Goldberg: An FBI raid over cutout coupons?
You gotta see it to believe it.
How did a mother of three turn clipping
into a $31 million rip-off?
Did I hear that right? Like, $31 million?
Everybody knows you pick up a pair of scissors,
you cut out coupons, you go to the store,
but there is a darker side to couponing.
"Oh, you’re getting 89 of these free?
Yeah, that makes sense to me." Boop boop.
Miller: Get a little e-mail that basically said,
"I know somebody who’s creating a lot of counterfeit coupons."
It’s impossible to know they’re fake.
Thomasson: I started monitoring the mail,
and the return address was MasterChef Designs.
Probably ’cause they’re cooking up them coupons.
There were counterfeit coupons in every crevice of the house.
We dug through her trash.
Looking for coupons.
I guess I can call her the Virginia Beach Robin Hood.
[ Laughs ]
Goldberg: Robin Hood? Hold up.
Is she taking from the rich,
or is she making herself rich
with some do-it-yourself counterfeiting?
This is the largest coupon fraud case in the history of coupons.
Miller: MasterChef needed to be stopped.
She conned America.
I’m Whoopi Goldberg, and this is "The Con."
[ Cash register beeps ]
♪
We needed someone who could read the fine print of a coupon con,
so we got Laci Mosley,
known to her fans as Scam Goddess.
Mosley: I think a lot of times when you’re dealing with
scammers or con artists, ambition really is the downfall.
Ambition can be tied to greed and wanting more
and wanting to be successful,
but it can also be tied to wanting to be acknowledged.
And I think that’s what everybody wants in this life,
is to be seen and to feel important.
There’s a lot of layers to this.
This isn’t just a woman who was a bored housewife
who decided to commit fraud.
♪
We’re talking about Lori Talens.
She’s a woman of color.
She spent most of her childhood destabilized,
moving around the country.
Her father was oftentimes deployed,
and her mother was a single mother
basically taking care of two kids.
Eventually, Lori Ann makes her way to Virginia Beach.
She’s staying very close to a military base.
There’s a huge Filipino community out there.
Goldberg: Being a military brat meant Lori Ann
had to quickly fit into new social groups,
and Virginia Beach was no exception.
Orpilla: As far as the Filipino community in Virginia Beach,
a lot of the kids have grown up together
so we have each other’s back and support each other.
When I met Lori, I think we were at least 18.
I do remember eating at Olive Garden,
and so that was the beginning of our friendship.
Goldberg: But Lori didn’t just hustle to make friends,
she was driven to succeed in just about everything.
Orpilla: Lori, as a late teenager, was really into fixing cars.
She actually wanted to know the mechanics
and be able to fix them herself.
And because she was also attractive,
that started her foray into car modeling.
She’s gorgeous, but is she smart?
Yeah, she was. She was very business-minded.
She always knows what she’s doing.
She was always planning
and always had, like, a bigger picture,
and she wanted a really good life.
If she tried to do something, she’d always make sure
that she was always the best at doing it.
Mosley: That kind of magnetism that she had
led her to bringing more women into the car modeling industry
and even becoming a car modeling agent.
As her business expanded, she was marketing.
She was reaching out to people, she was creating business cards,
and that created an interest for her in graphic design.
Goldberg: Lori Ann was thriving in Virginia Beach.
She married her husband, Pacifico, in 2010
and quickly added a couple of kids.
With a combined income of over six figures,
they were living the American dream.
Bopp: When I first moved to Virginia Beach,
I was in the Navy.
I was an aviation maintenance administrator.
So just live, work, that’s it. [ Laughs ]
Lori Ann and I met through one of my friends
that was in the Navy with me.
When I met her, she was pretty successful,
but at the same time,
she wanted to spend time with her family.
At the time, her son was 3 and so was mine,
and when we were hanging out together,
she was always cooking.
I would always complain to her
that she was trying to make me fat.
[ Laughs ] She loved to cook.
Actually, my son, he loves food,
so he’s like, "You’re a MasterChef.
I love how you cook."
And she’s actually one of my best friends.
Lori Ann definitely was the full package.
She likes nice things, you know? Who doesn’t, right?
You have to have the nice things in order to look good.
She always had her nails, her hair done,
and she was always dressed to impress.
If she was to go to sleep and wake up,
she’d be ready to go out the door.
