Cons of the Heart with Jim Grinstead
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Hey, it's Britt. As we're gearing up for season two, I am bringing on a handful of experts to answer questions about season one. I met Jim Grinstead. He's the host of Scams and Cons at a podcast conference I was at.

As soon as he told me about what his show was, I wanted to know how he felt about the con Kanan ran on me. After talking with Hugh, the trial attorney, about whether or not what Kanan has done is a crime, I wanted to dig into whether or not it could be considered a con.

And if it's a con for love and there's no way to prosecute or have a resolution in that justice, how do we get through this together? With that, here's my conversation with Jim. Why scams and cons? What's your draw to that?

I always loved heist films. I just really love them. I have an addiction to them. But to pull off a heist, you have to pull off a lot of cons to make that happen. So I thought, okay, heists don't happen in a grandiose way that often. But cons, well, those are everywhere. All generally prey on fear or greed.

Either I make you afraid that if you don't do something, I'm going to make bad things happen for you. Or if you have a chance to pick up some money or make some cash that most people wouldn't have to do, people will happily go along with that scam as well. What about the view of love and manipulation in that con? Like how often do you see people using love

love to make that con actually work. Unfortunately, romance scams are probably the most common scam that are out there. You know, it used to be pen pals and the telephone came in with the dating sites and now with the internet, it's really easy to get out there. And I think the situation is similar to what you had, people who are vulnerable,

need love. They don't have many outside connections. And so they have the opportunity to connect with someone. And the red flags, they ignore as well in the sense that they've never met the person in person.

They see pictures. They're always say, well, let's meet in Cleveland or we'll meet in Dallas. We'll do that. And then something comes up that doesn't allow it to happen. And those things typically where my car broke down, my mother's in the hospital with some kind of disease and there's a need for money there. And they plead the person until there's no money left.

In one case, a woman was asked to take a briefcase full of business papers to South America. And she did that thinking that would be her opportunity to meet them. What she didn't realize was that the suitcase was loaded with drugs and she was arrested and put in jail for two and a half years until everything got straightened out.

So that's almost as bad as it can get. You got to argue about self-esteem and long lasting sorts of things there. But your situation, the only difference I see in it is that there is no request for money. So there had to be another need, something else they wanted from you. That story is awful. I got the chills as soon as you said she got arrested. Well, I got the chills when you said briefcase full of papers because I

Some of us will overlook what in hindsight could be like, oh, why would you do that? But when you're in the moment, you're wrapped up in that situation, especially with Kanan. He contacted me all the time. We always had communication. It was great. So you just sort of ride that high of communication.

Finally having met somebody you can connect with and you will do a lot of things that maybe normally you wouldn't do. It's very disheartening. There's a lot of things that go on in the background that most people don't realize, especially over the internet when it's typed rather than spoken. You may be talking to somebody that you think is the love of your life online and they're taking notes on a computer right there.

So if you want to call or contact at a different time, another scammer may pick up the phone, but the entire history of the conversation is there. And since they work from scripts and styles and things, they can pick it right up. So you may have five or six or seven different people handling your account. But in fact, it's many, many different people.

We met at a podcaster's conference and it doesn't seem like our podcast would be aligned, but they are in the con sense. But have you come across other people who con just for love? No, I haven't. In fact, that's part of season eight, a thing called polyamory cons. This is where people have many different

relationships, some of which they know about. Women know that there are these other relationships are out there, but they're not based on money. They're based on the need for human contact and love.

Being in the online dating, there are so many profiles that the men specify that they are in a poly relationship or open relationship of some sort. What are you seeing as far as scams in that type of relationship? Well, typically it's money. The polyamory part of it, I frankly have just started researching, so I can't give you a lot of good detail on that.

But love and sex seem to be the things that they're looking for. They don't want or need money. They don't want to scare somebody away. But on the other hand, as you noted, with so many different people and so many different stories, it's not like the call center type of romance scam. You got to keep all your stories straight. And that's really difficult. I...

believe that Kanan was able to keep the story straight with all of us because we all had a different story. So it was like each of us had our own plot in his brain. He could tell me that he just had a conversation with his brother and talk to somebody else and say, oh, I was just talking to my sister. But he's not going to trip up on what those conversations were because he

their different characters in each one. And I think that is how he keeps it all straight. It's either that or he has an impressive spreadsheet of who's coming over and what their favorite dinner is, because he remembered very specific things about me and

In offhanded comments, I would make in conversations and then bring them up later to reinforce that connection. You know, he really cared about me was the feeling that I got.

