two.
They look like they stepped out of a fashion magazine.
(18:33):
Jay Avery tall, tanned and tatted, his wife Marla, a
former Playboy model, though their movie star good looks seemed
to have zero sway when they try to report what
happened to police, and we went to a number of
police stations trying to get them to take the case.
I called the police station in Napa Valley or wherever
(18:53):
St Helena. That just was going all around. Detective Moraqian
explains that turning scam victims away at police stations is
actually a very common occurrence. He had already come into
the Gonna Beach Police department prior to me taking over
the fraud desk. He'd been there before, and they sent
him away. They sent him away. Um, that's what they
(19:14):
did to me. It's like Jesus well, because Jay was
it was not that unlike any other fraud victim. He
walked in with a box of paperwork and said this,
this person is stealing from me. And when you're a detective,
or even when you're a beat cop, you know, assigned
a patrol, most of the time it's the result of
(19:35):
a bad business deal, which most of the time is
a civil matter. And that's exactly what the cop told me.
It's a civil matter. This is the criminal matter. You
gave her the money, go to civil court. Good luck, right,
And they told Jay the same thing they did. I
heard he tried multiple times he did. If memory serves
(19:55):
he had been in, in and out of the police
station at least three times, and then the four of
time he comes in. So the fourth time he comes in,
you know, I had a routine where I would get
there early and leave a little bit early so I
could miss traffic and go to the gym, which is
where I'm coming from today. And he walks in and
(20:16):
he says, I need to speak to the fraud detective.
And I happened to walk right by him when he
said that, so I looked at him and said, oh,
that's me. He's standing there with his then fiance Marla,
and he's like, I need to talk to you. You know,
there was something about him. I just I felt like
I needed to hear his story. So we went back
(20:38):
and we sat down and talked. And how amazing is
that though you're walking out, you're not even listening. You hear, oh,
I need to speak to the fraud detective, and you're like,
that's me. And most people in your position would have
ignored that because you're going home, you're going to the gym.
But you felt something. You felt like an urgency from
him or an energy from him, Like what what made
you decide to let me talk to this guy. I
(21:00):
mean candidly, I have a full sleeve, so I have
tattoos all over. I saw his ink and I was like, yeah,
that's some nice ink like that was my first reaction
when I saw, Yeah, he pulled down his sleeve because
he was on duty and they have to cover up
the tattoos and looking at us. So he pulled down
his sleeve and showing me his tattoos. That vividly remember
that part of the conversation. There was just some kind
(21:23):
of aura about him. He's a very charismatic dude. Um,
we're about the same age. And uh, I just I
felt bad for him. I wanted to at least hear
him out and not make him feel like we didn't care.
At that point, you didn't think there was any crime.
Now at that point, I thought, you know, okay, fine,
(21:43):
I'm gonna listen to this guy. I'm gonna deliver the
bad news that it's a bad business deal. Good look
in civil corp. Look in civil cork. Go get an attorney.
You're probably not gonna win a dime. Have a nice day. Regardless,
Jay and Marlaw are beyond grateful that Detective Iraqian even
seems interested in their case at all, because no one
(22:03):
else is. The truth of the matter is, without your tattoos,
you would have gone to the police ten more times
and nothing would have been done. Nothing would have happened. Yeah.
But it's not long after talking to Jay and Marla
that Detective Iraqian figures out one possible reason police keep
turning them away. The problem that Jay was running into
is he was telling people that he was a recovering addict. Yeah,
(22:29):
it was an opialid addict for for years, and I
was open about my addiction. And then why why this
kind of happened to me? I mean, I'm not ashamed
of it by any means. So when you tell a
cop who is salty jaded, yeah, you think yeah, like, yeah,
(22:50):
you brought it on yourself. You know, I don't have
time for those people are dead somewhere. I gotta go
deal with that. Correct. But on that day, back in
January of s is clean and sober for almost three years.
As he starts telling Detective Miraqian about his ordeal with
Lizzie Mulder probably lost a couple of million over like
(23:10):
a seven year period. Wow, Yeah, this was like a
low time in your life. Yeah, because I went, you know,
from maybe not ever really having to worry about money
again too. Oh no, what am I gonna do? And
I felt like a failure. I felt, you know, just lost.