♪
Goldberg: In 2014, Lori was put on bed rest
while pregnant with her third child.
Pacifico’s electrician salary was their only source of income.
Orpilla: Lori, when she got pregnant with her daughter,
she had bad edema.
She had the edema in her legs and feet,
so her legs were really swollen and everything like that,
and at that time, I believe she was the breadwinner
because she had all the different businesses,
and that’s how they were making their income.
So that really hurt them, you know?
This is where she starts to get a little stir-crazy.
When you’re used to being successful,
running your own business,
and being this excellent salesman,
it kinda feels like such a waste of potential
to just be laying up in bed eating cheese curls
waiting for this freeloading baby to pop out.
[ Indistinct talking on TV ]
While she’s on bed rest,
she’s flipping through TV channels,
and what does she see?
"Extreme Couponing."
And I think that gave her ideas because,
one, it was accessible.
She could get coupons, bring them to her home.
He spent nothing out of pocket for 100% savings.
But two, she’s not working and she wanted to save money,
or maybe even needed to save money.
What is our total?
Zero, zero, zero.
[ Cheers and applause ]
This was the perfect thing for her.
Bopp: After she was off bed rest,
she started doing some couponing,
and I was like, "Oh, I wanna learn."
’Cause who doesn’t wanna buy a whole bunch of things
for like a dollar?
She was cutting up coupons,
and we would be running around to different stores.
Of course, it’s very exhausting to do that.
Goldberg: Not as tiresome as waiting behind
one of those deal chasers in the checkout line.
Lori Ann did the couponing because it was lucrative.
She wanted to give more to her family
without being away from them.
Walton: So Lori starts getting into this extreme couponing thing,
and she has a knack for it.
She starts her own couponing group called
757 Couponing Brags and Deals,
and people start joining,
and sharing in her love and passion and zeal
for extreme couponing.
Goldberg: These clippers take their savings very seriously,
and Lori emerges as a coupon queen.
She was always willing to help others.
She would donate to the dog shelters
or, like, I remember seeing boxes of things
that was going to church.
Orpilla: When my husband passed away --
he died, he had a heart attack --
she came and brought me bags of stuff,
so I’m looking at it and I’m like,
"Oh, that must be from her couponing."
I mean, there was, like, shampoo bottles, lotion, ramen,
various miscellaneous stuff, toothbrush, toothpaste.
She hung out with me till like 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning.
She was there to console me, you know,
at, like, my darkest hour.
My husband just passed away, you know?
Not many people would do that, and she did that for me.
Goldberg: Lori used coupons to spread the love,
but how exactly do they work?
Does anybody out there understand the coupon?
I need somebody to explain this to me.
Cataldo: I teach consumers to coupon via workshops.
I write a syndicated weekly column
which runs all over the country,
and I also work on the industry side,
helping brands understand how consumers use their coupons.
I mentioned in one of my blog posts to my readers
that I have a black belt in tae kwon do.
One of my readers came back and says,
"Well, you’ve had one in couponing for years."
So yes, I have a black belt in couponing, too.
Goldberg: Wow, a black belt couponer.
Many consumers don’t know the ins and outs
of how coupons work.
You cut the coupon, you hand it to the cashier,
you save your dollar.
What happens after that?
The store takes that coupon
and submits it to a clearinghouse.
They actually get that dollar back
from the manufacturer of the product.
I consider coupons a win-win-win --
I’ve saved a dollar, my store has still sold the product
for the price that they want to get for it,
they get the dollar back,
and the brand has invested that dollar
in me having the product in my house.
Aside from the aspect of saving money, it’s exciting,
and when you start watching your bill
come down and down and down, there is a definite thrill
that keeps you doing this.
Goldberg: A perfect system,
but what happens when you add a con artist?
Spoiler alert -- not everybody wins.
Goldberg: Coupons have an obsessive following
for people like Lori Ann Talens.
Who are these people with the scissors?
You know, everyone has this mental picture
when you say "couponing" of a mom
sitting at the kitchen table with a pair of scissors,
and there are plenty of us doing that.
But when you start to look at the demographics
of who’s actually couponing,
it really is not limited to any specific race,
age, sex, all -- everybody.
Everybody likes a deal.
But the average consumer may not be aware
that there’s an entire other side of couponing,
the dark side, let’s call it, where there are counterfeits.
