How to Spot a Con Artist

In this day and age, it should come as no surprise that professional con artists rely heavily on technology. I mean, we all do if you think about it. So that’s not a red flag in and of itself. That’s just a fact of life.

And what do I mean by a heavy reliance on technology to “sell” their stories to you? I mean, they are constantly showing you emails and texts to demonstrate what someone said or did; the story they’re laying out is often happening over the phone; or they’re frequently pointing you to documents or websites on their computer (which can all be easily and convincingly photoshopped or otherwise faked) to back up the narrative they’re unpacking for you.

Every now and then I come across a con artist who takes the Red Flag of Technology to the next level. One such con artist is Lizzie Mulder.

How Lizzie Mulder used technology to scam her circle of friends and associates out of close to $2 million may seem unbelievable. But it happened, and it’s happening every day because the world is full of Lizzie Mulders. So pay close attention now to how people like this can scam you.

Lizzie Mulder grew up in Orange County, California, in the 1980s and ’90s. “She was, I don’t want to say the ugly duckling, but she always tried to fit in, and she just never did,” said a woman I spoke to who graduated from Dana Hills High with Lizzie in 2001 but does not want to be ­identified.

It’s entirely possible that Lizzie’s many unsuccessful attempts “to fit in” with the other kids at school when she was a teenager are one of the reasons she became a con artist later in life. All of her friends from that era were much wealthier than she was, lived in nicer homes than she did, and wore designer clothes and drove flashy cars. They all possessed the kinds of accoutrements that Lizzie’s family could not afford.

So when Lizzie became an adult, she started lying to attain all the things she had never had as a kid. Then she calculatedly circled back to the classmates she’d known in high school so she could show off to them. Then she conned them all out of millions of dollars using technology.

In 2013 Lizzie Mulder flew to Italy to attend the wedding of a high school friend. She knew that a bunch of people she’d grown up with would be there, people she hadn’t seen since high school. Lizzie saw this wedding, held on the gorgeous Amalfi Coast, as an opportunity to recast herself from downtrodden ugly duckling to radiant and uber-successful swan. She had had plastic surgery and lost weight. And when she arrived at the reception, her hair, makeup, and wardrobe were red-carpet ready. As Lizzie circulated and mingled that night, she dazzled the crowd with her glamour and sophistication. When asked by her former classmates, most of whom she hadn’t seen for more than a decade, what she did for a living, she looked them dead in the eyes, smiled, and said, “I’m a CPA. I have my own accounting business now.”

Lizzie did in fact have her own accounting business, Mulder Financial. She had an office overlooking the ocean in opulent Laguna Beach, with an accounting degree from prestigious Pepperdine University hanging on her wall.

But that degree was fake. As was her career. Lizzie was not a CPA, and she had never gone to Pepperdine. In fact, she had never even graduated from college — any college. But she pretended to be all those things very convincingly — she was in her early 30s and already quite the sophisticated con woman, with a roster of clients she’d been robbing blind for years. And they had no idea. When it came to stealing money and then hiding her theft in plain sight, Lizzie was a master.

“Lizzie bragged about her education, where she did her undergrad and where she did her master’s program. She told us often about how she passed the CPA test on the very first try. But as you know, Lizzie didn’t graduate from college. She has zero credentials. She’s a self-taught con artist,” said Lauren Scaccia, one of Lizzie’s many victims.

Lauren hadn’t seen Lizzie Mulder since high school when she bumped into her at that wedding in Italy. She was impressed by what she saw. Lizzie had seemingly morphed into an entirely new person. She was outgoing, fun, and extremely gregarious. After that wedding, Lauren and Lizzie quickly became good friends — best friends really. And as fate would have it, Lauren and her business partner Geneva Mendosa were planning to open a high-end hair salon in tony Newport Beach, a stone’s throw from where Lizzie lived and worked in Laguna Beach. Suddenly Lizzie offered to be their CPA for free. Well, in exchange for doing Lizzie’s hair.

“You need somebody you can trust. You can’t afford me, but that’s okay. I’ll take care of you guys,” Lizzie said, as Lauren recalls.

Now that’s Red Flag #1 right there: “I Just Want to Help.”

She wasn’t exactly a stranger, but she hadn’t been in Lauren’s life before except as a distant acquaintance in high school. Then suddenly she’d appeared at that wedding in Italy and she’d become a best friend in no time flat. Lizzie just wanted to help Lauren and her business partner — seemingly out of the kindness of her heart.

“She always let you know how great she was, how much money she made,” recalled Lauren’s business partner Geneva Mendosa when we spoke about Lizzie back in 2022. And that’s Red Flag #5 right there (“I’m Better Than You”). “Lizzie made sure that we knew how lucky we were to have her in our lives. And we felt it,” Geneva added.

