Jimmy Scalzo visits Fraud Busting. Listen to find out how his success and a family business disagreement led him to commit mortgage fraud…and bring his extended family down with him. He’ll reveal the mindset it takes to do what he did and exactly how long it took him to snap out of it and much, much more.
Here’s the Transcript:
Traci Brown: Jimmy, thank you so much for coming on Fraud Busting. It’s great to have you here!
Jimmy Scalzo: Thanks for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Traci Brown: Now, you are in where? Milwaukee, right?
Jimmy Scalzo: Milwaukee.
Traci Brown: We talked a little bit, and I know you will do a better intro of yourself than I will, but the short story is you had a little trouble with some bank fraud, mortgage fraud. Why don’t you just let us know who are you, and then we can dive into what happened, and go from there?
Jimmy Scalzo: Sure. You are kind because it was more than a little trouble. It’s a situation where I was born and raised in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a Catholic school boy. I got out of college, went to work for some community banks, had no aspiration of getting into banking. At the time to get into financial services, the culture was changing from maybe an industry that was in the Dick Van Dyke era to an industry that was becoming very salesy and personality or charisma or the ability to go out and talk to people was coming in. The president of the bank asked me if I had an interest in the job. I said no. I was making $3.75 an hour. He told me it paid $23,000 to start, so I loved banking immediately and started this career. I had some success early, and as I grew up the career ladder and moved, I decided I was going to do some investment real estate. I did it with family which was a horrible mistake. The long and the short of it, Traci, is my two partners were my two first cousins, they got into an argument, one drained our checking account. We didn’t have any money to cover the bills or the payments that were due.
Traci Brown: Oh boy.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, I made a loan that I benefitted from.
Traci Brown: You were the loan officer.
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea. What’s crazy is none of the real estate loans to purchase the properties were ever done at a bank I worked at, ever, not even for a minute. They were all done at a different bank, approved by the bank’s board, all 100% above board, but when things got ugly, you get desperate and you panic and you don’t think straight, I made a loan to my cousin that clearly was to help and benefit me. That is how this whole mess started, this horrible indiscretion started to go down that snowball path.
Traci Brown: Okay. Let’s talk about that. You made one loan to your cousin to cover the losses from really a family argument, it sounds like.
Jimmy Scalzo: That’s how it started. Yea.
Traci Brown: So how much was that loan?
Jimmy Scalzo: $167,000.
Traci Brown: And then, because you keep saying it started there, so let’s talk about that. You made the loan. So, you made a loan to benefit you, so were the terms of the loan or the decisions made on the loan made by you, or were they made by an underwriting department? How shady was it here, or was it shady at all?
Jimmy Scalzo: No. It was as shady as you get. I mean, I had a $750,000 lending limit. I was a senior office at the bank. It was shady. It was solely intended to save my backside. It was about as stupid as it gets.
Traci Brown: So, what happens next? Did you pay off the losses or cover what you needed for this investment real estate and then . . . what happens?
Jimmy Scalzo: What happened was we needed collateral for the loan, so we used my aunt and uncle’s house as collateral. My cousin took the loan papers. They came back signed. I notarized them. I never questioned the signature. I wired him the money. The properties never performed better for a year until the homeowners’ insurance clause came to show them that they needed to renew their homeowners’ insurance and it says on the bottom first mortgage and then names the bank’s name. They were like, we don’t have a mortgage on the house.
Traci Brown: On your aunt’s house.
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea, yea.
Traci Brown: Oh.
Jimmy Scalzo: My aunt and uncle’s house. Yea.
Traci Brown: Oh, shoot. Okay. So, you put their house . . .
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea.
Traci Brown: How did you get the papers to put their house up, or was it you just . . . someone faked the signature?
Jimmy Scalzo: So, let me backfill this story a little bit.
Traci Brown: Okay. Alright.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, in all the years that I was in banking, it’s an industry where the salespeople and the operations people really don’t like each other.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: The reason being is the operations people think salespeople are full of poop, and the salespeople think the operations people are an impediment to getting something done.