I think counterfeits have been around
almost as long as couponing has been around,
but it’s become very sophisticated.
Goldberg: In the digital age,
coupons are now bought and sold online.
Something bad made worse by the Internet?
[ Gasps ] Quelle surprise?
The fake coupons are largely distributed in online groups,
social networks, private groups,
secret groups, private messaging.
Once you join one of these groups,
you will find not only counterfeit coupons being sold,
some of them will actually create the coupons for you.
Well, what product do you want?
How much dollar value do you want?
To me, there’s no way these people
do not realize that these are fakes,
but there does seem to be a disconnect
for some of these shoppers.
If you wouldn’t use a counterfeit dollar bill
or a counterfeit hundred -- let’s go big -- at the store,
you know, everybody backs off of that
and says, "Oh, no. There’s consequences.
That’s counterfeiting. You could go to jail."
Well, you can with this, too. It’s still counterfeiting.
But for many people, I believe that thrill
of getting the deal takes over,
and they’ll do whatever they need to do to get it.
Goldberg: Chasing that thrill takes a heavy toll,
because retailers lose more than $100 million per year
to fake coupons.
It’s a huge problem for the industry,
it’s a huge problem for your stores,
and it’s a huge problem for your average consumer like me.
Someone has to pay,
whether it’s the store taking the loss or the brand.
If the brand takes the loss, it filters down to us.
It hurts everyone.
Mosley: When you go to a grocery store
some checkout cashier making minimum wage
may not be interested in researching
how you’re getting $24 off of a pack of Pampers.
What do they have to gain from that?
Nothing.
I would just boop, boop, boop, boop,
"Oh, you’re getting 89 of these free?
Yeah, that makes sense to me." Boop, boop.
I wouldn’t say anything, either.
So then, by the time that this coupon
reaches the manufacturer,
it’s been so much time that’s elapsed,
there’s probably not that much of a record
of who made these purchases,
so it makes it very difficult to stop this kind of fraud.
Goldberg: You know it can take almost a month for the system
to catch a fake coupon,
and by then, the customer is gone,
leaving behind only the cost.
The reality is that counterfeit coupons does have a consequence.
You know, it hurts both the brand
and it hurts the manufacturer.
This is not a situation of a guilt-free crime.
Goldberg: In 2017, Lori is still running
with a legitimate coupon crowd,
but that doesn’t stop others from running into her.
Lori’s the head of her own coupon group.
An admin for another couponing group notices Lori’s group
and starts looking into Lori
and sees that she has a background in marketing
and a background in graphic design
and hits her up one day, shows her a coupon and says,
"Hey, what do you think of this?"
So Lori takes one look at that coupon and immediately says,
"This is horrible. I can do better than this."
And almost overnight, she comes up with a fake coupon
that looks exactly like the real thing.
The admin is so impressed,
she offers to pay her to do more.
So Lori becomes a part of that new group.
They’re paying her to make these fake coupons.
Lori Ann taught herself how to make barcodes,
so her coupons are next level
because the bar codes are legit and they work.
We have to remember that this woman
was accustomed to being the breadwinner.
She’s had businesses since she was in her late teens.
She loved the thrill and excitement of doing business
and participating in sales,
and now that she had become a stay-at-home mother,
which for a lot of women is a dream,
she was a working woman who found a lot of value
in contributing financially to her household.
So she was naturally inclined
to try to fill that space in her heart
and that kind of hole where she used to thrive.
Goldberg: So Lori Ann has a glimpse of her value
on the dark web
and sees this as a way to become her own boss.
Once she had created these new counterfeit, working coupons
she had a new counterfeit coupon social media group
where she started distributing them,
and a lot of this starts that way.
Walton: At that point,
the people in her illegal couponing group could literally
think of anything they want under the sun
and ask Lori to create a coupon for it.
That high-dollar name-brand detergent for $25,
Lori can get you a coupon so it’s $5.
Lori is like a magician. She can create anything.
Goldberg: By selling excessive discounts on staple goods,
Lori Ann now has the revenue for some luxuries.
There was a lot of home improvements.
You would just see her postings on Facebook.
There was the addition of the pool, there was the roof,
and then the tiles being replaced in the house.
Lori not working and me seeing all those posts on Facebook
with all the home improvements,
I mean, there was a lot of speculation
wondering how was she doing that.