(23:33):
I got to a place to where I wasn't sure
if I really wanted to continue moving forward with life,
you know, as a victim of a con myself, I
know that feeling all too well, and I've since learned
it's exactly the way a con artist wants to leave
you feeling so they can make their escape and you're
(23:54):
to hurt and devastated to do anything about it. But
I'm getting ahead of myself. Off, How did Lizzie Maulder
first enter your life? Jack? So, I was a personal
trainer for years and I had a client that ran
a pretty big wealth development company and she ran his books.
And when I started the wine business, things started to
(24:16):
pick up a little bit. I needed help with the accounting,
so he referred her to me, and then that's how
we met in about two thousand nine. And she was
a big part of helping me get organize. So you
were like a trainer, like training guys, like working outlifting
weight stuff like that. Yeah, And it was one of
your clients who you were training recommended Hey, I know
(24:38):
this great c p A. Lizzie Maulder. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And what business was your client in? And he was
a pretty big wood developer, so it was a pretty
legit referral. So Jay starts moving away from being a
personal trainer in the gym to owning and operating a winery.
It's a dream come true for him. His family's in
(24:59):
the beer a business, and now using his own money,
Jay starts Jack Wines, an up and coming label in
Napa Valley with a bright future. Jay's business model was
to me rather genius. Detective Miracian is impressed with jay
savvy and entrepreneurship. He would buy overstocked wine. When they
(25:21):
make wine, they make too much, so he would buy
those barrels and rebottle them and relabel them and sell
them so he never actually had to make wine now,
he just had to get the extra from others. Right,
that's a genius idea. It's a great idea. And he
was doing well well until until a confident blonde with
a warm smile and convincing pedigree enters the picture. How
(25:43):
does she come across to you? Outgoing, very pleasant, sharp,
with the correct response for the questions that I was asking.
Seemed like a go getter. Was she likable? Oh yeah, yeah,
were close. And I lost a lot of friends through
my addiction, right, A lot of people that I grew
up with from the age five, six and seven that
(26:05):
was into that. Right. Jay's drug problem, though, doesn't start
in the streets. It actually starts in a doctor's office.
So my drug of choices opiates. It started out after
a bunch of surgeries. I had about five surgeries in
two years. Yeah, two hand surgeries and three knee surgeries.
And were these injuries from like, yeah, from hockey. I
(26:28):
played hockey grown up and I was a big, you know,
brawler so to speak. I plagued by injuries the last
fifteen years that were acquired in my youth. Uh. And
it started out with perkosets and then it went to
a drug called opano, which is oxy morphone, and then
it manifested into full blown haroin addiction for about three years.
(26:48):
And during those three years in the throes of drug addiction,
when all of Jay's friends desert him, Lizzie Mulder sticks
by him in his eyes and even in his wife
Marla's eyes. She's like family. The impression that I originally
got was that they kind of like a sister, like
(27:09):
an older sister type. But when Jay's addiction becomes untenable,
things change quick. No one really knew that I had
an opiate problem at that point. I ended up getting
a d U I in two thousand eleven, which crashed
my car and sustained some injuries. And then it kind
(27:30):
of was the cab was out of the bag that hey,
I in fact have a drug problem. And then at
that point I've told her I was going to get help,
and she was very supportive. She was helping me find
detox is intensive outpatients, and I went to an intensive
outpatient to do kind of an intake assessment and they
told me that I needed full blown in patient when
(27:53):
I gave them my history and what I was currently using.
So Jay checks himself into rehab and what happens next
is literally unbelievable. Well, there's so much more about Lizzie
that goes into the level of diabolical sociopathic behavior. Next time,
(28:27):
I'm Queen of the con the o C Savior. She
created a website, she created a numbers, she created a
guy named Brent Harrison using Spoon software, and I'm thinking,
I'm talking to a guy overseas that wants to invest
into my winery, and really, I'm talking to that woman
in Orange County that is just scamming me the whole time.