Traci Brown: Exactly. Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, I knew coming up the ranks where all the cracks were in the system. I did the underwriting on a loan presentation. I ordered the title work. I had an appraisal done. I mean, it was all done with wrong intentions. I’m in a position where I can tell the operations department to draw up these papers. I’m putting this credit through and nobody . . . that’s the thing, I mean, right or wrong, when you get to a certain level in the banking world, especially in the community banks, it’s not like someone is going to stand up and question you. I mean, they just kind of go along to the beat of the music. Papers were drawn. The loan was funded. The money was wired out. That’s how it went.
Traci Brown: Okay, so your aunt and uncle find out about this. What happens with that?
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, great question. Essentially, I was at the zoo with my kids. My mom called and said, hey, I don’t know what happened, but there is a war going on, you better find out. I go to the house, a screaming match, they give me 30 days to pay it off or deed the properties over to them.
Traci Brown: The investment properties?
Jimmy Scalzo: Yes ma’am. So, the bank says, hey, you make X and they don’t make anywhere near X. We can’t cut you loose. Could I stand as a guarantor? No, because what would be the consideration for that? You’re not an owner anymore, so why would you want to guarantee the debt? Plus, my mom had guaranteed through her trust, because the loan was getting pretty high, the debt as well. They were like, would your mom stay on? We really need her to bridge this gap. Being young, dumb, and completely arrogant, I went back to them and said, well, yea, no, that’s not going to happen. I am not going to deed them over to them either. If you come after me, your son is going to go down as well because after all, I wired him the money. So what happens is they go up to the U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee and made a deal where they received a guarantee that there wouldn’t be any prosecution for them.
Traci Brown: This was your aunt and uncle?
Jimmy Scalzo: Correct. Or my cousins or my partners. They got a blanket deal, which was the right thing for them to do. That would be the impetus or the start for me to get looked at completely at all, from the start of career to this complete screwup.
Traci Brown: Okay, so that’s pretty interesting. Did your cousin just fake your aunt and uncle’s signature on that, or who did that?
Jimmy Scalzo: This is one of those moments where I’ll answer you this way. I wasn’t in the room. They came back signed. I notarized them. So how that got done, I don’t want to say because I wasn’t there.
Traci Brown: Got it. Okay. Alright. So your business partner/family like pretty much teamed up against you and threw you under the bus? How did that . . . I’m trying to make, I guess, a short statement out of what happened with the attorney’s office and the whole thing.
Jimmy Scalzo: Typical immigrant people, right, and they don’t want any debt on their house. They understand that this is a complete unethical misgiving. It doesn’t take someone with a higher level of education to piece this altogether, so they want it gone. They don’t want to run the risk of I stop paying, something goes sideways.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: They want it gone. So, when they come at me hard, rough, angry, which they should have been, I put up resistance and said, hey, I’m making the payments. After all, I’m me, I’m a good credit risk. I’ll make the payments. I’m making good money. Why are you mad? Right. Looking at it so myopically and so one-sided, for just myself, I say, hey, you know, relax, it’s going to be okay. Well, you have a mortgage on your house for $167,000 and you know your house should be free and clear, why would you idly stand by and say, yea, it’s okay, forget about it.
Traci Brown: Yea. No one is going to do that. Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea. So, when they dug their heels in, they said, I’ll give you 30 days to pay it off or to come up with this plan where I just give them the properties, and I couldn’t get it to budge. I didn’t have the money to pay it off. I dug my heels in and they took the avenue that would protect themselves.
Traci Brown: Wow. Okay, okay. Where did your cousin land in all of this?
