Catfished by Jacob Wohl

[mahatmakanejeeves]

That's one thing about Wohl I hadn't guessed. I find it hard to believe too.

PrinceOfWhalesHat Retweeted

This story is riveting, and horrifying.

We joke about Jacob Wohl, but hes a sociopath and con man who needs to spend his remaining years in prison.

Catfished by Jacob Wohl by @lpandell

Link to tweet

Catfished by Jacob Wohl
How a Texas oil heiress got scammed — and then seduced — by Twitter’s most inept Trump-loving troll

Lexi Pandell
Jun 12
....

Back in 2014, as Cass was beginning her life in L.A., Jacob Wohl was in the midst of his first con. ... The son of lawyer and Fox News contributor David Wohl, Jacob showed an early eye for manipulation — though not for execution. As a teenager, he founded a series of hedge funds, claiming to manage 178 clients and $10 million in assets. But after an investor reported that he hadn’t been paid out in full by Wohl (who called himself the “Wohl of Wall Street”), the National Futures Association (NFA), the derivatives industry’s self-regulatory organization, quickly realized Wohl had been lying to investors about his experience and prowess as a means of securing their funds. In reality, he had 13 clients and $500,000 in assets. He also appeared to be funneling some profits into his mother’s account. Wohl was banned for life by the NFA, ending his nascent career as a hedgie.

Barred from the investment world, Wohl turned his sights on following in the footsteps of his father, a vocal Trump supporter. In 2017, Jacob began tweeting earnestly about the president, praising his stream-of-consciousness tweet storms as “the modern day version of FDR’s Fireside Chats.” It wasn’t long before Wohl built a sizable following, eventually amassing 185,000 followers. Around the same time, he also set up Surefire Intelligence, an unlicensed private investigation firm. He created a personal alias for that company: “Matthew Cohen.” ... By now, broke enough to be on welfare, Cass went back to Craigslist to find a private investigator. There, she discovered a Surefire ad promising to recover assets for those who had been scammed out of $5,000 or more.
....

Months passed and Cass continued her relationship with “Cohen.” Though he often traveled for what he called “assignments,” they spoke by phone regularly. “He has a soothing voice and he would talk to me for hours and hours,” Cass says. “Any time I’d call, he was accessible for me. I really needed somebody to lean on and he was that person for me.” Cass disclosed a lot to him during those conversations, including something that was incredibly painful for her to revisit: Several years prior, she’d been date-raped by a man who’d hired her to do costuming work. The man forced himself on her in a hotel room after a night of drinking. She says she filed a police report months after the incident, but the case petered out.

Wohl seemed sympathetic when she first told him. Then, in October, he came to her with an offer. He and a colleague named Jack Burkman had been tapped by the government for a new job. (Cass says she didn’t know who Burkman was; he’s perhaps most famous for leading an effort to boycott the Dallas Cowboys after they signed Michael Sam, an openly gay football player. Last year, he was shot in the buttocks by an ex-Marine whom he’d hired to uncover a conspiracy around the murder of Democratic staffer Seth Rich.) Cass recalls Wohl telling her the project had “an unlimited budget.”

This would be a political acting gig: She’d put in some anonymous calls to the press and recount the details of the real rape she’d experienced, but she would change some significant details — notably, that the man who raped her was Robert Mueller, the man who for months had dominated the news cycle with his investigation of the President. In return, she says “Cohen” promised he and Burkman would create an alias for her, keep her identity secret, and pay her $50,000. “If whatever you’re saying is true then yeah, sure,” she said, referring to “Cohen,” the covert operation, and the major payday. “If it’s legit, it’s legit.”
....

[Dennis Donovan]

1. It's hard to feel much sympathy for Cass

She still loves Wohl? After all of this?

And Wohl must be on the path to be indicted.

[More_Cowbell]

3. I feel no sympathy at all for this trust-fund idiot

She blew through her trust fund without ever really working, ending up on welfare in California until she got an inheritance. She was willing to lie about Mueller raping her, and appear at a press conference saying so, as long as her real name wasn't used (she thought of it as an acting job). She went to the press only after Jacob finally dumped her.

[edbermac]

4. K&R