I Survived... Weird Specific Scam Artists

Here we are again, folks. Another day, another minisode where Olivia and Brooke talk about weird stuff that happened to them. And what good are bizarre stories if they don’t become content for internet consumption later? I live for an audience.

This time, we keep with our umbrella theme of Snake Oil Salesmen - except we bought the snake oil. Sort of. We were kids. It was a rough time.

Are You Okay?

No, it’s very late because I forgot about this blog post.

Right… So Scam Artists?

Yes! Turns out, Olivia and Brooke both were taken by the seductive allure of scams. Except not really - but that sounded good, right? Since these are personal stories told from the horses’ mouths, so to speak, I strongly recommend listening to the episode for the full hysterics. But if you prefer to read, here’s the synopsis of Olivia and Brooke’s brushes with deceit.

Brooke was once a wee babe raised in the soft, plush arms of Mickey Mouse. Hers was a Disney family (shudder), and thus she has more than a little experience with something known as Disney Pin Trading. This insane, sprawling empire was akin to a cult when it was first introduced to the Disneyland Resort (and other properties, I assume), and folks from all over the world wanted a taste of those tiny green discs of metal. Er, not a literal taste. You get it.

Brooke’s mother briefly made a pretty decent living off selling pins from the park, and Brooke spent a ton of time trading in the park, accompanying her mom on early-morning pin releases, etc. etc. etc. It was fun, she got to go to Disneyland like every weekend, and she got a dope Princess pin collection out of the deal. Sweet!

But the environment got a little… creepy. There were folks called Pin Sharks who would try to hold certain pins hostage to get other park attendees to buy them more pins. Once, toddler-Brooke wanted a pretty Princess wreath collectible pin, and the lady who owned it told her mother to buy a list of $50 worth of other pins from a nearby store. Super classy, lady. Real smooth. So, this was the kind of person pin trading attracted - especially given how lucrative pins were on eBay.

See, when folks from other parts of the world can’t get their hands on something they perceive as valuable or cool, they tend to spend ungodly amounts of money on it. And, oh boy, did they. People would spent anywhere from $10-200 per pin, depending on what it was. More often than not, they would get into bidding wars with other folks, let their emotions run away with them, and end up wildly overpaying for the value of the pin they wanted. Ah, well. It funded more than one vacation for my parents. C’est la vie.

Thus, enters Larry Allred - a man Brooke has very few memories of. At the time, he was just a guy that traded pins in the park and had a contact with the Disney pin manufacturers that allowed him to buy wholesale unstocked pins. He seemed like a good enough guy to Brooke’s family, so they chatted with him now and then and ended up buying a few lots of wholesale pins from him. The story Larry pushed was that his contact had a stock of pins that had been QCed as official Disney merchandise but was never put on the shelves. Since the pins would otherwise go to waste, they were sold as a pocket liner for the manufacturer. Larry bough from the manufacturer and then sold to friends and family. Whatever. We ended up buying a couple hundred pins from him, and those were traded in the park for better pins to sell on eBay. Win win.

Fast forward a handful of years later, and Brooke’s family had all but stopped trading. A couple of moves and oversaturation made eBay a somewhat less viable income option, so we moved on. But we did wonder what ever happened to Larry Allred, who had basically disappeared from our lives when we stopped going to Disneyland. So we did a quick Google search.

Uh Oh.

You bet your ass, “Uh oh.” The first line we read in the search results was, “A convicted rapist was sentenced today to eight years in prison for his role in a scheme to import more than $200,000 in counterfeit Disney pins from China to sell online.”

Turns out, Larry Allred had been convicted of two rapes in the 70s and served (minimal) prison time. When we knew him, he was running an elaborate scheme with a business partner that cost Disney hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue. In a nutshell, he would get samples of authentic Disney pins and send them to a manufacturer in China. The manufacturer would mass produce copies of the original pins and send them back to Allred’s house in the U.S. by the thousands. When Allred was arrested in 2013, he had over 91,000 pins in his home, and there was evidence that he’d been running the scam since 2000.