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, wow. They lost all the properties. The bank took it back in foreclosure. It’s a perfect storm because it was during a time right after President Obama came in office and the market inverted. Let’s say a duplex that was worth $150,000 Tuesday, it might be worth $70,000 on Friday.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: It was ugly. Couldn’t sell them. Nobody wanted them. People were having a hard time making rent, so the cash flow became severely impaired, and then obviously, when they took the necessary steps to remove me, they didn’t have anybody making the income level loss of the cashflow so they lost them all. My mom, boy, my mother lost everything. She lost her house. She moved in with my wife. I ended up going to Terra Haute federal prison camp for 27 months. My wife took my mom in and my mom, my wife, and my two little girls lived together until I came home.
Traci Brown: Wow. Okay. Let’s back up a little bit.
Jimmy Scalzo: Sure.
Traci Brown: Was there a trial? Was there . . . ?
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh no, no, no, Traci. In your extensive experience, you have learned more about this or forgotten more than I’m ever going to learn, but the United States government is like Father Time. They are undefeated. There is no I’m going to go to trial against the United States government. No. If you ever think in your mind, can a person be so scared that you can’t generate any saliva in your mouth? When you get paperwork that says the United States of America versus your name, you’re like the Mojave Desert in your throat. That is the scariest thing I have ever seen or read in my entire life.
Traci Brown: You are the second person who has told me that. You know who the first person who told me that was? Not long ago, it was Lance Armstrong. Same thing. He was like, just like you said, when you see that, you know you’re toast.
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh yea. It’s a wrap. The movie credits are playing.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, I got a lawyer up here in Milwaukee. He said it was his expertise. He said, you know, you need to work with me to make a plea because . . . And at that point, Traci, it’s weird because – no, it’s not weird, it’s faith based, it’s family, you know you’re exposed, and the cat’s out of the bag and you did it. What are you going to do? You can either be one of these people who goes and says, I’m a victim, they were out to get me, witch hunts. No. I did it. I’m responsible for it. It’s my mess. So at that point, once I retained counsel and he started working through the process, I made up my mind I was going to fully cooperate as much as I could.
Traci Brown: Okay, so I have another question. This goes back to the first of this whole thing. You were in business with two cousins.
Jimmy Scalzo: Yes.
Traci Brown: One drained the account. What happened to that guy? Because you did this out of desperation, right, because people do things like you did, one is desperation and two is opportunity, and three is rationale. I get why this happened and I get that you had the tools to get it done. But what about the account drainer? Like, I am so curious.
Jimmy Scalzo: Well, I am going to answer you very candidly. What happened to him is he was given coverage by the government when all this was unfolding, and he made peace with his brother and he came away unscathed until they foreclosed on everything, and now they have some pretty sizable judgments against them.
Traci Brown: Oh.
Jimmy Scalzo: You know, there is karma. He’s had some run-ins. To say this tactfully, he has some run-ins with local authorities in Kenosha about behavior with females.
Traci Brown: Oh, wow. Okay. Okay.
Jimmy Scalzo: He’s had some things happen to him. But you know, hey, listen, my life, it’s a miracle because my wife stayed, and 88% of all marriages end in divorce when someone does something like this.
Traci Brown: I heard that. I want to talk about that. One day, you know, you’re . . . Had you been lying to your wife this whole time, or just kind of not telling her what’s been going on?
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, completely not disclosed. I’ll walk you through. I’m a vice president by 33. I’m a senior vice president by 36. Went to Catholic school and went to the University of Wisconsin. I wasn’t a dumbbell.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: But what happened to me is that, and I would equate it to an ER doctor who sees death repetitively, I became immune and lost my respect for money, to the point . . .
Traci Brown: I’ve heard that too from big . . .
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea.
Traci Brown: You just don’t see the number of zeroes anymore. It’s just not . . .
Jimmy Scalzo: You don’t. It caused me to become morally bankrupt to the point where I felt resentful that I was helping people become successful that I thought maybe I was better than, or I maybe was smarter than, or whatever it may be, or they used my skillset to improve their skillset. A complete asinine way to look at life. I think there was also a sense that when you’re a bigger fish in a small pond, you think you can swim with a great white shark. When you have affluent customers, and their disposable cash is here, and mine is here, and you want to run with those guys, it’s not like I can go to my boss and say, hey, give me a whole bunch of money so I can hang out with Traci, she’s loaded.