A lot of people are like...
Goldberg: At what point does extreme thrift
become outright greed?
Walton: I understand the allure.
I might get sucked into that, too,
but at some point, I’d be like, "You know what? This is wrong."
Maybe I’d be the one to call the Coupon Information Center.
Goldberg: I’m sorry. You’re calling who?
Mosley: The Coupon Information Center, or the CIC,
is an organization that’s dedicated
to being a watchdog in the coupon industry
to prevent counterfeit coupons.
Bud Miller is the head of the CIC.
Now Bud, he’s an advocate for coupon legitimacy,
a coupon cop, if you will.
Miller: I’m the executive director
of the Coupon Information Center,
and we fight coupon fraud.
One day in June of 2017,
I just get a little e-mail via the website.
It basically said, "I know somebody who’s creating
a lot of counterfeit coupons, please contact me."
Goldberg: The coupon community runs much deeper than I imagined.
They have tipsters when someone has tainted the well.
Cataldo: So, why would a member of a group
turn these counterfeiters in?
Guilty conscience, I think, is number one, you know?
Number two is the coupons stop working.
They bought these, and they didn’t work, and they’re angry.
Now they’re gonna turn in the counterfeiter.
Those tend to be the two things
that turn someone into a tipster.
Goldberg: With this hot tip,
Bud dives headfirst into this new case.
Miller: We started working with that informant,
and we learned more about what was going on.
They said the counterfeiter, or the con artist,
was using the name MasterChef.
Then we started seeing
some of the images of counterfeit coupons.
Very high-value counterfeits, $9 apiece.
You don’t really see very many legitimate coupons
at $9 apiece.
MasterChef really had a good recipe
to create these counterfeits.
The graphics of the coupons were very well done.
Some of them were printed on professional printers.
MasterChef is operating at a very high level.
It’s impossible to know they’re fake.
Miller: It was clear that MasterChef,
whose coupons were being redeemed all over the country,
needed to be stopped.
Goldberg: How do you tack down an unknown fake coupon mastermind?
Just as you suspected -- through the mail.
♪
Goldberg: A tipster has informed coupon cop Bud Miller
that there’s a new fraudster on the scene,
and Bud is determined to take them down.
At this point, Bud has no leads.
He just has a tip and a dream,
and he finds out that the person who’s running this coupon ring
is going by the alias "MasterChef."
Probably ’cause they’re cooking up them coupons.
Goldberg: Gotta have an alias on the dark web.
Rule number one -- don’t use your legal name
when you’re doing illegal stuff.
Miller: We knew that, you know, you have somebody called MasterChef
creating kind of a toxic brew of counterfeit coupons
ranging from standard-looking coupons
like you would get in the Sunday paper,
to discounts that you could use at fast-food restaurants.
It was very clear that MasterChef was big leagues
because of how well MasterChef was hidden.
Goldberg: To join MasterChef’s group,
you needed someone to vouch for you,
a picture ID and proof
that you’d already dirtied your hands
with counterfeit coupons.
No one wandered in there by mistake.
MasterChef wanted to make sure that corporate security
or law enforcement would never penetrate their groups.
Goldberg: MasterChef is an elusive criminal,
so Bud needs a law enforcement agency
that knows how to track things down.
Thomasson: The Postal Inspection Service
is the law enforcement arm of the post office.
We enforce over 200 federal statutes
as they pertain to the United States mail,
the postal infrastructure, and our employees.
Most people have never heard of us.
We used to be known as, like, the silent service.
Nobody knew we were out there,
but we’re one of the oldest federal law enforcement agencies
in the country.
I found out about this case through a phone call
from Bud Miller.
He introduced himself from the CIC,
and, you know, I started going through my mind
something like, was that counterintelligence something?
And then he went further to explain,
Coupon Information Center.
I was like, "Did he just say coupons?"
And he was calling to pitch the case to me,
and he was wanting to know if I’d be interested in working it.
Miller: There’s a number of elements you need
for a successful law enforcement case.
You need to be able to prove, is there a violation of the law?
Mailing counterfeit coupons
is a violation of the federal law called mail fraud.
Miller: A dollar amount drives the interest
of the US Attorney’s Office.
What is the impact of the community or the nation?
He didn’t have loss amounts for me.
He didn’t have a total number of victims
or anything at this point in time.
