Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

We gotta talk about gaudy wealth, man. I get it – the bling, the cars, the clothes… you wanna look flashy. It feels good. But as an expert on scamming, you’re not paying me to tell you the things you wanna hear. (Actually, scratch that. That’s precisely what you’re doing. Anyways.) Point is… as much as you might want to flaunt the prizes of your cons, you have to be careful. Like Icarus and the sun, you don’t want to fly too high before it all comes tumbling down again. Let this week’s Hall of Famer, hubris aside, be a cautionary tale for you…

ANTHONY GIGNAC: THE FAKE SAUDI PRINCE

BORN: ~1970

As this exclusive series has mentioned in previous lessons, there’s plenty of reasons for a commoner to aspire to become royalty – the wealth, the prestige, the freedom… but the real estate, cars, trips, and other perks are definitely up there too. For those select few, life is pretty well as good as it gets. No wonder that so many scammers have their eyes set on the upper echelons of society… but so few actually make it to the top. That’s why I have to tip my headset to this week’s Hall of Fame Scammer… it’s hard to reach the top and keep in top scamming form for over thirty years!

Our focus this week worked hard to cultivate his image; Anthony Gignac was born in Colombia in the chaos of the still-ongoing war on drugs, and was adopted as an orphan by an American family in Michigan at age 7. Possibly due to the trauma he faced in his childhood (which apparently included being sold for sex in the streets of Bogotà to find food for him and his brother), he consistently lied to his school classmates about his wealth and status; as a child, he even duped a Mercedes salesman into letting him take some test rides in a car he claimed his “father”, a Saudi prince, was purchasing. He started seeing a therapist at age 12, but it clearly didn’t have much effect. After his adoptive parents divorced when he was 17,  he portrayed himself as “Prince Adnan Khashoggi”, borrowing the name of famed billionaire Saudi arms dealer. He used stolen credit cards to hire limousines to drive around his hometown of Detroit in the late 1980s. In 1991, he got two years in prison, thanks to fraud charges stemming from $3500 in charges at LA’s posh Regent Beverly  Wilshire Hotel, along with another $7500 in limo and shopping purchases; using his fake Saudi identity, he even had hotel employees addressing him as “Your Highness” during his California adventure.

When he got out of prison, Gignac quickly returned to his true passion of credit card fraud, racking up tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt under the name Khalid Bin Al-Saud. Over and over again, he successfully scammed people: $30K on a Hawaii vacation in 1993, $51K a few years later in Florida at Disney World, and many others. On a different Florida trip, he managed to trick American Express into issuing him a platinum card with a $200 million line of credit… by throwing a temper tantrum in their offices, claiming his “father”, King Fahd (or Crown Prince Abdullah, depending on what he felt like), would be furious with him losing it. He then went out and immediately rang up another $22,000 in limousine and shopping charges that went unpaid.

In 2003, our story gets weirder. Gignac was arrested, once again, for running up thousands of dollars in purchases at luxury stores in Michigan that went unpaid. While that was serious enough that he faced spending another four years in prison, he also somehow managed to charge thousands of dollars to a different account, owned by a real Saudi prince. According to Gignac, he was allowed to use the account… he’d been having an affair with this man (naturally, blasphemous behavior in Wahhabi Sunni Islam)… and was blackmailing the family in order to keep quiet about it. This was, of course, another lie, but he really did know the real prince’s account number, and authorities still aren’t sure how he even obtained it in the first place. The real Prince Khalid later wrote a letter to retailer Neiman Marcus, claiming Gignac was in no way associated with the Saudi royal family whatsoever. Gignac got 77 months in prison for bank fraud and impersonating a foreign diplomat for his troubles. All in all, he’d been arrested ten separate times at this point in his life.

When he finally got out again, he aimed his sights higher than he’d ever gone before – no longer content with tens of thousands of dollars at a time, he wanted millions.

Through the decades, Gignac, as Khalid Bin Al-Saud, put a lot of effort into appearing legit: he bought fake diplomatic license plates for the cars he drove, fake diplomatic badges for his security service, wore traditional Saudi clothes in many of his meetings, and most importantly, constantly demanded and displayed luxurious gifts, especially jewelry, watches, and art. Through the appearance of wealth, Gignac put up some extremely impressive numbers in the 2010s. Operating a fake investment business, Marden Williams International, Gignac swindled investors out of over eight million dollars. He claimed that MWI was the owner of luxury hotels, pharmaceutical companies, and more… but what really sucked in investors was the premise that they could invest in Gignac’s stake of the ludicrously profitable Saudi oil company, Aramco.

Using his new money, Gignac lived high on the hog – he rented a penthouse on Fisher Island, Miami (though he told investors that he actually owned the entire building), drove Ferraris, Bentleys, and Rolls-Royces, wore thousands of dollars of jewelry, including some ridiculously gaudy Rolex watches… and documenting the entire thing on his Instagram account for the whole world to see.

In November 2017, the scam slowly began to fall apart; Gignac, as his princely alter ego, wanted to buy a 30% stake in the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach from billionaire developer Jeffrey Soffer (formerly married to Australian model Elle Macpherson). All went well… until Soffer’s team started doing what every grifter fears most: “due diligence”. As it turns out, Gignac set off some alarm bells to Soffer’s team because of an incident where he ordered prosciutto at a restaurant… not something a devout Muslim would do. Despite another public meltdown, claiming that Soffer had “dishonored” the fake prince’s reputation (and that it needed to be fixed with an elaborate gift), the feds finally came for Gignac. In May 2019, he pled guilty to impersonating a foreign diplomat, aggravated identity theft, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was sentenced to 18 years and eight months in prison, and he remains on the hook to repay the $8 million he stole from investors across the world. (Carl Malden Williamson, the British lawyer who helped Gignac form MWI, sadly committed suicide in December 2017 – he lied to his wife that he’d been unaware of Gignac’s real identity.)

Thirty years of grifting takes the utmost in dedication… and a few lucky breaks as well. Hard to believe that it was just a plate of prosciutto that ultimately did him in. One different order and he could still be out there today. But like football, so goes life. One decision affects all our others. You can check out this episode of HBO’s Generation Hustle if you want to learn more.

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Did it work perfectly? No. But it worked a hell of a lot better than my Browns teams did – and I still got to keep the cash I made after running that operation. So who’s the REAL winner here? Believe it or not, it’s in fact you! At least, it will be, if you call 1-900-FAST-BUX right now! Take a 10% discount on my audio tape lessons on the art of the con, and – exclusive for this week – receive a FREE* Rolex for every subscription package you buy! It’s not gonna be here forever, so get in while the getting’s good! Until next time – I’m Hue Jackson.

*I was told that it was real when I purchased a case of them in Times Square, at least. I take my word very seriously, you know.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Banner image by The Maestro.