Traci Brown: Yea, yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: You do stupid-ass things to try to play at the same level that these other people are at and you just simply can’t. So, what I am saying to you nicely is you’ve got the keep up with the Joneses mentality, you live way beyond your means, and you don’t respect the money. You just blow it because, after all, you’ll just make more of it.
Traci Brown: Right. Or get more of it somehow. Right. Okay.
Jimmy Scalzo: Right.
Traci Brown: Okay. So then, your wife kind of knows what is going on, but maybe not really knows what’s going on. So, how did all this come down?
Jimmy Scalzo: No, no. No. My wife was completely blindsided.
Traci Brown: Oh, completely blind. Okay. Okay.
Jimmy Scalzo: Completely blindsided.
Traci Brown: How did that unfold one day?
Jimmy Scalzo: When my lawyer called, it had been a couple years where they look and they dig, and they dig into everything. Because once the meter starts, it’s like Warren Buffet said, if a state trooper follows you for 500 miles, you’re getting pulled over, a ticket, something’s happening.
Traci Brown: Right, right.
Jimmy Scalzo: So once they started digging, it comes to the point where my attorney says, hey, look, there’s movement. This is going to happen or lays out a set of what potentially could happen. I drop this completely bombshell on her and my mom and everyone else in my family. There is no way to tell you. I talk a lot, and I’m an English major. I don’t have the words to tell you the shame that one feels at that point.
Traci Brown: Oh my gosh. Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: You know what I mean? It’s disgusting. To my wife’s credit, she looked at it and said, we’ll talk. We did. It was a one and done. It wasn’t a three-strike thing. I have kids. We believe in the sanctity of marriage. This is my wife’s worst . . . I’m not going to leave, but there won’t be a sequel to this movie. Whatever happens, I’ll stick it out with you. You show me you change, or we’re done.
Traci Brown: Oh wow. Okay. Okay. So then, how long did you go away to prison camp for? Tell me about that.
Jimmy Scalzo: I got sentenced to 35 months, which in the federal system I think you do, I think it’s 80 – don’t quote me on this – but I think it’s 85% of the sentence, so I did 27 months.
Traci Brown: Okay. And then, you know a lot of people do . . . There are kind of two kinds of people that go into that situation, into prison. One is the kind that just like wastes their time. They try to avoid the whole issue altogether, and there are other people who really take the time to I guess go internal, understand themselves better, improve themselves. What side of the fence are you on?
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, I’m on the side of the fence that there is no chance ever that I want to even put my name on a chalkboard, let alone get in trouble. People say, and I’ve heard people say to me, oh boy, it’s the best thing to ever happen to me. No. It’s not. It’s the most jarring thing that ever happens.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: I don’t mean disrespect to anyone, but I would say it’s like someone who has a traumatic experience in their life, someone who maybe survived a disease or a car accident or had a huge event happen to them. Traci, what’s so unfortunate is that the family goes to prison with the prisoner, and they have it worse because they have to carry the burden of that person being gone, the shame or guilt in the community, and then try to piece their life together, waiting for your re-indoctrination or re-introduction back into society.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: I go away, and I watch one blade of grass grow for almost 900 days, right, because there is nothing to do. But that’s not exactly true. What you can do is try to rewire the way you think, what your priority levels are, why would you ever do something so stupid, and the fear is, not so much, to me, for me, for my individual case, it wasn’t the fear of . . . it was the fear of failure, right. I mean, everything I did or I had accumulated, I was going to lose, so it was a fear of failure and loss of money, and that’s just such a horrible way to live your life. But my mindset was I was going to come back a man. I was entitled desk jockey, jelly-donut guy who had an upper middle-class life. I didn’t have any siblings, and that was, from a perspective of my one brush with the law was a speeding ticket, to go to where I went, people say, how long did you need to be there before you would have learned your lesson and you would have been rehabilitated to the point? About 20 minutes.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: Once you walk in there, it will grab you pretty hard.