So I actually turned him down, but not a hard no.
It was a, "Go do some homework."
Goldberg: While Bud is tackling his homework on loss numbers,
Lori Ann is expanding her counterfeit empire.
She wasn’t creating coupons just for manufactured products.
There were restaurants.
There were other retailers involved.
In her case, probably started thinking,
"What else can I make? What else is going to work?
What else can I sell?"
She’s got thousands of members.
She’s drafted her husband, Pacifico,
to start mailing out coupons to all these people every day.
He’s become kind of her assistant.
Goldberg: Despite Lori Ann’s secretive operation,
Bud is tireless in finding the numbers he needs to open a case.
Miller: That took some time in doing
because you don’t have your hands
on every single counterfeit the suspect is associated with.
So you have to base it off the purchases.
Goldberg: With the help of a coupon service,
Bud is finally able to estimate the scale of loss
from the fraud.
So once we were able to identify that this was costing
hundreds of thousands of dollars and more,
then we were able to reach out to law enforcement.
He contacted me again, it was in the summer of 2018,
with a six-figure loss amount,
which is enough to attract the interest
of the US Attorney’s Office in Norfolk at the time.
I knew that Bud’s source was using Telegram
to communicate with whoever’s selling these.
So I naturally went to the FBI
to shop the case to see if I could find an agent
that was interested in joining it.
Specifically, I looked for someone on their cyber squad
who would understand the geek speak,
for lack of a better term,
and I came across Special Agent Brill.
Brill: I’m an FBI Special Agent
based out of the Norfolk Field Office in Virginia,
and I currently work cyber-related crime.
This case first came from Inspector Thomasson,
and honestly, the first time that he pitched it, I --
I laughed, um, because who cares?
It’s counterfeit coupons.
What kind of damage could be done?
Goldberg: I’ll tell you, this is not a victimless crime.
We all pay.
When the losses from the toothpaste industry
are passed onto you, you smile just a little less.
♪
Thomasson: Shannon came on board.
We started digging into the case,
still not knowing who it is that’s doing this.
We knew it was Virginia Beach
’cause this is where the mailings originated.
This is where the first scan was
on the tracking information for the mailing,
but we didn’t know the return address.
So we didn’t know where it’s being mailed from.
Is it being dropped at a blue box?
Is it being dropped at a post office?
Where is this scam originating?
Goldberg: If you’re looking in Virginia Beach,
let me suggest a certain newly remodeled house.
There’s a woman by the pool
who just might have some questions to answer.
♪
Goldberg: In 2019,
the feds, the Postal Service, and the coupon cops
are a year into their pursuit
of a fake coupon savant known as MasterChef.
Miller: We’d interviewed Bud’s source at length,
and they told us they had received a picture
of whoever’s selling these coupons to them,
and they said on the metadata,
I found longitude and latitude of where the picture was taken.
And I’m like, well, that’s amazing, you know?
Who would think of that, to look for that information?
So I plugged the longitude and latitude coordinates
into Google Maps,
and it pops to a house in Virginia Beach.
I then used databases we have access to to run that address,
and the house comes back associated with
Lori and Pacifico Talens.
I pulled Lori Ann’s DMV information,
and as soon as I saw her photo,
I told Special Agent Brill, I said, that’s her.
She’s like, "Why do you think that?"
I said, "Well, remember the picture
that the source sent us of her
with the really nice French manicure on the hand?"
She’s like, "That’s a bit of a stretch."
I was like, "That’s her."
Investigators have a good lead,
but they have to build a case now
and make it airtight before they confront Lori.
Goldberg: How exactly are they building this case?
Tracking down a suspect’s manicure
would only scratch the surface of this criminal enterprise.
Now you start digging into the person,
figuring out who they are, what makes them tick,
what is their history?
So you start pulling criminal histories,
you start looking for work histories,
you start doing physical surveillance of the property,
sitting outside and just watching,
who’s coming, who’s going,
what belongs, what doesn’t belong?
Mosley: They drove to Lori’s neighborhood,
and they sat in a car and watched them,
I guess hoping to see groceries being brought home?
Too many groceries?
Thomasson: While doing physical surveillance,
we saw a building permit posted on the front of the house.
So I subpoenaed the City of Virginia Beach
for all building permits that were associated
with this particular residence.
We got in touch with those contractors.
