The OC Savior: Ep. 1, A Fake Somebody

artist who has done this to many people. Since going public with my story of how I got con by Mayor Smith, Dear Jonathan, I got conned by a lifelong family friend and his mother out of three hundred thousand dollars literally hundreds and hundreds of victims and almost victims. Jonathan, my name is Antoinette. I want to thank you for saving me from making a horrible mistake. Have been contacting me sharing their insane stories of how they got conned.

So a widow she gets scammed out a two hundred thousand dollars by a con artist who works in the mayor's office. There's this Los Angeles Botoks doctor. She could scammed out of a hundred and sixty dollars in gold and precious metals. The con artist was pretending that her money was growing every month, and he'd photoshops statements and mail them to her, so she think her gold is appreciating, but there was no gold, just photoshop and a devious

con artists. And there's this French con artist. She moves to Beverly Hills and she scams two million dollars out of people under the guise of starting a dog rescue. Itunds like that French voice just kind of lures you in that accent. You know, yes, the French art cunning. My buddy Evan Goldstein is fascinated by it all, and truth be told, So am I. You know, after getting conned by maryor Smith, I thought I was unique. I thought Mayor Smith, like that's a one in a lifetime

kind of situation. But that's not true at all. Con artists are everywhere because like you're the only one I personally know that has been con and most victims don't go public like I do, so most people don't know it's a thing. But Jesus, I've been getting hundreds and hundreds of emails from spirit victims asking for help with their con artists, you know, like inspired by what I did with Mayor, Like they want that for their conn Maybe there's less shame going to you because you're just

in the same boat. Yeah, I'm another victim. Yeah, you're another victim. Yeah that's a good point. So what's one of the most interesting cases that you're looking into. Now, there's this this woman named Lizzie Mulder. She lives in Orange County. She scams her circle of friends out of one point five million dollars using every technique that Mayor used on me, and then other techniques that I've never even heard of. It is truly truly insane. So she's good. Oh,

she gives Mayor a run for her money. Really, Yeah, it's hard to do. I'm Jonathan Walton and this is Queen of the Con The o C Savior, Episode one of Faith Somebody. Orange County, California is a place you got to see to believe. You've probably heard of Orange County, or the o C as it's known by locals. It's a unique part of the Golden State that boasts the wealth and grandeur of Beverly Hills, only bigger, much, much bigger.

It's about thirty miles south of Los Angeles, and the encompasses more than two dozen municipalities, cities like Newport Beach, Anaheim, where the original Disneyland is located, Happy Plo, and the ever posh Laguna Beach, where the average income is kids you not two hundred and seven thousand dollars a year. It's everything you think you want to be a part of. It's u beautiful cars, beautiful homes, beautiful people. It started

off as a suburban neighborhood of Los Angeles. Orange County started to grow and it became a tech hub, which brought a lot of money, and it just got wealthier and wealthier by the day. There's everything you can imagine. Every single stores here, every single restaurant is here. They really catered to people that are are well off. There's no theft, there's no what are they called the people that steal your packages from your porch pis pirates. Yeah,

there's none of that. It really is otherworldly here because I went to get coffee at the Coffee Bean before I got here, and everyone, all the other customers said good morning to me. Not the people who work there, just other people waiting on good morning. Good morning, like like it took me on surprise, like why are you all being nice to me? In l A? Nobody talks to you lest they want something. I yeah, I'd never hear greats. Even though Orange County is only about an

hour's drive south of l A without traffic. It's a whole other universe out here, a truly spectacular place. Laguna Beach, which was a show on MTV. I think that's when people really started to notice. Kate Casey is host to the hit podcast Reality Life with Kate Casey, and she's got a PhD in Everything o C. She's been living here for the past nineteen years. Then there was the show The o C, which was a scripted series, and

then you had The Real Housewives of Orange County. I think that Sarah should take her bony little butt out of my fake and pretentious home. I'll buy you a new I'm bored with it. And that show really kind of showcase what it would be like to live in suburban Orange County. But what you see on TV isn't always what it's cracked up to be. I think normal people come here with good intentions, and it's very easy for people to get caught up living here is like