(28:49):
And it sounded like a man, it did. It sounded
it sounded just like a man. Lizzie Mulder uses her
close relationships to her victims to bleed them dry, probably
lost of and shockingly, most victims refused to believe what's
happening right in front of their own eyes, and they
were basically saying, I think You've got the wrong girl.
(29:10):
Lizzy's sweetheart. I've been at her house and I've met
her kids and her beautiful family, and you know, she's amazing.
Queen of the con The O C Savior is a
production of A y R Media and I Heart Media,
(29:31):
hosted by 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
(29:54):
and mastered by Cameron Taggy, sound editing, audio and studio
and engineering by Matt Jacobsen. Legal counsel for A y
R Media, Gianni Douglas, Executive producer for iHeartMedia. Maya Howard
Lizzie definitely wanted to be somebody that was seen. She
was very charismatic in Lizzie Maulder is a c p
A in exclusive Laguna Beach, dazzling small business owners far
and wide. And she came in and she said all
the right things. She had the right look. She had
this really great front office with ocean views. It was beautiful.
(00:26):
And she had this placard on the wall that said
she went to Pepperdine. Oh so she had like a
degree on the wall, a degree from Pepperdine with her
name on it. Pretty soon, Lizzie Maulder starts doing the
books for the ultra high end salon powered by Toni
and Guy in Newport Beach. She always let you know
how great she was, how much money she made, how
(00:49):
she just was so busy. But what she kept on
selling to us was what you guys are a small business.
I can handle you. And not long after that the
chaos kicks in. She said the direct deposit was set up.
It never happened. My staff called me saying the electricity
is off, and I'm like what we had run out
of all the money and thousand dollar check came out.
The count the credit card didn't go down, so she
(01:11):
was supposed to use that ten grant to pay down
the credit card. And literally days after that incident, a
desperate phone call from Lizzie Mulder's husband Jesse blows a
gigantic hole in who everyone thinks Lizzie Mulder really is.
And he said, it looks like she's been stealing money
from you, and she's been doing it for about a
year and a half. Apparently there's a detective there that's
(01:32):
been looking into her. He was crying and he said,
I don't know what I'm gonna do. We have these
two little girls, and I'm just I'm afraid and I'm
sad for them because their mother has done this, and
she's done it to several businesses that I'm finding. I'm
(01:58):
Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Khan The
O C Savior Episode two. It's totally fine. Laguna Beach
is not only a wealthy city and a breathtakingly beautiful city,
(02:19):
but it's got a really low crime rate. There's only
an average of one murder reported every year and seventeen
robberies for a city of almost twenty five thousand people.
That's not bad. At all. But there's one type of
crime that's egregiously under reported and underinvestigated in Laguna Beach,
(02:39):
and that's fraud. So when you work the fraud desk,
which is what I was assigned, that's the that's the
death that nobody wants. Why is that? Today he's a
sergeant in the Seal Beach Police Department, but back in
Jordan Moracian is a fraud detective for Laguna Beach p D.
Fraud is you're essentially a an accountant with a batche
(03:01):
It's a thinking man's game. Correct, It's like chess. There's
no blood at the crime scene, there no prints. It's
like numbers. Numbers, numbers follow the money. Yeah, Yeah, that's
a lot harder to do. It is hard to do
because you're dealing with people who either a or smarter
than you, or be think they're smarter than you. So
(03:22):
it's a very complicated web, especially with the ability to
wire money, internet, credit cards, identity thapp There's so many
pieces that go into fraud. It's hard to find the
right evidence to get a conviction. Correct. Detective Miraqian is
a muscular guy in his forties, clean cut, with piercing
(03:44):
blue eyes, a real g I Joe type in the
overarching fight of good versus evil. Miracian is the epitome
of the good guy. To me, though, and I think
to all victims of con artists, he's a freaking superhero.