So Lizzie took over the finances for Lauren and Geneva’s new salon. She became their de facto CFO. She did their taxes, handled their payroll, paid their rent, electricity, and water. In fact, every dollar coming into the salon went into a bank account controlled by Lizzie Mulder.

And as the weeks passed, the drama began. Crazy, crazy drama. All of a sudden, the electricity in the salon went out while the place was packed with clients getting their hair done. It appeared the light bill had not been paid. But a little later, in a bizarre twist, the power company called Geneva and said actually that was a mistake — the light bill had been paid.

Then more drama. Every two weeks, all of the employees who had signed up for direct deposit never got their paychecks. Lizzie blamed a technical glitch with the direct deposit company. She showed Lauren and Geneva emails corroborating what she was telling them.

“It was so chaotic every two weeks. It gave me so much anxiety even going to work,” Geneva told me.

At one point, Lauren and Geneva found out that they hadn’t paid rent or their vendors or their suppliers in months — which did not make any sense at all because that was entirely Lizzie’s job. But then strangely, one by one, all these people the salon owed money to would call up Lauren and Geneva and say everything was actually paid in full and not to worry about it.

The truth of what Lizzie Mulder was actually up to would go on to blow everyone’s mind — especially mine. It turned out that Lizzie had downloaded a bunch of voice-changing apps on her phone, a relatively easy thing to do. Then she’d call up Lauren and Geneva using different voices to trick them into believing this or that. She’d just open the app and talk into her phone, and the app would change the sound of her voice in real time to make Lizzie sound like a cast of different characters of her own choosing.

Lizzie had a voice she used for the power company, a different voice for the payroll company, other voices for the bank, the landlord, suppliers, vendors. She even had a voice she’d use to impersonate an IRS agent.

You can’t believe what you hear over the phone anymore. So it’s a good idea, when there’s chaos around things like rent or the light bill or whatever, to call up the landlord or power company or whoever, even though they may have called you first. You need to double-check and confirm it was really them and not some scammer like Lizzie pretending to be them.

Now with AI, scammers can sound exactly like your mother or father or son or daughter or anyone you know and love — over the phone. It’s a real threat.

The only way to protect yourself is to have a talk with your friends and family and come up with a verbal password. Let’s say for argument’s sake the password you all agree upon is wildebeest. So from now on, if you or anyone in your sphere gets a call from a loved one giving you a dramatic story like they’ve been arrested or they had an accident or they’re in the hospital and need money wired to them to save their lives — keep in mind they will sound exactly like your loved one — ask them, “What’s our verbal password?” And if they draw a blank or don’t know it’s wildebeest, hang up and call the number you have for that person and get them on the phone and clear everything up.

Remember, scammers can spoof any phone number. They can be calling you from Nigeria, and the technology they use will make that call pop up on your phone and appear as if it’s your mother calling. But they aren’t calling from your mother’s actual phone. So if you hang up and call the number you have for your mother, you can quickly figure out if it’s a scam or not.

As for Lizzie Mulder, by the time all was said and done, she had stolen close to half a million dollars from Lauren and Geneva’s salon in less than two years, while stealing hundreds of thousands more from a dozen other clients with the same voice-changing app techniques. And the way Lizzie was surreptitiously moving all that money out of her clients’ bank accounts without notice is meticulously duplicitous and a stinging indictment of our banking system.

“The coup de grace was the checking account with the name ‘Income Tax Payments,’” Mike Cochrane, one of Lizzie’s other victims, told me back in 2022. Mike had been running a print shop in Orange County for decades when Lizzie Mulder started doing his books back in 2009. But unbeknownst to Mike, Lizzie had created a bank account at Bank of America called “Income Tax Payments.” She’d make out checks on behalf of all her clients, including Mike, payable to “Income Tax Payments” and have them sign those checks under the guise of paying their taxes year after year. FYI, any payments to the IRS need to be made out to “the U.S. Treasury,” but most people, especially harried business owners, aren’t paying close attention to those kinds of details — especially when they’ve hired a CPA whiz like Lizzie Mulder to do their books.

So all those checks never made it to the IRS. Instead, they went straight into Lizzie’s Bank of America account called “Income Tax Payments.” And no one suspected a thing.

Sadly, the nearly $2 million Lizzie stole from her friends and clients pales in comparison to the millions they all owe now to the IRS in back taxes and penalties because of all the years Lizzie was pretending to file and pay their taxes when in reality she wasn’t. Mike Cochrane’s Orange County print shop went out of business. “We have 37 levies on us from the IRS. They sent out 420 letters to all my top clients, instructing them that they were no longer able to pay me directly and that they had to pay the IRS, which killed my customer base. The IRS shut us down,” Mike said.