One contractor talked about how nice Lori was,
and she even gave his employees meal cards for free combo meals.
We were like, "Oh, really?" He’s like, "Yes.
I’ve still got some out in the truck."
We were like, "Well, go get ’em and show ’em to us."
He comes back in with about half a dozen combo meals.
Lays ’em out on his desk.
And we look at them, and we’re like,
"Okay, well, these aren’t legitimate,
so we’ll be taking ’em with us,"
and he’s like, "Oh, I can’t keep them?"
Like, "No, you can’t. [ Laughs ] You can’t keep these.
We’re taking them with us."
Goldberg: The agents now have hard evidence that Lori Ann
is trafficking in phony meal tickets.
Who knew that you could tip your contractors with a cheeseburger?
What the surveillance didn’t do for us
is that it really didn’t tell us her pattern of life
and that’s kinda what we wanted to establish.
She never left the house.
So we knew we had to do a little bit more digging to find out
what else is going on behind the scenes.
Some of the other tactics or techniques that we used is,
we met up with her mail carrier.
Mail carriers know a lot of information about you.
They look at what mail you’re receiving
and what mail you’re putting out there.
And this mail carrier, this was great, he said,
"Yeah, sometimes her mailbox is full of these envelopes."
And that was important information for us to have
because it showed that someone in the house
was sending these envelopes from the actual house itself.
Thomasson: I started monitoring the mail
just to see what was moving through their mail,
and I saw a mail piece that was addressed to someone
in the Continental United States,
and the return address was MasterChef Designs.
♪
MasterChef is the moniker that was used by the person
that was selling the coupons on Telegram.
I also saw that there was a Laurel, Maryland, address
that was being used as the return address, a PO box.
I reached out to that post office,
and I said "Do you have this box number?"
And they’re like, "No, that’s not a real number."
So I knew it was a fake address.
So that adds another part to the fraud.
They’re trying to conceal where it’s actually coming from.
Goldberg: So this mailbox has more than one red flag,
but how can the authorities confirm
MasterChef’s mail was sent by Lori Ann?
Thomasson: Special Agent Brill and I discussed
how are we were gonna lock them in
that we know it’s them putting it in the mailbox,
because if you just confront them with it, they can say,
"Well, I don’t know who put it in my mailbox."
We then elected to use a covert pole camera
that was aimed specifically at their house.
They set up a pole cam,
and if you don’t know what a pole cam is,
it’s when you literally put a camera on a pole,
and it watched her house,
because what they essentially needed was the mail fraud,
so they needed a video of Lori taking her counterfeit coupons
and putting them in the mailbox
and flipping up the flag of fraud,
and eventually, they got it.
Thomasson: We were able to capture Lori Talens
going to her mailbox with these parcels,
putting them in the mailbox and putting the little red flag up.
And that was a vital piece of evidence
because we figured they would deny it and use that line of,
"I don’t know who put it in my mailbox."
Well, now you’ve got a video.
How are you gonna dispute the video?
Other things that we did to kind of
help answer the questions that we had is,
we did a trash pull.
Those are not fun by any stretch of the imagination.
We dug through her trash.
Goldberg: What did they do? Oh, my goodness.
They might be some white-collar crime fighters,
but they are not afraid to get their hands dirty.
We called the city, they said they’d provide
a "clean truck" to us to dump this in.
Clean just means nobody else’s trash is in it.
It hasn’t been hosed out.
It’s still got three weeks’ ago worth of stuff
on the bottom caked on it.
So they would go around and dump her trash can and hers only,
or her recycling,
and then we’d go to an offsite location.
They’d then open the large back door of the truck.
I would bring shopping bags and tie them on my shoes
so I’m not tracking whatever out of the truck with me.
We’d physically climb into the truck.
Just think of everything you throw away, it’s in there.
It’s rotting, it was hot, it’s nasty.
They are rifling through this woman’s trash
looking for coupons.
In the recycling, we found discarded coupons.
We found some of the packaging materials that we had seen
in the coupons that were shipped to Bud’s source.
There was a packing slip that she used pretty routinely
in what she would ship out.
We saw blank copies or copies where she had messed up on
and just threw away.
We found those in there.
So now you know you’re at the right place,
you know you’ve got the right house.
At this point, they have amassed enough evidence
to get what they need,
which is a search warrant for an FBI raid.