being in the middle of smoking mirrors. Everyone presents themselves as one way, and invariably you find out it's not the truth. You will have somebody who will drive a Maserati but live in an apartment, and to normal people you think, why would you do that? But it's because I think that normal people come here and they see excessive wealth and they think that in order to make it here socially and financially, you have to present yourself

as somebody who has an enormous amount of money. And it sounds like everyone's running their own kind of scam in a weird way. It is to a degree because you never really know what their intentions are and what their true authentic self is. The interesting thing about living here, too, is that people don't ask a lot of questions. So someone like myself from the East Coast, I ask a lot of questions where did you go to school, where are you from, what do you do for a living?

The questions here are much more surface. Where do you like to vacation? Do you go to the yacht club? So it's very easy for a con to make their way here because no one's really asking questions that would reveal the truth behind someone's persona. Yeah, it sounds like Orange County is an ideal breeding ground for con artists. Absolutely to those who know her in, Lizzie Mulder is a super successful certified public accountant c p A. She

came in and she said all the right things. She had the right look, like wow, we could never afford a c p A like that. She was a big part of helping me get organized, and when I started the wine business, it seemed like she was doing a

good job. She's a thirtysomething, articulate, blonde, confident, well connected, and extremely social, with a rugged firefighter husband, two adorable young daughters, and a gorgeous two and a half million dollar home overlooking the Pacific Ocean and exclusive no poor people allowed Laguna Beach. How does she present herself to people? What were your impressions? Lizzie definitely wanted to be somebody that was seen. She was very charismatic. She definitely wanted

to be popular, to be liked. She wore really nice clothes, definitely had more of like a cowboy aesthetic to her is she liked riding horses and stuff. So she'd come in and you could tell that she lived in Laguna, so they have a different look to them. They're a little bit more laid back. Geneva Mendoza is what Disney's Little Mermaid would look like if she took human form, refined features, eyes that sparkle, and her red hair. Oh my god, and your hair is like out of a movie. Well,

thank you? Did you do that special for me? Because I'm gay? But your hair it's like red and shiny, and it's wavy and flow. It's like it's like I'm on a movie set and you're ready for your close up. I feel like hair dressers need to always look. Our clients are coming to us to have of the best look, so we're looking shabby. That's not gonna work. Do women come to you and be like, I want your hair? Yeah, all the time. I can see that. Yeah, it's very like.

And then you have to break their hearts and let them know that you know, there's there's going to be several thousands of dollars to get you there, And Geneva should know. She's a co owner of the Salon powered by Tonian Guy, high end Newport Peach establishment, cutting and quaffing the hair of some of the most wealthy and glamorous people in the world fortune, five hundred CEOs, actors, models, and well healed c p A s like Lizzie. How did Lizzie Mulder first enter your life? So? Lizzie was

a client of my business partner, Lauren. She and Lizzie went to school together, although Lauren didn't know her when they went to school. They reconnected in Poisano at Italy at a wedding posts Atano is a tiny little cliff side town on southern Italy, is a malfi cu most pebbled beach fronts frame steep, narrow cobblestone streets lined with old world boutiques and cafes. The houses whimsically stack atop each other, precariously going up and down the mountain side

painted every single color of the rainbow. If you've seen that Matt Damon movie The Talented Mr Ripley, I always thought it would be better to be a fake somebody

they don't nobody, then you know the scenery. It was filmed in Positano, Italy, because it's one of the most beautiful places on earth and the perfect location for a wedding or an elaborate Cohn so Lauren went out there, and you know, it's a small wedding because it's international and not that many people are going to show up, and so there was a few people and one of those people was Lizzie and she was there with Jesse,

her husband, and they had a great time. She approached Lauren and she was just over the top, you know, having a good time and bringing Lauren into and introducing her to the people. You know, she was really showy that way. So Lauren quickly became friends with her, and then she became Lauren's client at the salon and she started doing Lizzie's husband, Jesse's hair and the girl's hair. So when you first saw her, she was a client.