It’s insane to both Olivia and Brooke that the Disney pin world got so intense that people were capable of running six figure scams just by skimming loose pins and having them recreated overseas. Moreover - it was so lucrative a business that Allred and his partner sunk a considerable amount of money into it for nearly 13 years.

As a sidebar, Brooke found out after recording this episode that Larry Allred is responsible for the murder of a woman named Cynthia May Hernandez in 1976. He was identified with DNA evidence in 2016 and plead guilty to her murder as well as a number of other unsolved rape cases. He is in prison for the rest of his miserable life, and if he died tomorrow it would be too soon. This completely overshadows anything Disney pin-related, and that’s where this segment ends. It’s… a really big bummer.

That Was Unpleasant

You’re telling me, bud.

Is Olivia’s Better?

Way less murder-y, yeah.

Olivia has a penchant for getting injured, as we’ve heard a couple times on the show. A few years back, she got into a major car accident that involved her yellow VW bug getting smushed between two other cars. She came out miraculously unscathed - just some expected soreness.

A family member heard about her accident and immediately recommended she see a chiropractor “just in case” she had whiplash that hadn’t presented symptoms yet. They meant well, and seemed to know what they were talking about, so Olivia’s family took the recommendation and scheduled an appointment with a chiropractor in Tustin who shall go nameless because they seem straight up crazy when it comes to criticism of their business practices and Olivia doesn’t want to get sued.

Thus begun a series of generally unproductive appointments where Olivia was advised to take on eight weeks of “treatment” that consisted of 15 minutes of adjustments and warm compresses. Olivia had a feeling that things were a little on the fishy side, but she’s not one for confrontation and the placebo effect is a very real thing, so she let it slide. In fact, she felt sort of better. So she recommended her dear boyfriend Matt pay them a visit.

Matt went in for exactly one appointment where the chiropractor suggested he take a series of X-Rays to check for scoliosis. When he came back for the consultation on his imaging, the receptionist claimed that Matt had asked to only receive one X-Ray - which hadn’t happened. Matt argued that he had received a full set of images, and they essentially shrugged it off and said they only had one picture. Matt immediately got the impression that they had never taken the X-Rays at all, and that this image was a stock photo of someone with scoliosis. They recommended weeks of intensive treatment. He left the office and never came back.

Olivia, on the other hand, continued going to her appointments. Since insurance is a thing, and she wanted to stay on top of it, she asked the chiropractor for her bill up to that point and the office flatly refused, saying they would provide a bill when treatment was completed. This is not only highly irregular - it’s a massive red flag. Payment should always be due at the time of treatment, and anything otherwise implies that the doctor is overcharging for their services or being otherwise dishonest.

Gee, I Wonder What Happened

Well, yeah. They eventually got their bill, alright. And for a treatment plan that lasted a few weeks and consisted of 15-minute adjustments, Olivia’s bill came out to nearly $4,000. And they had done… nothing. No genuine improvement. And they insisted that she needed to continue coming back. As it turned out, the sessions had started at around $60, but increased incrementally without Olivia’s consent or knowledge until each session was well over $100. But that’s not all - they also had offered her warm compresses after every adjustment. Without her knowledge, they charged her for every single compress in an increasing price from a low of $25 to a high of $70.

Holy shit.

When the superbill was sent to their insurance, the insurance company responded by rightfully observing that the chiropractor had far overcharged for what was necessary and only offered to pay for a portion of the bill. So, at the end of the day, Olivia’s family had to shell out a huge chunk of cash to receive basically nothing. Alternative medicine bullshit.

Now, this isn’t to say that chiropractors as a whole are garbage scam artists. But you can generally tell the good from the bad by the things they claim and offer. A good chiropractor will give you adjustments and suggest massages and physical therapy for injuries. A bad chiropractor will suggest you never stop coming back and claim that only their services will help your chronic pain. One is a helpful alternative medicine practitioner, the other is a liar. Also, keep an eye out for reading material that suggests vaccines cause autism. That’s generally a bad sign.

Don’t get got, guys. Don’t be like us. Or, rather, don’t be like us when we were dumb children. Be like us now: cynical and untrusting of anyone ever! Yay!