The other thing I want to point out here is how absolutely meaningless a signature on a check is. Hundreds of checks that Lizzie made out to Income Tax Payments and deposited into her own account either were not signed or had a squiggly line that Lizzie drew in over the signature line that looked nothing like the actual signature linked to the clients’ bank accounts.

I sat down with forensic accountant Jen Rodriguez, one of the people who helped investigators ferret out all of Lizzie’s financial scams, and she explained to me why a signature on a check is worthless. “For all of us consumers and people that want to get their money fast — check deposits are automated. And so they go through. So, unless something is flagged then, it’s not caught. There were so many checks that didn’t have signatures but they never got caught. And the bank cashed them. And banks aren’t responsible for protecting you from fraud. Only credit cards are. So that’s one thing where you have to do due diligence as an account holder to really check all of your statements.”

Sadly, Rodriguez is correct. Even though the banks cashed all those checks that Lizzie fraudulently deposited with no signatures or clearly forged signatures, the banks never returned a single dime to any of the victims. In fact, one of Lizzie’s other victims, the owner of a travel agency, whom Lizzie scammed out of close to $800,000, sued Bank of America in 2020 in an attempt to hold them responsible for that theft for allowing Lizzie to open a bank account named “Income Tax Payments.”

The travel agency owner lost. She appealed and then lost again. The court actually ruled twice that Bank of America had no duty to monitor customer accounts for fraud. “And that’s the way it is,” as Walter Cronkite used to say.

Here’s something else you’re going to find unbelievable. After police in Laguna Beach investigated Lizzie Mulder for nearly two years and uncovered a dozen other victims she’d scammed, the Orange County District Attorney’s Office refused to file charges! They refused to prosecute. And they told the detective who was investigating to drop the case! “The district attorney told me, ‘I don’t think this is a winnable case. It doesn’t really have any jury appeal and quite honestly, it’s too convoluted. And I don’t think you have enough to win in court,’” Laguna Beach fraud detective Jordan Mirakian told me back in 2022.

I just couldn’t believe it.

But Mirakian, who is now a police sergeant in Seal Beach, a small seaside city about 30 miles north of Laguna, flat-out refused to drop the case. And he ingeniously figured out a way to go over the Orange County D.A.’s head.

“So I started thinking about it, and I was like, well, you know, I bet she’s falsified her income taxes. So I called a criminal investigator from the IRS, and the minute he got attached to it, it became a federal case,” Mirakian said.

The IRS started investigating the Lizzie Mulder case in late 2016. They eventually got the Department of Justice involved. And before long Lizzie Mulder was federally charged with wire fraud and falsifying tax returns in May of 2017.

“When we get involved in a case, it shakes people up, it shakes up defendants. This is a federal case now,” said former assistant U.S. attorney Scott Tenley, who prosecuted Lizzie Mulder for the Department of Justice. Backed into a corner, Lizzie ultimately pleaded guilty to both charges and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

Scott Tenley is a criminal defense attorney now at Tenley Law. We were sitting in his shiny marbled conference room overlooking picturesque Newport Beach when he explained to me that, had Lizzie Mulder not pled guilty, she’d have been looking at a bunch of other charges and potentially decades behind bars.

“We would have charged her with multiple counts of wire fraud, multiple counts of filing false tax returns. We would have probably considered charging her with something called aggravated identity theft, because she was impersonating people that she knew were obviously real people, so by coming in and resolving the case early, she helped kind of control her exposure.” That’s because when criminals plead guilty, especially in a federal case, they spare the government from potentially spending millions of dollars on an actual trial: empaneling a jury, paying experts like forensic accountants, and taking up an entire courtroom and staff for weeks or months. In return, the government tends to go easier on them with fewer charges and generally a lighter sentence.

Keep in mind here that if Detective Jordan Mirakian had dropped the case like the Orange County D.A. had instructed him to, Lizzie Mulder would have walked away scot-free. “And I’ll share with you, the D.A. was pissed. Because we kind of made them look bad. … But I was like, well, if you’re not going to do your job, then I’m going to find somebody that will,” Mirakian said.

 

Coming in January 2026: Read about the latest scams in our new Con Watch column written by cybersecurity expert Steve Weisman.

Johnathan Walton is a former TV reporter and current reality TV producer who has written and produced shows for NBC, ABC, HBO, Disney+, Discovery Channel, and many others. He is also the host of the podcast Queen of the Con.

From the book Anatomy of a Con Artist: The 14 Red Flags to Spot Scammers, Grifters, and Thieves by Johnathan Walton. Copyright © 2025 by Johnathan Walton. Published by Rodale Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

This article is featured in the November/December 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.