And Lauren had introduced me several times, as she does, and you know, when we have longtime clients, we'd like to introduce ourselves. And this is my business partner and my best friend, Lauren and Geneva, you know, so I had seen her several times in there, and Lauren was just trimming her hair. At this point in Geneva and Lauren are working as hairdressers for Tony and Guy. But soon the entrepreneurial bug bites and they want to open

their own franchise together. When we decided to be lawn owners, we needed to start doing the due diligence of getting all the paperwork, finding a bookkeeper, finding a c p A, finding people that are just going to get us where we need to go. The next step. We approached one firm that was sent to us by another client, and we showed up there and they were there one moment.

The next time we showed up, they weren't there. They were wanted by the I R S. You know, they were doing some kind of weird fraud, and they were gone, oh my god. Yeah, And it was weird because they set up the appointment for us to show up and they weren't there. And I told my client that referred me, I said, did you know that so and so is wanted by the I R S. You need to check your your business stuff with them because they could have

stole some money from you. So at this point it would seem the universe is protecting you from Thank goodness, right, little do you know who's waiting in the wings. Yeah, but at that point, you don't have a c p A. So you're looking, we're looking, and so Lauren calls her friend Lizzie and says, you will never guess what happened. We set up this pointment with the c P A firm and we showed up and they're not there. And Lizzie's like, oh my gosh, that does happen all the

time I hear about that. You know, they just don't know why they get this in their head that they need to steal people's money. She said that. So Laurence set up an appointment with her at her home office in Laguna and she had this really great front office with ocean views, was beautiful, 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 her name on it. Pepperdine University is a prestigious school that sits on eight hundred and thirty acres in ultra exclusive Malibu, California. Pepperdines neighbors include people like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Barbara's Trisand and Leonardo DiCaprio. A four year degree from Pepperdine costs nearly a quarter of a million dollars. Their alumni include some of them heavy hitting

movers and shakers in the business world. The head of the New York Stock Exchange went to Pepperdine, as did the CEO of United Airlines. So a frame degree from Pepperdine University says a lot about Lizzie Mulder. We looked at it. We're like, wow, that's that's really awesome. You know that you went to Pepperdine. We know how prestigious

that school is expensive. I would be remiss if I didn't point out here the striking parallels between accounting whiz Lizzie Mulder with her frame degree from Pepperdine University and my con artist Mayor Smith, who, if you recall from season one, frequently showed off her frame copy of the Irish Constitution signed by her great uncle, firmly establishing her as Irish Royalty. Professionally framed documents really do lend an air of legitimacy to whatever stories being told. Mayor Smith

easily convinced people she was a wealthy Irish heiress. Lizzie Maulder, a successful Pepperdine graduate with the world on a string Laguna Beach c p A. Lizzie Malder loves to tell her prospective clients just how lucky they are to have her. She always let you know how great she was, how much money she made, how 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'll just do that on the side, you know, as a favorite to you as a favorite, you know, don't worry about it. All you have to do is just let's trade in hair. She gets lots of hair treatments and things that are very expensive at our salon, so she said, let's just do like a barter system. So in exchange for you guys doing her hair, she was going to be your c p A and do the books for

your new salon. And that arrangement works out great at first, but as the weeks turned into months, Lizzie's involvement in the salon's finances becomes ubiquitous. What she would do would create this thing where we actually really needed her. Every little business decision she took control of. Any time we would listen we would talk to any of the vendors, any anything, even the I R S or anything, she would be like, put me on the call. I want

to talk to them. So she got so invested in every little part of our business that at one point I was even asking, or can I pay down the credit card because it's getting a little high, and I don't. I don't like that, you know, I hate debt. So she'd be like, I already sent them a check, just leave it alone, and I'll I want to run it through quick books. I don't want to have all these little little things that you're doing. I want to do all of it. She always had a plausible reason that

made sense. Yes, of course, and not long after Lizzie takes over the salon's books, a never ending string of unfortunate events begins to punctuate the lives of Geneva and her business partner Warman. Or what was the payroll problem? Payroll problem? We were going through a DP and there was a problem with our tax i d. A d P is the company Lizzie hires to run the salon's payroll.