Traci Brown: Wow. So, what did you do with your time when you were in there?
Jimmy Scalzo: I got a job.
Traci Brown: What were you doing?
Jimmy Scalzo: I’m not handy, so I got a job in the wood shop.
Traci Brown: Okay.
Jimmy Scalzo: Because my wife said, could you actually come home and maybe be able to do something when you come home? Right. I got a job in the wood shop. I did that for the first six months, and then I went to work in the warehouse. In Terra Haute, it’s a three-facility complex, so they have a camp, a medium facility, and a maximum facility, and one warehouse. I went to work as a clerk in the warehouse. You know what I mean, it’s 29 cents a day. You work. Anyone who is under this misnomer that there is Club Fed and it’s like the Wolf of Wall Street movie – no. I mean, it’s not. It’s nasty and it’s a situation where a guy took a front-end loader, scooped people from all different walks of life together and said, okay, you screwed up, live together, and sort it out. There are decent human beings there, don’t get me wrong, and then there are people who truly deserve to be there, and I did. I deserved to be there. I deserved the punishment. But it’s a tough environment. I’m not going to say it’s not. It certainly is.
Traci Brown: So, when you say camp, and then you said medium facility and maximum facility, like I think we hear a lot about the medium facility and the maximum facility. What is the camp part like? You can kind of walk around a little bit, can’t you, and get out and about?
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea, sure. Yea, yea. Absolutely. Yea. You have the one strike philosophy. You are not someone who took a life or severely injured or impaired someone, so you get to walk around basically in, say Docker’s and a t-shirt. You have the ability to have a job. You have the ability to take some of your time and call it your own, meaning you can exercise or read or go to a library. Your movements are less restricted. However, the reality is you’re counted several times a day where you’re standing against a wall. You’re in an environment where there is no sense of relaxation or you can let your guard down. There is this phrase – you are institutionalized. To me, that means a person’s been there so long that any chance in the outside world or any connection, they let it go, and they just take this as well, this is my life now. But it’s, man, Traci, I can’t explain it to you. It’s hell. It’s not easy.
Traci Brown: Here’s a question that is semi-unrelated, but I’ve always been curious to know more about. Because there’s an economy in prisons, is there not?
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea, there is.
Traci Brown: Talk about that a little bit, because you always hear about, oh, they bought a cell phone from the guard for $800 or whatever.
Jimmy Scalzo: I don’t know anything about that. I know that there’s like if you make friends with someone who works in the laundry, and you like your clothes folded or put back in your bag and brought to your bunk, stamps, or mackerel, or a bag of tuna, yea, there’s an internal currency like that, absolutely.
Traci Brown: Wait. Where do you get a can of tuna? Do they have like a . . . ?
Jimmy Scalzo: It’s a bag. It’s a tear bag. You can buy it at the commissary.
Traci Brown: Okay.
Jimmy Scalzo: It’s not too dissimilar from the outside world where you’re exchanging goods for service, right.
Traci Brown: Right, right.
Jimmy Scalzo: It’s just in the form of stamps or food.
Traci Brown: Oh wow. So then, on this subject, I rode a ski lift once with a guy that said he was responsible for inventing or hosting the prison, almost like a Paypal system for prison. Is that true? Do ya’ll have cash, or did you have like a computer system with your balance in it? How did all that work?
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, from the outside world, if you’re incarcerated and someone from your family wants to send you money, the street phraseology would be, it’s on your books. But yea, basically they go online and they would send money through an EFT, an electronic funds transfer, to your account, and then you could use that for commissary or maybe buy a pair of tennis shoes or something like that.
Traci Brown: Got it. Okay, okay. Yea. Well that guy went skiing in Vail, so . . . (Laughing).