After we met, you listened to my podcast. And when we had talked, it was clear that you hadn't experienced a lot around this love being the con just for love's sake. What were your thoughts after listening to the show and how it sort of balances out with other shows you've done? It caught me off guard because I'd never heard of it before. But a lot of the techniques were the same.

And so I thought, in all honesty, is like, so are you feeding me a line trying to get promotion for your podcast or whatever it might be? So I was open to the idea that, yeah, I can see this happening. But the fact that there was no financial transaction involved or no, I need this from you at your expense, that caught me off guard. And so I said, OK.

Let me accept that this is fact and go research it. I listened to your podcast and it was very compelling. And I thought, okay, I can see this happening. I did more research and there's some of it out there, but at least to me, it's still an unusual story. And I'm going to do more research on this concept of people who are looking for something other than money. I want to see that is because there may be other people

desires or things out there that are like romance scams, but are seeking other sorts of things. It isn't that typical con where you're trying to get somebody to buy you a car or pay your rent or give you cash or steal your money. This is all emotional warfare. That's an interesting way of putting it. I wouldn't have thought that. I mean, that's how it feels. And a lot of us have some pretty intense PTSD from

not trusting ourselves, not trusting our own communication and what we experience with someone. And it is really complicated to move forward because there isn't that clear crime. There isn't a clear moment where you were taken or you lost some money or you got, you know, beat up or there just was none of that. It's all mental and emotional.

And especially because he preys on women that have had previous traumas, either in their childhood or in their life, they're more apt to... This is the sound of your ride home with dad after he caught you vaping. Awkward, isn't it? Most vapes contain seriously addictive levels of nicotine and disappointment. Know the real cost of vapes. Brought to you by the FDA.

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not trust themselves, which is a really cruel thing to do to someone. Since the podcast release, I get 50 to 100 messages a day from women with similar stories. And those stories, a few of them are financial. There's some financial con tied up in that. Most of them are

I thought I had met the love of my life. It turns out he had three other relationships. There were kids I didn't know about. And then he just disappeared one day. It was very validating to start getting these messages. But then it became very clear that this is actually incredibly common to

there's just no crime. And you feel very humiliated and dumb for having fallen for this. And so people don't talk about it very much. I recently interviewed a prosecutor about, you know, is there a crime that was committed by Kanan? And there just isn't. There's not a crime. There's a couple civil things that a couple of the women might have options to do. But

Because there's some mentality and people have sent me this comment as well. It's just another guy that lied. What's the big deal? Of course he cheated. It's just another man that cheated. And I think that that concept puts something like this at a level that it isn't that it's taken seriously. It's just not that big of a deal. But talking to these women, thousands of women,

Some of them have chosen to never date again, to never get married, to never have children. They don't leave their house. The psychological damages of this are as complicated as if they wiped you out financially or they physically assaulted you. But there isn't a recourse there.

other than talking and sharing and trying to build a community where you feel less alone in being conned by love. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And one of the reasons the police don't put more attention toward it is because they see it as part of a scam area, which includes many other things. And police these days around the country are short-staffed. So

I've seen people go in who've lost all their life savings and they go to the police and they say, there's no crime here. We don't have time or the resources to investigate it. So not only is there an emotional cost to it, there can be huge financial costs which wipe out somebody's chance to retire and live the life that they'd hoped to build forever.

And the cops just don't do anything about it. And they say your only choice is civil litigation.

And even then, the burden is very high to get somebody to court and prove something's wrong. So in my experience, it's just what's happened to you. What you've just said is that emotional support groups come together. The women support one another. They tell their stories. Sometimes a professional is involved to help guide the conversation. But in the end, as far as law enforcement is concerned, you're on your own.

We're coming from two different generations. How have you seen scams and cons change and evolve or have they?

You know, it's basically the same scams, just retooled with whatever new tools are available or whatever can be done. Somebody has an idea to say, well, we're going to call you and tell you you're going to be fined for jury duty or you've missed a summons that should have been paid. During election season, I'm seeing people send out texts confirming somebody's voter status.