So they had a wrong name and they couldn't create a actual direct deposit because the wrong name and the tax i D We're not sinking up and the direct deposit was going to be done, but every two weeks it never happened. She would even set us emails saying see they said that it was set up, and we get all these emails from a DP. So every two weeks, the salon's employees are supposed to get their paychecks direct deposited into their bank accounts, but it never actually happens,

never ever, And the employees are piste. You know, she'd come in at two o'clock, they're off at two o'clock. They're all waiting in the break room for their check, and here we are just all frantic, creating a whole bunch of distrust. It was o chaotic. Every two weeks. It gave me so much anxiety even go into work because here are wonderful staff started getting upset because why was it so chaotic? Why couldn't direct deposit go in? And all we were able to rely was what Lizzie

was telling us. For the ones that were really mad, she would have one on one conversations with them about what was going on, like take them into her confidence. Yes, there was some heated conversations, but she always acted like she knew more. She would be schooling them on on business and and still trying to, you know, put the flames out a little bit, right because she went to Pepperdine. Yeah, she knows more about this stuff than they do. They're

just hair dressers. And Lizzie ironically becomes sort of a hero to all these hair dressers because every time the direct deposits don't show up, Lizzie does and sits down and manually cuts checks to every single employee and gets them paid. In their eyes, she's a problem solver, a savior. But soon other strange problems start popping up in the salon that leave everyone in the dark. Literally. So you're in the salon, the electricity goes out. What happened? Did

you not pay your electric bill? That's what all your clients were saying. Did you not pay the electric pay the electric bill. Meanwhile, you're probably dying inside because like, how embarrassing your You own the salon and there's no power. Well that's the thing is that there is actually this weird, fraudulent scam from people pretending to be Edison or any kind of electric company, but specifically Edison. And even if you go on their website, they say, beware people walking

in pretending to be Edison. We're not going to shut off your power. This you know this and that, so there's a scam where people dressed up like the power company people. They show apout your place of business and what they demanded money, Yes, they say, give us some money, we're gonna shut your power. Yeah. And it's so silly that sometimes they say, well we'll take gift cards. You, oh, seven fifty dollars and we'll take it in gift cards.

Where to cheesecake factory? Where would you like at Amazon? So that had happened a few times anyway, I mean, it happens, It happened, happened. Oh I didn't know that twice before within even like a couple of years. Ms And they hand over this brochure that they got from somebody's front porch. Is an official Edison brochure and it has a description of not paying payments and things. So this is a normal scam. I'm on my way into work. The electricity goes off. 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 and I get a number started calling in so I answered it and it was very muffled. It sounded really strange, and they said, is this Mrs Mendoza and yeah, yeah, so this is Edison Long. We heard that you've got your electricity shut off. We wouldn't do that. We wouldn't come and just shut your electricity off. We would send a notice that you were your bill was due. But you're actually on auto pay,

so there's no reason why that would happen. This is this is a fraudulent action. So we're gonna send somebody down there within an hour to turn you back on. I said, no, we need it to be turned on now, like now. And they said, okay, well we do see that there is some past bill and we just need that to be paid. And I said, just turn the electricity. I have a whole salon full of clients in there. So they said, we understand that, we'll get somebody within

the hour. So we hang up. I called Lauren immediately. I said, Lauren, this is weird. This person called me out of the blue telling me that this is a fraudulent activity. They didn't shut it off. So then Lizzie calls me. She said, I just talked to Edison. Did they call you too, And I said yeah. She said yeah, Well I'm just gonna pay the bill. Let's do But you are on auto pay, so I don't know why that didn't go through. Just we're just gonna do that in the power will come back on. So that all

got handled. The power came back on. I walked in. I'm so embarrassed, my head kind of low, and I'm like, don't want to look at anybody, especially not the clients. You know. I go in my office and some of my managers come and talk to me, and they said, was it the same kind of thing? How those people come in and they just scam us? And I said,