Goldberg: Wait till you see what they didn’t throw in the trash.
♪
Goldberg: In May of 2020,
after two years of digging into packages and trash,
the FBI finally gets a warrant
to raid the home of Lori Ann and Pacifico Talens.
Thomasson: When we showed up at her door,
it was very early, 6:00 a. m.
We’re pounding on the door.
I’m calling her cellphone, trying to get her to answer,
to come down, ringing the doorbell.
There’s no more hiding for Lori and Pacifico now.
The FBI’s in front of their house.
The neighbors know something big is up.
Thomasson: She takes quite a while to come answer the door,
but as soon as she answers the door,
it’s grab her, get her out,
’cause we need now to clear the house
to make sure it’s safe for us to enter
and nobody else is in the house that we don’t know about.
So once you clear the house, the search commences.
There were counterfeit coupons in every crevice of the house.
Her kitchen drawers, we went through her closets.
Even in the pockets of the coat jackets
were stuffed with coupons.
Her car, every crevice.
It was astronomical, the amount of coupons we found,
and the coupons themselves were valued at
about a million dollars. [ Ding ]
We also took away her computer and her cellphone.
Her computer especially had over 13,000 images
of coupons on them.
We interviewed Ms. Lori Ann, with her approval,
and we showed her one of the envelopes,
and the envelope had a date on it.
We asked her how the envelope got in her mailbox,
and she was very evasive with her answers.
We said, "Okay, well, we’ll show you how it got in your mailbox,"
and I produced a video with the same date as the envelope
of her putting the envelope in her mailbox,
and at that point, you could see it in her face
that she realized she had been caught,
and she decided to ask for legal counsel at that point.
Thomasson: She’s now restricted as to where she can go.
If she stays at the house,
she’s not free to roam around the house.
She’s in a fixed place
with an agent watching her the entire time.
She opted to stay
because her kids were still upstairs sleeping.
So Lori’s now sitting on her couch in her front room,
watching this parade of box after box after box
being taken out of the house as evidence.
I was just, like, in shock.
I was like, "No, this is not happening to somebody I know."
And then it’s like, now your reputation is,
you know, messed up because of this.
I would be embarrassed.
Bopp: To me, it was heartbreaking.
The last thing that I would like for any of my friends
is to be in trouble,
especially if they have little ones.
Thomasson: And I think the gravity of the situation
was just getting heavier and heavier on her.
And by the time we were done,
she approached us and she told us,
after she conferred with counsel,
she would like to schedule
a time to sit down and speak with us.
We were provided a great opportunity.
The goal of the interview was largely to find out,
okay, how did you accomplish all this?
Did you have any assistance from within the industry?
And, of course, what can we do to prevent this
from happening again?
She provided us how she got into the counterfeit couponing group,
which was important for us to know.
She had provided us information on how she learned
how to produce the coupons, how she learned how to barcode,
who she worked with, who her members were.
She was like, "Look, yeah, I got roped into crime,
but also I was excellent at crime, like everything else."
Brill: Her coupons were on high quality, glossy paper,
with the corporate logo, the product image.
You would never know.
They were indistinguishable from real coupons.
We had to bring in an actual counterfeit coupon expert
to analyze all the coupons that we obtained from her house
to see if they were actually counterfeit.
They were absolutely perfect.
The financial gain came from various different sources.
It came from, obviously, dues paid into the group.
It came from selling the coupons.
She also would take the coupons and utilize them herself
so they’re making a profit off it,
so they’re making a little bit of money.
Goldberg: Lori wasn’t the only one clipping profits
from this coupon con.
Pacifico, in his interview,
did admit that he knew about the coupons.
Obviously, he used them.
His role in this was helping her ship.
He would drive by a post office or a blue collection box
on his way to work and drop them off into the box.
Eventually, he got tired of doing that,
so he offered the suggestion of,
"Why don’t we just mail these from the mailbox at the house?"
She agreed to it,
so that’s when they started putting them in the mailbox
and putting the red flag up.
The biggest piece of the puzzle that was left at this point
was determining a loss amount and all the victims.
I’m going through her laptop,
and there’s just all these files of just barcodes on computers.
There was over 13,000 images.
The two large coupon processors in the industry
compiled the dollar losses for every single barcode
that we provided to them
and verified that they were indeed counterfeit.
Thomasson: Bud called us, and he said,
"I’ve got your loss amount for you."