And then if they need to be reinstated, as they're told they need to, then it's $150 to do that. One of the most frightening things is, and I'm talking to somebody from the FBI this Friday about it, is that scammers are now coming to your door. They tell you that you owe this amount of money for whatever they say you did wrong. And so they'll send somebody over to pick up the cash.

So in the past, all scams had to be face-to-face because there wasn't the telecommunications and the internet. But now we've got people coming in right to your house. And most of these crimes aren't violent. They don't want to hurt people. But when they start getting more personal and they include pictures of your house and your neighbor's houses –

And we already know that people can take over cameras on computers. So it won't be long before we see pictures of the interiors of the house. To me, that's a very scary and a new thing that I'm seeing. One of my children called me and said, I just got an email and it was pretty clearly a form letter, but it had his name.

address, and a picture of his dad's house and said, if you don't give me $2,000 right now, I have control of your phone. I'm going to send things out to all the contacts in your list and all of these things. And thankfully, he called me. I have pretty heightened security around my stuff now. So I have someone that I trust.

And we dove into it. We didn't pay the money. And thankfully, there wasn't anything that pursued it. There was no actual malware. But, you know, this is a I'm going to say child. He's an 18 year old. But at one point he said, it's it's 2000 bucks. I'll just pay it like I can't risk this happening. And I was like, no.

No, because A, they now know that you'll pay it and you don't know what's going to happen. And let's see what access they actually have. But to find that out, I had to have security in place first.

ahead of time. And most people don't do that. And it's shocking to me how form letter this was that was sent. It was very clear that they just sort of AI put in the names. The photo was a Google aerial photos, but how intimidated and scared he felt to get that email and to read that it's such an invasion of your privacy. And I think we're going to see more and more of that.

Yeah, in fact, we live with our phones these days. They have our contacts. They have all our information in them. It's now possible for a scammer to just walk past you and empty the SIM card of your phone. And then the SIM card is where your contacts are kept. That's the memory area that allows the phone to function. So you can get conned, get stolen from.

and not even know when, where, or how it happened. It's just, it's gone. How are you at trusting people? How do you approach situations? I think I'm becoming more paranoid all the time. I was in the parking lot of one of my grocery stores that I go to all the time, and I was getting into my car with the groceries, and I looked down and there was a $100 bill on the ground.

And I thought, all righty. But then the podcaster in me came out and said, now, wait a minute. This could be a pigeon drop, which is a scam where somebody finds a bag full of money. Another person noticed it. Okay, we all have to split this. And a third person comes in and says, oh, well, my cousin's a lawyer. He says, if you...

Keep it for 30 days and nobody claims it. It's yours. So, okay, fine. What do we do with the money in the meantime? Well, the money is generally then given to the sucker. But the other two say, how do we know you're not going to run away with it? So we go to the bank. The sucker draws out, say, $2,000 to give to each of the other people.

who vanish immediately, you know, make it to the front door. And then when the sucker opens the bag to deposit the rest of the money, it's blank paper. And so I'm looking at this hundred dollar bill on the ground and I think, am I about to be confronted by a couple of people? And so I thought, well, let's find out. I do a podcast. Let's see if it's going to happen. And so I picked it up and put it in my pocket and closed the door and drove off. So

There was nothing from that. I was afraid to spend it. I just was sitting there thinking as soon as it hits, it's going to be counterfeit or something like that. So I ended up saying, okay, I'll go to the bank and just say, I found this. Is it real? And they checked it and go, nope, it's a real $100 bill. But greed took in. I mean, I'm seeing a $100 bill on the ground and I'm going, I want that $100 bill. I really want that $100 bill. But fear.

Fear stepped in and made me unwilling to use it for a while, which meant it was worthless if I didn't use it. But finally, I figured out a way where I could do that. Apparently, I wasn't being scammed. I got lucky.

So your hundred dollar bill is the same as me seeing an attractive man trying to decide if I'm going to get scammed and taking the precautions of what I need to do to still get that risk, not have that fear because it's not.

For me, it's not greed. It's love and companionship and finding that partner. So I wonder if people like Kanan are just greedy in love. And that's the commodity that they exchange is love and validation because it's what he feeds off of. It's what fuels him. Yep. I'd say that's exactly it. You've got to decide, you know,

Do I need this badly enough to take this risk? Or am I scared enough to take this risk?

Thank you.

You can find her at britney.ard on all platforms. If you like what we're doing, don't forget to hit that follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast right now. And also give us a rate or review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.