I think so. I think that's what it was. Because I got a call from medicine saying they didn't do it, so you know, they're a little sketched out, and I thought, what the heck. So of course nobody came from medicine, not all day, not all night. So I was just so irked and so weird it out that I told Lauren, like, I don't think that was real. For some reason, it sounded like muffling. It sounded from a different country, and it just didn't seem legit. What accent did the voice

you talk to you have in America? What's really an accent? I couldn't really hear it. It was so faint that I could not actually a woman. It was a woman, but not a voice you've heard no telling you that it's not the power company that shut your power off. It's a scam of some sort. And did the power come back on? The power came back on, and Lizzie said she paid it and that we would just owe her. So that's what that happened. And she's and so she said,

you are on auto pay. Well, we were so delinquent with that bill that they cut us off of even doing auto pay. So I had to go to the store down the road from my house to pay our bill every month. And even that felt sketchy to me. I was already so frazzled with all of this, the fact that I would go and pay the electric bill at at a liquor store. Why is this even a thing? I know? Yeah, you're a new Port Pach salon owner and I have to go to a liquor store to

pair of electric bill because we're a delinquent. As the months passed, Geneva and Lauren are chasing their tails running a salon, dealing with forty employees and working in the salon as hair dressers themselves. It's not long before the salon's finances begin to eclipse every other issue they're having. Then pretty soon c p A Lizzie Malder finds herself in Geneva's crosshairs. There was a lot of questions I would always have that were never being answered, and she

would disappear for two or three days. Come Monday, she wouldn't answer. We were all in a group text and I would say, Lizzie, what about this, this and this? Did you pay this bill? Did you did you talk to the I R S? Did you talk to Cox Cable? They said they haven't been paid for three months? Oh, I already talked to them. I'll get back. I'll get back to you. It was always like I was chasing after her, and it was just so disheveled that it really made me frustrated because I try to be very

organized when it comes to especially bill pay. Lizzie is the salon c p A for two years from and in that time, the salon inexplicably hemorrhage's money. I mean, they have a lot of clients, and they have a lot of repeat clients, and the salon is bringing in a lot of cash but somehow they're spending more than they're taking in and it just doesn't make any sense. But it's about to what was the straw that broke

the camel's back. Well, there was a point of true breaking point where there was this ten thousand dollar check that she said she had this blank check that Lauren had already signed in her bag and it was for some bill. And at the time she because we had run out of money, she was in negotiations with different banks, and at the time it was Farmers. She said to get a line of credit. That was the only way we were going to be able to stay afloat because

we had run out of all the money. And of course she said it was our franchise fees, it was the payroll taxes were too high. All these things were the reason why we had no more money in our account. So she was negotiating a line of credit for us, and she hit me up one night and she said, Hey,

I have this check. I've been talking to this guy from from Farmers and he said, you need to pay down this credit card and so I'm gonna pay it down with the ten thousand dollars and I'm gonna cash that you know, for that, And she's like, I just talked to you about this stuff because I know that that Lauren doesn't get it all the time, and I know that you're always, you know, looking at that, and I was. Again, she was playing, She started playing us

against each other. She could see that, you know, I was irritated with her and that she wouldn't even answer me. The way that Lauren would get her to have a conversation with us is she would open it up with how are the kids doing? How is Jesse doing? So eventually Lizzie would answer and then we could circle back to business. So anyway, so she wrote this ten thousand dollar check. I saw it come out of the account. And the thing is she knew I was always looking.

That's why she did that. So this ten thousand dollar check em out the count the credit card didn't go down, so she was supposed to use that to get us this letter of credit and it never happened. So three or four days later, she's disappeared. You know, we didn't talk to her. She's on some trip. So we hit her up where I said, Lizzie, where's this ten thousand dollars for the check? She says, I paid it down. It should hit on Friday. So Friday comes, it doesn't hit.

