Face Plant: The Woman With A Thousand Boyfriends

Every case file, interview, and archive tells a piece of the truth. I'm Kylie Lowe, and on my podcast, Dark Down East, original reporting is at the heart of every case I cover. I don't just retell crime stories, I investigate them. I'm speaking with families, searching court records, and piecing together the facts that have been overlooked and forgotten with time. The result? True crime storytelling that digs as deeply into a case as you do. You can listen to Dark Down East wherever you get your podcasts. So there was this journalist in England who got what so many of us get, which is like the ping on the Twitter or in your inbox or in your messages saying, hey, I really like the photos that you posted. This is Katrina Onstad, a podcast producer and journalist in Canada, talking about Simon de Brassell, who for the past 20 years has been a correspondent for the Times of London. Simon received this message on New Year's Eve 2018. The sender went on to introduce herself. My name is Shirley. Not Shirley, but Shirley, S-H-R-I-L-E-Y. And this journalist, Simon, was quite intrigued and began a kind of conversation with this person on the other end of these texts. Gradually, message by message, a relationship began to form. He's a bit older, so I think he didn't really understand that this is a common experience of life online. He ended up talking to this person who presented herself as an American in Flint, Michigan, a mother, a hard worker, an environmentalist. And he was quite intrigued by her. Shirley shared photos, too. She was, I'm sure most people would agree, incredibly beautiful. The two were trading messages most days, often many times a day, and grew quite close. Pretty soon, Simon found himself falling for this woman he'd never met. And then all of a sudden, she started asking for money. The bells didn't go off quite as quickly as I think they might to someone who's a little more online. But he eventually sort of got the sense that maybe this wasn't all kosher. She ended up pinging him from what she said was a hotel in Toronto. She was trapped there in a snowstorm. They had taken her passport, and she needed help to get back. Creeping doubts aside, Simon was enraptured. He wanted to ignore these doubts. But his journalistic radar was beginning to twitch, and he starts to do a little investigating. He finds other people online talking about being scammed by a woman using some of the same images Shrilli had sent him. He's sort of investigating this now as a journalist, wondering if he's being scammed. He presses Shrilli for answers. Why am I seeing your pictures used in these online romance scams? And who is Janessa Brazil, the name that seems to often be associated with these images. Shirley reassures him. She's got a good explanation. When he confronts her, she says, actually, yeah, lots of people are using my image online in scams. And thank you for discovering this. Thank you, because I am the real Janessa Brazil, and my life has been made a living hell. My funds have been frozen. I'm the subject of lawsuits. And I really need your help, actually. Now that the whole truth is out, she says, she and Simon can really get close. And then she sort of double scams him, right? So it's always like scam on top of scam in this story. It was such a labyrinth to navigate. Simon isn't totally at ease. He's skeptical. That's the journalist in him. But a big part of him, his emotional core, still believes that this could be real. He wants this to be real. So he agrees to help Shrili out again. He sends her some money via PayPal. The least he can do to help his online girlfriend escape Toronto. But there's one problem. PayPal says, no, you can't transfer this money because this money is going to West Africa. And then the scales, you know, fell from his eyes that he kind of snapped to and realized, oh, God, I'm still being scammed. It's just that the scam is always taking a new shape. This is Chameleon, a weekly look at the many faces used by scammers and con artists. I'm Josh Dean. This week we ask, who is the woman whose image became the face of catfishing scams around the world? And who's really behind this con? THE END of answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to the deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. Chameleon. This is Chameleon Weekly. The PayPal news broke the spell. Simon de Brucel was now sure he was being scammed. He'd been catfished, lured into an intimate online-only relationship with someone pretending to be a sexy American single mom named Shrilly, who'd set out to gain his trust with the aim of extracting money from him. To help himself get over the shock, sadness, and embarrassment, Simon decided to go on the offensive and investigate his own scam. And what he found is that the photos Shrilly had shared of a stunning brunette had been used in numerous other romance scams around the world. And this scammer, whoever it was, most often went by the name Janessa Brazil. He found the name mentioned over and over on the message boards where scam victims gather in trade stories. She became like a white whale. People are all over the internet asking, who is this? Who is Janessa Brazil? Did she get in your pocket? Did she get into your head, your heart? And we wanted to find out why this one image and this name was everywhere. Like, who is the actual face? Who are the humans at the center of these elaborate, elaborate schemes? This was a jumping-off point for a quest that ultimately became a podcast called Love Janessa, produced by Katrina Onstad and hosted by the British-Nigerian journalist Hannah Ajala, an investigation that led Katrina and Hannah and their team to a very real human behind the mysterious name. So Janessa Brazil was what you would call like an early adopter of the online sex culture. She was the cam girl with a large audience. Cam girls were an early internet phenomenon. Women who would perform on camera. Not necessarily doing amateur porn, just living their lives, but