Jimmy Scalzo: (Laughing). He must have had a lot of money on his books.
Traci Brown: Yea. I guess so, I guess so. So what happens when you get out? What’s your family doing? You’re working now, right?
Jimmy Scalzo: I am. Yea. I am. When you get out, the first few months that I was out, I was on home confinement, so you have to check in with a probation officer. Even though I did not have a drug crime, I’ve never taken any drugs, you still have to go and have urine samples.
Traci Brown: Tested. Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: All the rules and regulations. Then once you’re off of that home confinement, I think you punish yourself more than when you were being punished because there is a thought in your mind that someone looking at me is judging me. There are people when I was in the banking world who would do zero business with me for whatever reason. They didn’t like the way I combed my hair, whatever it may be. But when they talk to me now, and it’s so dumb, there is a lure or a sense of Tony Soprano to it, and they want to gossip. What was it like? What did you do? I’m an Italian guy, and I don’t want to stereotype anybody, but there are some people in that culture that think it has some sort of glamour.
Traci Brown: Prestige, a little bit. Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: Yea. An excellent word. It doesn’t, believe me. It doesn’t. There’s nothing dramatic or sexy or alluring about any of it.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: That’s one thing. I was married once before. I have two older children. I have no relationship with them. It’s impossible to try to bridge that gap. Tried. I’ve tried desperately, but it’s not come to fruition.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: I think if I showed you my Indeed account, I have 2,153 jobs that I had applied for from say November of 2015 until last year. I might have had 123 responses. I’m not one that, if you were going to interview me, I don’t let you find it. I tell you. Because I’m one Google click away from you knowing everything about me anyways, right. Even for someone who’s never gotten in trouble, you are one Google click from finding stuff.
Traci Brown: Oh, everybody is. Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, I disclose it. But I was in a box mentally about it. I exercised a ton. But the greatest cathartic thing I found is working with the American Certified Fraud Examiners and doing this, or doing a presentation for them at a conference because legitimately if I can stop somebody from thinking or doing or even considering what I did, I feel fantastic. I know that if somebody says, yea, that would never be. I said that too. I used to go those conferences. People were out of mind and would say, would you pass me a Danish, and why do I have to listen to this guy? Right.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: But the temptation is there. You never know what pitfalls are going to come in your life or what life throws at you. I used to think, yea, what a waste of time. But I’m so grateful that someone like yourself, or ACFE, gives people a forum to get this out because truly, if I can stop someone from even considering it, I feel a heck of a lot better about myself.
Traci Brown: You know what, I’m glad that you’ve been so open and honest because it’s not easy to talk about. But I think today you’ve probably stopped a couple of people who were thinking about it because the glamour is just not there. ACFE is fantastic. They are the ones that connected me with you. Now, were we at the same conference? Did I miss your session? I can’t remember.
Jimmy Scalzo: I was at Columbus, not at Columbus, but I did the Zoom in April.
Traci Brown: Right. That’s right. I missed your session. I had another appointment, because it was all virtual. There was almost a thousand people on that.
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, it was fantastic. I had the pleasure of going to their global conference in 2017 in Nashville. A cute story. My wife, she’s not . . . her personality is much different than mine. She is more reserved. She doesn’t talk as much as I do.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, she was giving this Vince Lombardi speech. It’s going to be great, blah, blah, blah, you’re going to be fine. I had some nerves, right. So, we walked into the hall and John Gill was there from the ACFE. I said, John, how many people are in this room? He says, oh, I don’t know, anywhere between 4,000 and 5,000. My wife, who had been so encouraging, 20 seconds later looked at me and said, oh, you’re screwed.
Traci Brown: (Laughing).
Jimmy Scalzo: Gee, thanks. But it was awesome. I think what happens, Traci, you do this for a living, but I think there are so many people in my spot who tried to defer the blame or brush off the blame or almost make themselves a victim. No. I did it. It’s my screwup. I’m responsible for it. I have to own it. I think that if you take that approach, (a) it is easier to deal with, right, for me, but (b) I don’t want anyone just to blindly trust me. I’m just asking for the opportunity to be trusted. Right.