She disappears Friday through Monday. Monday, I said, Lizzie, it still hasn't cleared. So I go into the bank and I asked them, I saw this ten thousand dollars come out. Where was it taken out? And they said, oh, it was handled in Laguna Beach, And I said, does it show that it's going to our credit account. We're sitting in the bank and we get a call at the same time, and we are talking to Lizzie telling her we're trying to find this ten thousand dollars, you know,

because it's missing. At this point, Laurens still like, I wonder where they lost it. That's so weird. And I'm like, well, that's freaking weird. Yeah, it's strange. So we get a call, goes to one of the tellers that we're talking to, one of the bank tellers, and they say, oh, yeah, they're in here right now. They said, we're creditors, we work for US Bank and we're handling the credit card thing, and yes, we did see it hit the account. It's going to clear in a couple of days. So the

lady we were talking to. She said, send that call over to me. I want to talk to them. The phone line drops, So I was like looking at Lauren, like, are you serious? Really? So let me understand. Another bank supposedly called the bank you were at, the credit card company. The credit card company somehow new were you were there? Yeah, and they were calling because they saw that we were

looking into it. Yeah, So it was just super fishy, but still Geneva and Lauren accept that explanation and move on. Days later, though, a bomb drops and nothing will ever be the same ever again. We went on a business trip. We were going to Scottsdale and you're about to leave to come back home after the business trip, and we get a call from Jesse Mulder and which is Lizzie's husband, and he said, Lauren, are you sitting down? And Lauren, because she's like the kindest person in the world, she

starts kind of hyperventilating. She's like, oh my god, is Lizzie okay? What was Why would you be calling me? And Jesse said, just just sit down and listen to me. And I'm just sitting there on the bed like what you know. At this point, anything goes She this woman has come up with so many reasons of something, and so Jesse tells Lauren that he was getting suspicious of some of activities that she was doing. So he started rummaging through her stuff and he found all of these

accounts that said income tax payments. He said, I want you guys to go through your accounts. It looks like she's been stealing money from you, and she's been doing it for about a year and a half, so please look through all this stuff. I'm going to take everything I found to the Laguna Beach Police Department. Apparently there's a detective there that's been looking into her, and I want to make sure that he gets all this information.

And Jesse was crying himself on the phone. 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. Coming up this season on Queen of the Con the O C Savior, they say, in my line of work, you shouldn't take things personal, but I made

it personal. Just the arrogance of Lizzie Molder. It made it easier for me to go after her because I just didn't like her. She created a website numbers. She created two personalities as young something and a guy named Brent Harrison. 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. And it sounded like a man, it did, it sounded it sounded just like

a man. Lizzie actually used a service that was a phone service where you could change your voice. Well, there's so much more about Lizzie that goes into the level of diabolical sociopathic behavior. Oh, it's to go up and do the I r s audit in l A with her and one of her assistants. And there never wasn't audit that, there wasn't audit, complete fabrication. Wow. I'm walking

out of the station and in walks Jesse Moulder. I need to talk to a detective and he says, I'm a firefighter and I think my wife is scamming her clients out of money. She got me for to eight five altogether, she took eighteen thousand dollars out of my business. She took a little over twenty out of my parents. How much money did your boss end up? Losing? Millions every single day as a struggle to keep our business open, we almost lost our own homes. We are facing bankruptcy

because of her. She crippled us. She crippled us badly. Elizabeth Mulder is a predator. I lost my twenty year marriage. The number of people she has hurt, the amount of time she has done it, and the callus and cruel manner in which she abused the trust of at least sixteen victims and probably more. I think, if she's not already scamming people, I think she's concocting her next scamp.

I agree, Queen of the con The O C Savior is a production of a y R Media and I Heart Media, 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 and mastered by Cameron Taggy, sound editing, audio and studio engineering by Matt Jacobson. Legal counsel for A y

R Media, Gianni Douglas, Executive producer for iHeart Media. Maya Howard