They say, in my line of work, you shouldn't take
things personal, but I made it personal just the arrogance
(04:05):
of Lizzie Moulder. It made it easier for me to
go after her because I just didn't like her. By
the time Lizzie Moulder's husband, Jesse, calls to warn the
salon that his wife is stealing from them, Detective Mirackian
has already been looking into Lizzie for months. It was
listed on my thirty one cases that I was already
(04:27):
investigating Jesus one cop as in us getting thirty one
cases one detective. Now most of those are cases that
we close out immediately. You know, someone stole my credit
card and used it at Target. Did the bankery in virtue? Yes, Okay,
then you're no longer a victim. That's a good point.
As complicated as fraud is, fraud is also if you're lazy,
(04:50):
which some detectives are, fraud is a good place to
hide because you can take a ton of cases and
close them out. You never have to really do anything,
and you don't do meeting and it looks like your
clothing cases. You know, go to target, pull the video,
post the video somewhere and and everybody's happy. The bank
(05:11):
doesn't care that they reimburse their client. The client got
the money back in their account. Nobody cares except the
bad guy. It just gets away. Bad guy gets away,
and and bad guys in the fraud game and white
collar crimes get away every single day. It makes more
sense to commit white collar crime than it does to
(05:32):
go in and rob a liquor store or bank, because
you're you're probably not going to get prosecuted. And I'm
guessing Lizzie Mulder knows that and it's actually planning on it.
What she's not planning on, though, is her husband Jesse
calling her victims off to warn them. Geneva Mendoza was
stunned when her business partner Lauren got that call from
(05:54):
Jesse explaining that his wife, Lizzie Mulder is robbing them blind.
And what are you thinking as this is you're hearing
all this? I said, I I effing knew it. I
don't want to say, you can say I I yeah,
I literally that's what I said. Just was shaking my
head and I was fuming, and Lauren was crying, and
(06:17):
I mean, that's just our dynamic anyway. So I was
so upset, so immediately I just started acting, and I
started going through our accounts and I start going through
check by check by check, I had found forty seven checks.
And then when we all when we went really went
through it, um, it was seventies seven checks. When all
(06:39):
was said and done, how much money did she get
from you? But that theft doesn't happen all at once.
In the same way that my con artist, the Irish heiress,
scams me out of nearly a hundred thousand dollars a
little at a time, Lizzie Malder does the exact same
thing to the Newport Beach salon. It was so chaotic
(07:02):
every two weeks, it gave me so much anxiety to
even go into work. Remember the payroll problem where every
two weeks the salon's employees were supposed to get their
paychecks deposited into their bank accounts by a d P
their company. Lizzie supposedly hires to do payroll every two weeks.
It never happened. She would even set us emails saying, see,
(07:24):
they said that it was set up, and we would
get all these emails from a DP. But I'm using
quotation because you thought it was from a DP. Yeah
it was, yes, So she would create emails from a
DP from all kinds of people, setting saying like showing
proof that she did talk to these people. She would
show the full email threads of back and forth, and
(07:48):
these people never existed. So it was just a way
again for us to kind of shut up and like go, okay,
well I don't know what's going on. So then we
would call on our behalf and say that's what I
would do. I would would say, Lauren, I'm just gonna
call a DP and see what's going on without Lizzie,
you know. And they would say, nope, we haven't talked
to anybody. And I'm like, really, why I have an email? Well,
(08:12):
we don't see any emails on our end, And I said, well,
how do what are we gonna do to get this
direct deposit set up? And they said we have to
do a B and C. So of course I had
to go through Lauren. Lauren asked Lizzie, where's this document
that we need? You know, So it just became this
whole thing where she had to get looped back in,
and then that's what would create the whole thing again.
So every two weeks she would rush in because the
(08:35):
direct deposit wasn't there. Of course it wasn't there because
she wasn't doing it. She created that drama herself. Yes,
so she can come in and write manual checks to
the staff, yes, but what was she was doing was
she would do this entry into the ADP platform and
it wouldn't save so all the taxes were still left
in our account. The staff thought their taxes were being
(08:58):
taken out and documented, but they were just receiving a
manual check. So at least they got paid with their
taxes were left in our account. And what Lizzie did
with that extra money which was sitting there, you know,
it was a substantial amount of money. She would write
these checks that would say income tax payments, and at
any time we had two checks a month because of
(09:22):
all these payroll checks. It creates a lot of confusion.
