HeyJaredThe Counterfeit Scale
Erhan Civelek is a former strategy consultant at Bain, BCG, and Kearney. Grandson of a fifth-generation Grand Bazaar merchant, he writes about trust architecture, fraud, and institutional design. Author of the forthcoming book The Counterfeit Scale.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 13
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- Sep 29, 2026
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- Jul 30, 2026
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This Week’s Fraud, Weighed: The Provenance of the Dealer (opens the original)
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Last Friday, in a federal courtroom in Miami, a judge waited for a man who had already pleaded guilty to walk in and be sentenced for selling forged Andy Warhols.He didn’t come. His own lawyer told the court he didn’t know where his client was. The judge gave everyone a week to find him.The art world has a word for the documented history of an object — the chain of owners, exhibitions, and sales that establishes a work is what it claims to be. Provenance. Whole careers are built on checking it.
This Week’s Fraud, Weighed: The Rescue That Foreclosed (opens the original)
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Nine days ago I published a field guide to the second scam — the fraud that hunts people who have already been hurt, arrives dressed as rescue, and charges for the lifeline. I wrote that its engine runs on three things the victim already carries: hope, shame, and a sunk cost that makes the next payment feel like the only way to redeem the last.This week, a federal indictment in New York described that engine with the housing market bolted on. The victims were not people who had lost money to a c
A Field Guide to the Second Scam (opens the original)
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Here is a fact about fraud that almost nobody tells victims, and it should be the first thing they hear: the moment you are defrauded, you become the most valuable target on earth.Not because you have money left — often you don’t. Because you now have three things every con artist prizes above cash: proven willingness to transfer funds, a desperate need for a specific outcome, and a secret. Your name, your loss, your contact details, the amount you lost, and the emotional state you’re in are pac
This Week’s Fraud, Weighed: The Invoice That Approved Itself (opens the original)
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In October 2023, two men signed a two-year rental agreement on a luxury vacation property near Miami. Thirty thousand dollars a month. Both names on the same lease.One of them ran a school in Cincinnati. The other billed it.Hold that image — two signatures, side by side, on one document — because according to federal prosecutors, it is the entire fraud in miniature: the man who approved the invoices and the man who submitted them, formally joined in writing, splitting the proceeds of the same st
This Week’s Fraud, Weighed: Where the Money Goes (opens the original)
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Four editions of this series have asked the same question from four directions: how did the lie get believed? The counterfeit captain, the phantom loan book, the producer’s borrowed glamour, the child’s stolen number — every weighing so far has stood at the front door of the fraud, examining how it talked its way in.This week we go around the back, to the question almost nobody covers: once the lie works and the wire clears, where does the money actually go? And why, when the victim wakes up to
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