also sometimes taking off their clothes. Before there was OnlyFans. She had a subscription-only service, and she was making, she says, at one point about a million dollars a year. She really understood that space and posted a lot of images. Before everybody shared everything on social media, she was sharing not just sexually explicit pictures and not just performing shows, but also pictures of herself grocery shopping and doing her laundry. It was actually those pictures that made this former cam girl the perfect cover for catfishers. Because there was so much out there. So when the scammers needed to be roping in their victims and showing them evidence that Janessa Brazil was a real person, they could say, this isn't just a sexual thing. Like, here's me going to the flower market today. Here's me going up to dinner with my friends. And so unbeknownst to her, she sort of unleashed her image in this way that we all do very casually now. But she was early. Like, this was kind of, you know, the early 2010s. In those days, Janessa had a huge online presence. She had a very big following. She was an adult entertainer. She wasn't a porn star. She wasn't having sex with people, but she was performing. And she could charge like $100 for five minutes. That kind of cam girl celebrity. But despite this, the real Janessa Brazil was surprisingly hard for the podcast team to track down. In Janessa's line of work, you can imagine that having obsessive fans knowing where to find you would be a problem. They ultimately found Vanessa through an old friend of hers, a radio DJ named, and for those who haven't had the privilege, I swear this is real, Bubba the Love Sponge. This might hurt a bit, Reddy. I'm already doing it. Welcome to the Bubba the Love Sponge Show. Bubba, real name Todd Allen Clem, is an American shock jock radio star who learned his brash, hyper-sexualized broadcasting style from the school of Howard Stern, who was also somewhat familiar with Janessa. I was on Janessa's website. Janessa Brazil. Yeah, that's her metaphor. What a very impressive name. There she is. There's her nice ass. Vanessa was a kind of regular on the Bubba the Love Sponge show and the fact that her image was being used in catfishing schemes came up a few times Turns out it wasn a recent phenomenon And in fact, I'm in a full-blown direct message conversation with a person that's trying to tell me they're Janessa. Okay. You know that. I showed it to you. Yeah, absolutely. And they live in Sweden, and they want their money. There's no news to me. It's been happening for years. And now they're calling me Clem. Like, you know, you don't like when I call you Clem now to Clem. I don't think I've ever called you that. Bubba and Janessa became close, and she even lived with him for a while as a platonic roommate. Katrina knew that she had to get to Bubba to get to Janessa. So trying to get him was amazing, because if you call his number, you get like a racetrack. Like a Bubba the Sponge racetrack or something. Please check BubbaRacewayPark.com for time and pricing. Thanks so much, and we hope to see you here at the racetrack. We were always leaving messages at this racetrack and just trying to, anyway. Finally, Bubba called back. He was protective of Janessa at first. It was a really fascinating conversation with him. Like, he was in his studio, which had a shower booth, like, behind him in case, like, porn stars wanted to come by. And he facilitated an introduction. And I think she didn't really want to be found, you know, like she wanted a modicum of privacy. And we were lucky enough that he trusted us enough to put us in touch. Her name, as you've surely guessed, isn't actually Janessa Brazil. Her name is Vanessa. I'm not going to say her last name because obviously she's trying to live a private life. We found her in a small town in the States. I'm not going to say where. And she told us her story. And it was, it's a real gut punch of a story. Like, she came to the United States with her mom as a child from Brazil. They didn't have a lot of money. They came here. Her mom had been a dentist at home. But when she came here, she started stripping. Then she eventually started making clothes for strippers. Vanessa learned this skill from her mom, started to help, and ultimately saved enough money from making clothes for dancers to put herself through private school, where she did very well. College was obviously next. And when she went to apply, she discovered she was actually undocumented. It's so interesting. It's just like you see all the paths that a life can take. And when one door slams, her life just feared in a completely different direction. So suddenly her opportunities narrowed. Vanessa didn't go to college. She fell in love and got married. And then her career as a cam girl got started, prompted by a very unlikely event, a serious car accident that led to a settlement. With the money from that car accident, she got a boob job and started performing online, like just posting pictures and then gradually doing kind of camming after work. And her husband was sort of her agent, helped her with this. They both profited from it. And she looked at it as a kind of innocuous side hustle. A pretty easy and increasingly lucrative side hustle, with one particular and highly unexpected byproduct. Things were going pretty well. But every once in a while, she would get these little messages saying, hey, you know, you're my wife. I thought you were going to stop doing this. Aren't we in love? We already talked about this. Here she is talking about it on the podcast Katrina produced. This guy comes into my chat and he says that we're married. I was like, I'm sorry, what? And they're like, you're my wife and you told me you were going to quit this. And I went, is this guy joking with me? Is this like a prank? And I was like, why don't you send me an email and tell me what's going on? And that's when I started to realize what was happening. Gradually, it became clear to her that she had provided this deep well of images