Once in a while, I would see a payroll or
an income tax payment check and she said, yeah, that
was just going to pay the taxes, and that made
sense to you, of course, like, you know, why would
I doubt that. Of course it's going to pay the
tax it's got to be going to the I R S. Yeah,
But lo and behold, she had created a bank account
(09:45):
called income tax Payments, and so she was just you know,
taking the money that way, and that was all the
staffs taxes. If you, like most of us, don't totally
grasp how payroll tax his work, let me break it
down for you because that confusion is a big part
(10:05):
of why Lizzie Scam worked. Here, your employer withholds a
portion of your paycheck and holds onto that money in
order to pay taxes to the government on your behalf.
Those payments for things like Social Security, Medicare, income tax,
et cetera, get tallied into the W two forms you
used to follow your taxes. But at Geneva Salon, none
(10:29):
of those payments were being made to the government. They
were being made to Lizzie's phony company. And you don't
have to be a c p A to understand that
is a big problem. So come time for you know,
getting the W two's out, the first set that they
got was completely off. They were very wrong, and they
(10:50):
were all numbers based on what Lizzie had phonally created.
It's like she just randomly went through and created a
whole bunch of numbers and they were not accurate because
so it took a lot of time and and a
lawyer to get it all compiled. That whole scam that
she created where she pretends to be doing your payroll
with the direct deposit was just a way for her
(11:12):
to get those income tax payment checks into her own account.
But that's not the only way Lizzie Mulder tricks money
out of the salon. Remember the blackout. My staff calls
me saying the electricity is off, and I'm like what.
So I start looking on my phone for Edison's number
(11:32):
and I get a numbers started calling in and it
was very muffled. It sounded really strange. You know, this
is Edison calling. We heard that you got your electricity
shut off. We wouldn't do that. You're actually on auto pay,
so there's no reason why that would happen. This is
this is a fraudulent action. So what was the real story?
So we weren't on auto pay. Lizzie actually used a
(11:54):
service that was a phone service where you can change
your voice, you can change the number, you can say
the number is coming from whatever. So Lizzie had googled
Edison's number and she found that generic number and put
that in as the call number for me, and she
disguised her voice saying whatever she needed to say. And
so of course I looked it up and it went
(12:16):
straight to Edison's website. It was Edison's. Yeah, it was
Edison's phone number. Yeah. An app. Yeah, it's like some
kind of app or something that you can pay I
don't know, five dollars or something to disguise your voice
and do phony calls. And I'm sure she did that
for the bank, you know, now now that I think
about it, she probably did it for any of the
(12:37):
other vendors that we talked to, because there was a
lot of times we would have let me get Lizzie
on the phone and the call would drop, you know,
for different different various it is on the phone. Yes, yeah,
so you're talking to a vendor who you think is
a vendor, but it's really Lizzy pretending to be the
vendor using this voice change. Yes. And then another thing
(12:58):
happened with where they called Aauren, and it was some
southern accent. It was a Southern woman accent that called
Lauren for another some some kind of thing that we
had a bill pay, you know, and kept on saying like,
it's totally fine. And that's a statement that Lizzie would
always say, it's totally fine. So even though the voice
(13:20):
is different, Lauren knew that that's the way that Lizzie
would say that. That's her catchphrase, it's totally fine. So
at that point Lauren was like, yeah, that's weird. But
never in a million years would you think, oh, that's
Lizzie with a voice changing technology. No, even when when
Jordan told us that, we said, oh, okay, that makes sense,
(13:42):
but it just it was weird. I thought that she
called a service and had an actor called or something,
but it was actually her. So the depths of deception,
she knows no bounds. And that's certainly not news to
Detective Jordan Miracian. She was using voice skising technology where
she would call people with a voice like as a male.
(14:06):
And how did you find this out? Did you witness
her do that or you found the app on her phone?