Traci Brown: Right.
Jimmy Scalzo: I think even if it’s a shred of credibility, you gain a little by just being honest and saying, yea, I screwed up. I did it.
Traci Brown: Yea. That is interesting because you are working. What kind of job do you have? Do you think you want to do something else or something different? How are you feeling about your potential?
Jimmy Scalzo: I’m in sales. I’m a little older in the tooth. I’m working in a sales environment. I was honest in the first 10 minutes of the interview on what happened. I was able to show them a portion of my ACFE presentation from Nashville on YouTube. They were willing to give me a chance. I wish there was something I could find fraud coping related that I could incorporate into my life, honestly, because I still find myself, from a distance, looking at financial services, watching interest rates, helping people when they try to refinance their home loan. What does this mean? What does that mean? Yea, I mean, I guess, that’s a part of me that’s ingrained that I don’t know if I’ll ever get out of me. But, it’s not easy because I’m sure that if I meet someone and they may want to do something business related or even socially, if they check, it’s going to be there.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: People that I’ve met here at work that I find some camaradery or friendship with, I tell them. I say to them, hey, you know what, you might not want to talk to me after I tell you this, but I want you to hear it from me. I don’t want you to find it, and here it is.
Traci Brown: Wow. Now, have you had anyone just say, thanks, but no thanks.
Jimmy Scalzo: Not in the friend world, but in a couple of . . . actually I had a massive auto parts store chain offered me the job as a regional salesperson. Right. I tell them what happened. I disclose. They say, no worries, thank you for the honesty, go ahead and still take the background check. I don’t know how I pass the background check. They send me the offer letter. I get the offer letter from this person in Indianapolis who is a higher-level HR person. I say, did the people in Illinois tell you this? Then I think about three days later they rescinded the offer.
Traci Brown: Oh boy.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, yea. There have been a couple of times where I’ve applied for jobs and I don’t know how I passed the background check, but . . .
Traci Brown: I’ll tell you how you passed the background check. That is, because I just interviewed – oh shoot – private eye investigators. Their names are Michele Stuart, I believe is her name. Anyway – no that is not her name. Private eyes’ background checks. They just got a check that was not very expensive. That’s how that works.
Jimmy Scalzo: Okay, okay.
Traci Brown: It matters how much you pay for your background check.
Jimmy Scalzo: Oh, wow. Okay.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: So, I learned something from you today.
Traci Brown: Yea. There you go. There you go. So then, are you going to stay doing what you are doing for a while? Are you looking to do new things? What’s next for you?
Jimmy Scalzo: No. I like what I’m doing. I just would like to incorporate a little bit more of helping on this end into my life because, selfishly, it feels good.
Traci Brown: Yea, yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: It takes a little bit of the Scarlet Letter or the stain away. It helps me try to connect with people and say, hey, don’t do this.
Traci Brown: Got it. So, we’re going to wrap it up. A final tip. How can people get a hold of you and then a final tip?
Jimmy Scalzo: I’m no LinkedIn. I’m on Facebook and Instagram, if people want to look me up. My final tip would be: Even the most holiest of thou has temptation. The first initial thought is to completely wipe it away and say, oh no, no, no, but somehow it creeps back into your mind. Then, you start to think that you’re like a frying pan and you’re Teflon. Well, my tip is to you, it will stick. There is no cooking spray that will get you out of it.
Traci Brown: Yea.
Jimmy Scalzo: Don’t do it. No matter what, don’t do it.
Traci Brown: There you go. We heard it straight from the man who knows. Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you so much.
Jimmy Scalzo: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Traci Brown: For coming on Fraud Busting.
Jimmy Scalzo: Thank you. Have a good afternoon.
Traci Brown: Alright. Cool.