We were thinking maybe we’d get up to $5, $8 million,
somewhere in that ballpark, which would be a great case.
Bud comes out with $31.8 million.
It just kind of takes your breath away.
You’re amazed at that number.
It’s like, "Did I hear that right?"
You’re like, "$31 million?" He’s like, "Yeah."
Goldberg: After ringing up all the evidence,
Lori Ann and Pacifico Talens
were both charged with mail fraud,
and Lori Ann also got a count of wire fraud.
Brill: The loss amount, to us, was just astronomical.
There was, I believe, 100 companies that were victims,
and one company in particular lost $8 million.
Goldberg: With $31.8 million in damages,
will Lori Ann be made an example of
for the entire coupon community?
♪
Goldberg: Lori Ann and Pacifico Talens
are under arrest,
and their dark-web coupon con
is brought to light by news outlets.
The FBI has busted a couple in what they say is
one of the largest fraud operations ever discovered.
Female Newsreader: Lori Ann Talens created and designed
counterfeit coupons on her home computer,
then sold them online.
This also shows how much of a con artist this woman was.
Goldberg: For an artist who made so many fake coupons look perfect,
what exactly does perfect justice look like?
Brill: Lori Ann decided to plead to a criminal information,
meaning that she wanted to cooperate well before
we got to the phase of indicting with a grand jury,
and that works out to her favor.
It prevents her from getting slammed
with a whole bunch of charges,
and it shows that she’s being cooperative.
Lori did plead guilty to mail fraud and wire fraud,
and she ends up being sentenced to 12 years in prison for this,
and her husband, Pacifico, pled guilty to mail fraud,
and gets seven.
♪
Goldberg: While the investigation into
the counterfeit coupon ring continues,
Lori Ann’s accomplices could face charges.
But for now, Lori Ann and Pacifico
are the only ones in prison.
So far, the biggest victims are their children,
who will now be raised by their grandparents,
a five-hour drive from their mother’s prison cell.
Thomasson: You feel bad for the kids.
They’ve lost both their parents now.
But you don’t really feel sorry for Lori and Pacifico,
’cause they made those choices.
At any point in time, they could have stopped.
But she just kept expanding and getting bigger.
Pacifico kept doing the ostrich defense --
stick your head in the sand and turn a blind eye to it.
And in the end, they both paid the ultimate price,
which is their freedom.
Orpilla: I’m not mad at her.
I’m a little disappointed,
because the choices that they made
are making their whole family suffer financially, emotionally,
and I feel, as a mother, that that’s just really sad.
Like, I look at my kids -- I have three kids, as well --
I just can’t imagine being put somewhere, you know,
and not being able to see them every day, hug,
you know, be there for their moments, their life moments.
That’s -- That’s heartbreaking.
Even though she’s a con, you know, according to the law,
she has a good heart.
She really does.
She would be giving donations to church, to animal shelters.
I guess I can call her the Virginia Beach Robin Hood.
[ Laughs ]
Orpilla: She was taking from these big companies
and donating the items from her coupon haul
to people that needed it.
Yeah, you can look at it that way.
That’s a lot of stuff, though.
I mean I -- Yeah, that’s a lot of free stuff.
Walton: A lot of people are conflicted about
Lori and Pacifico’s jail sentences.
On one hand, they call her a Robin Hood,
but on the other hand, she’s just another scammer
who figured out an ingenious way to get money from the system
without being caught for years.
I feel both ways about it.
I feel bad for her kids, but I’m glad she got caught.
She cost supermarkets and suppliers
more than $30 million.
Thomasson: The impact that she made,
it doesn’t just affect the manufacturers and the retailers.
It affects everyday Americans.
She conned them,
because now they’re having to pay for what she did.
She conned America.
Cataldo: Was justice served in this case?
Yes, I think it was.
From what I have read, Lori regrets what she did,
and understands that it was wrong.
Goldberg: Lori Ann’s story is a cautionary tale,
one that she shares from behind the walls
of a federal prison in West Virginia.
[ Telephone beeping ]
Woman: This call is from a federal prison.
♪
Brill: It still blows me away
that counterfeit couponing is a thing,
and that it’s out there, that it’s this complex,
and to know that this is such a lucrative-type scheme
was absolutely mind-blowing.
♪
-- Captions by VITAC --