We found the app um during the search. Warrant for
her phone. But we had a number of victims say,
you know, he spoke to someone at the I R
S and they spoke to someone at the bank. Yes,
it sounded like a weird voice, but it was a man,
and it sounded like Lizzie Moulder because we all have
certain dialect, like certain phrases gave her away that tipped
(14:28):
people off, like wait a minute, it's a different voice,
but that's a Lizzie phrase. Huh yeah, God, because Mike
on artists impersonated people with texts and emails and she
created this whole life. She was best friends with Jennifer Aniston.
She had an inherance coming in and she's barristers in
Ireland or sending her emails up. But it was all her.
But she never had the uh skill set to use
(14:51):
voice changing software to actually talk to people as a
different as different people. But that Lizzie Moulder like one
up there on that Geneva and Lauren get sucked into
the whole Lizzie Mulder run around bait and switch scam
for two years. Money Airmark to pay the electric bills,
(15:15):
pay vendors and pay taxes gets diverted into Lizzie's bank accounts. Instead,
she steals nearly three hundred thousand dollars from the salon
that way, but in reality, the salon ends up losing
much much more. Not only did she take that cash
from us, that was actually you know, for various vendors.
(15:37):
Like I said, there's lines of credit all over the place.
We ended up having to take another two fifty dollars
and loans to pay all these big things, you know,
pay the bank back, pay all the taxes. We had
to send all that to ADP, what to send it
to I R S, Social Security, you know, everything that
you have on your check. We had right big checks
(15:57):
to that. It's what happened as a result of what
storey extra money, all the extra money we had to
take loans out, and that we have, you know, another
two dollars of debt, new debt on top of not
having any money. That's not money that we could use
for putting back into the business. That's just staying afloat,
you know. And then we have to pay that money back,
(16:19):
and then we start losing staff because they don't trust us,
so then it's even harder to make that money back.
So we end up being basically slaves to our business
because we just we have to earn enough money to
provide for our staff and provide for ourselves and pay
it all back. It's it's going to take the span
of our lease truly to pay back what Lizzie stole
(16:42):
from us. And it's just insane to go through that
kind of thing, and it's it's part of our story.
And that's what I try to say to anybody that
if you have something that you might be embarrassed about
because you were vulnerable and somebody took advantage of you,
you have to get the word out. You have to
tell people because you could be saving somebody else from
the same thing. And I know for a fact that
(17:02):
this has whatever we've said has resonated for somebody, and
they've said that sounds familiar from something that I've gone
through with my bookkeeper or my whatever they are. The
red flags are all the same. Yep, All con artists
are using the exact same playbook, only the names and
places change. But scamming the salon isn't what puts Lizzie
(17:26):
Mulder on the radar of the Laguna Beach Police Department.
In fact, by the time Detective Jordan Miracium starts investigating
the salon scam in he's already knee deep untangling a
wide array of Lizzie's cons based on other victims complaints.
This is the first interview I've done where I've been
able to really talk about all the things involved in
(17:51):
this case. And it all starts in October when a
man by the name of j Avery and his wife
Marla walk into Laguna Beach p D. And everybody thought
we were crazy when we would tell them what happened.
So many people made me feel like I was nuts.
But that's how it started. I catch up with a
(18:12):
couple over zoom. They're living in Utah. Now is it
a zoom for us and it's just a podcast or
wild people be able to see? Oh no, yeah, it's
just audio. I mean the zoo is so we can
look each other in the eye and talk. Yeah. Yeah.
But if ever a couple should be seen, it's these two.
They look like they stepped out of a fashion magazine.
(18:33):
Jay Avery tall, tanned and tatted, his wife Marla, a
former Playboy model, though their movie star good looks seemed
to have zero sway when they try to report what
happened to police, and we went to a number of
police stations trying to get them to take the case.
I called the police station in Napa Valley or wherever
(18:53):
St Helena. That just was going all around. Detective Moraqian
explains that turning scam victims away at police stations is
actually a very common occurrence. He had already come into
the Gonna Beach Police department prior to me taking over
the fraud desk. He'd been there before, and they sent
him away. They sent him away. Um, that's what they
(19:14):
did to me. It's like Jesus well, because Jay was
it was not that unlike any other fraud victim. He
walked in with a box of paperwork and said this,
this person is stealing from me. And when you're a detective,
or even when you're a beat cop, you know, assigned
a patrol, most of the time it's the result of
(19:35):
a bad business deal, which most of the time is
a civil matter. And that's exactly what the cop told me.
It's a civil matter. This is the criminal matter. You
gave her the money, go to civil court. Good luck, right,
And they told Jay the same thing they did. I
heard he tried multiple times he did. If memory serves
(19:55):
he had been in, in and out of the police
station at least three times, and then the four of
time he comes in. So the fourth time he comes in,
you know, I had a routine where I would get
there early and leave a little bit early so I
could miss traffic and go to the gym, which is
where I'm coming from today. And he walks in and
(20:16):
he says, I need to speak to the fraud detective.
And I happened to walk right by him when he
said that, so I looked at him and said, oh,
that's me. He's standing there with his then fiance Marla,
and he's like, I need to talk to you. You know,
there was something about him. I just I felt like
I needed to hear his story. So we went back
(20:38):
and we sat down and talked. And how amazing is
that though you're walking out, you're not even listening. You hear, oh,
I need to speak to the fraud detective, and you're like,
that's me. And most people in your position would have
ignored that because you're going home, you're going to the gym.
But you felt something. You felt like an urgency from
him or an energy from him, Like what what made
you decide to let me talk to this guy. I
(21:00):
mean candidly, I have a full sleeve, so I have
tattoos all over. I saw his ink and I was like, yeah,
that's some nice ink like that was my first reaction
when I saw, Yeah, he pulled down his sleeve because
he was on duty and they have to cover up
the tattoos and looking at us. So he pulled down
his sleeve and showing me his tattoos. That vividly remember
that part of the conversation. There was just some kind
(21:23):
of aura about him. He's a very charismatic dude. Um,
we're about the same age. And uh, I just I
felt bad for him. I wanted to at least hear
him out and not make him feel like we didn't care.
At that point, you didn't think there was any crime.
Now at that point, I thought, you know, okay, fine,
(21:43):
I'm gonna listen to this guy. I'm gonna deliver the
bad news that it's a bad business deal. Good look
in civil corp. Look in civil cork. Go get an attorney.
You're probably not gonna win a dime. Have a nice day. Regardless,
Jay and Marlaw are beyond grateful that Detective Iraqian even
seems interested in their case at all, because no one
(22:03):
else is. The truth of the matter is, without your tattoos,
you would have gone to the police ten more times
and nothing would have been done. Nothing would have happened. Yeah.
But it's not long after talking to Jay and Marla
that Detective Iraqian figures out one possible reason police keep
turning them away. The problem that Jay was running into
is he was telling people that he was a recovering addict. Yeah,
(22:29):
it was an opialid addict for for years, and I
was open about my addiction. And then why why this
kind of happened to me? I mean, I'm not ashamed
of it by any means. So when you tell a
cop who is salty jaded, yeah, you think yeah, like, yeah,
(22:50):
you brought it on yourself. You know, I don't have
time for those people are dead somewhere. I gotta go
deal with that. Correct. But on that day, back in
January of s is clean and sober for almost three years.
As he starts telling Detective Miraqian about his ordeal with
Lizzie Mulder probably lost a couple of million over like
(23:10):
a seven year period. Wow, Yeah, this was like a
low time in your life. Yeah, because I went, you know,
from maybe not ever really having to worry about money
again too. Oh no, what am I gonna do? And
I felt like a failure. I felt, you know, just lost.
(23:33):
I got to a place to where I wasn't sure
if I really wanted to continue moving forward with life,
you know, as a victim of a con myself, I
know that feeling all too well, and I've since learned
it's exactly the way a con artist wants to leave
you feeling so they can make their escape and you're
(23:54):
to hurt and devastated to do anything about it. But
I'm getting ahead of myself. Off, How did Lizzie Maulder
first enter your life? Jack? So, I was a personal
trainer for years and I had a client that ran
a pretty big wealth development company and she ran his books.
And when I started the wine business, things started to
(24:16):
pick up a little bit. I needed help with the accounting,
so he referred her to me, and then that's how
we met in about two thousand nine. And she was
a big part of helping me get organize. So you
were like a trainer, like training guys, like working outlifting
weight stuff like that. Yeah, And it was one of
your clients who you were training recommended Hey, I know
(24:38):
this great c p A. Lizzie Maulder. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And what business was your client in? And he was
a pretty big wood developer, so it was a pretty
legit referral. So Jay starts moving away from being a
personal trainer in the gym to owning and operating a winery.
It's a dream come true for him. His family's in
(24:59):
the beer a business, and now using his own money,
Jay starts Jack Wines, an up and coming label in
Napa Valley with a bright future. Jay's business model was
to me rather genius. Detective Miracian is impressed with jay
savvy and entrepreneurship. He would buy overstocked wine. When they
(25:21):
make wine, they make too much, so he would buy
those barrels and rebottle them and relabel them and sell
them so he never actually had to make wine now,
he just had to get the extra from others. Right,
that's a genius idea. It's a great idea. And he
was doing well well until until a confident blonde with
a warm smile and convincing pedigree enters the picture. How
(25:43):
does she come across to you? Outgoing, very pleasant, sharp,
with the correct response for the questions that I was asking.
Seemed like a go getter. Was she likable? Oh yeah, yeah,
were close. And I lost a lot of friends through
my addiction, right, A lot of people that I grew
up with from the age five, six and seven that
(26:05):
was into that. Right. Jay's drug problem, though, doesn't start
in the streets. It actually starts in a doctor's office.
So my drug of choices opiates. It started out after
a bunch of surgeries. I had about five surgeries in
two years. Yeah, two hand surgeries and three knee surgeries.
And were these injuries from like, yeah, from hockey. I
(26:28):
played hockey grown up and I was a big, you know,
brawler so to speak. I plagued by injuries the last
fifteen years that were acquired in my youth. Uh. And
it started out with perkosets and then it went to
a drug called opano, which is oxy morphone, and then
it manifested into full blown haroin addiction for about three years.
(26:48):
And during those three years in the throes of drug addiction,
when all of Jay's friends desert him, Lizzie Mulder sticks
by him in his eyes and even in his wife
Marla's eyes. She's like family. The impression that I originally
got was that they kind of like a sister, like
(27:09):
an older sister type. But when Jay's addiction becomes untenable,
things change quick. No one really knew that I had
an opiate problem at that point. I ended up getting
a d U I in two thousand eleven, which crashed
my car and sustained some injuries. And then it kind
(27:30):
of was the cab was out of the bag that hey,
I in fact have a drug problem. And then at
that point I've told her I was going to get help,
and she was very supportive. She was helping me find
detox is intensive outpatients, and I went to an intensive
outpatient to do kind of an intake assessment and they
told me that I needed full blown in patient when
(27:53):
I gave them my history and what I was currently using.
So Jay checks himself into rehab and what happens next
is literally unbelievable. Well, there's so much more about Lizzie
that goes into the level of diabolical sociopathic behavior. Next time,
(28:27):
I'm Queen of the con the o C Savior. She
created a website, she created a numbers, she created a
guy named Brent Harrison using Spoon software, and I'm thinking,
I'm talking to a guy overseas that wants to invest
into my winery, and really, I'm talking to that woman
in Orange County that is just scamming me the whole time.
(28:49):
And it sounded like a man, it did. It sounded
it sounded just like a man. Lizzie Mulder uses her
close relationships to her victims to bleed them dry, probably
lost of and shockingly, most victims refused to believe what's
happening right in front of their own eyes, and they
were basically saying, I think You've got the wrong girl.
(29:10):
Lizzy's sweetheart. I've been at her house and I've met
her kids and her beautiful family, and you know, she's amazing.
Queen of the con The O C Savior is a
production of A y R Media and I Heart Media,
(29:31):
hosted by 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
(29:54):
and mastered by Cameron Taggy, sound editing, audio and studio
and engineering by Matt Jacobsen. Legal counsel for A y
R Media, Gianni Douglas, Executive producer for iHeartMedia. Maya Howard
Host
Johnathan Walton
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
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