and experiences for scammers to draw upon and that they were kind of pulling from her own imagery and creating these composite Janessa Brazils and using them as the bait in these elaborate catfishing schemes. and she was bearing the brunt of this because people would call and be super pissed off, right? They'd lost lots and lots of money and actually part of it that I think when we talked to her that she found even more troubling was how heartbroken they were. Like they really, truly believed that she was in love with them and had not delivered on that love. Like these were really, really gutted men. It's impossible to know how widely Janessa's image was disseminated and used in catfishing scams. Katrina guesses that number is in the thousands, as in thousands of men who were targeted for a variety of sums. Like she would get calls saying, I lost $70,000, $50,000, $5,000. It was a lot of money. This really reached a peak in 2016 when Vanessa decided she'd had enough. She went dark and tried to fade back into America. I think having to absorb the vitriol of that many people who felt that she had ruined their lives, I mean, it's hard to imagine what that would feel like. You haven't done anything, but you have to bear the brunt of it. After the break, the hunt for the people behind those images, and how they weaponized one woman's photos as part of an entire catfishing industry. Some cases fade from headlines. Some never made it there to begin with. I'm Ashley Flowers, and on my podcast, The Deck, I tell you the stories of cold cases featured on playing cards distributed in prisons designed to spark new leads and bring long overdue justice. Because these stories deserve to be heard, and the loved ones of these victims still deserve answers. Are you ready to be dealt in? Listen to the deck now, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to Camellia. The Love Genessa team was able to trace many of the scammers using Vanessa's images to a single region, where Simon was told his PayPal money was about to be sent. West Africa, Nigeria, and Ghana in particular, is the global hub for romance scams, Which is why the Love Janessa team needed someone who knew the region and its culture to help them investigate. That's what led British-Nigerian journalist Hannah Ajala to join the team. I'm a journalist, reporter, but yeah, if I haven't mentioned the word traveler, that is definitely one thing that I absolutely love to do. It's opened up my eyes in terms of, you know, the places, the communities, and the people that I've crossed paths with. The Love Genesa producers had seen Hannah's work and reached out. It didn't take much convincing. It definitely took the whole idea of catfishing to another level. And the fact that it became part of what I tend to describe as a global catfishing phenomenon was something that enticed me to want to discover more of the story, especially knowing that this woman's face also held prominence in West Africa, in Lagos, Nigeria specifically as well, where I was when I first heard about Janessa, Brazil. You probably already associate West Africa with scamming to some extent. The Nigerian prince asking for a bank account to store huge amounts of money is the classic. Known as a 419 scam, after the part of the Nigerian criminal code that deems this illegal, that trick goes all the way back to the 1980s and was definitely one of the earliest scams to take advantage of the nascent internet, specifically using email. It's come a long way since then. We really wanted someone with familiarity with that zone of the world. So she went there to try and meet a kind of criminal subculture called the Sakawa Boys. So Sakawa is the Hausa language spoken in many parts of the African continent, and it literally means to be put inside, but it's been associated with a colloquial term for a romance scammer. The Sakawa boys are a sprawling underground community of mostly young men, involved in various scamming activities. There are some women that are part of this, but it's a massive network of young boys, a lot of them based in Ghana, who work together to essentially create these multiple identities. And they specifically target victims in westernized countries. Inside the Sakawa world, there's a belief that supernatural forces can help them succeed. That rituals can draw in victims and protect the scammer from consequences. Someone that's heavily involved in affording activities also may be heavily involved in witchcraft, in voodoo, and other dark spiritual activities. And a lot of it turns out to be based in Ghana, not Nigeria. There's loads of crazy PR about Nigeria. You open up the headlines and you see all of that. So the assumption is that a majority of these networks must live and breathe there. and a very massive part of this podcast was spending time in Ghana. I am Nigerian by heritage, but I spent a lot of time in Ghana just next door and I never would have imagined that a network like Sakawa existed in Ghana If you know what you looking for it easy to see The Sakawa boys flaunt their wealth and power on the streets of Accra and other Ghanaian cities. But there's something else driving it, because no one embarks on a career dreaming of becoming a scammer. It's coming from desperation because you're in a country and a system where youth unemployment is skyrocketing and you want to find means to make a living. It's actually a pretty good way of making a living. Romance scamming isn't a crime in Ghana, but it's still looked down on. And this is not a career that people like to shout about from the rooftops. It's not like a typical job that you see promoted in yellow pages. It's always through word of mouth. Turns out scamming flies pretty easily under the radar. Some of these scammers are family men. Their family members think they work in construction. They've been doing this for nearly a decade. And there's never been a raised eyebrow. They're putting food on the table. Money's coming in all the time. There's never a concern. There's never an odd behavior. A lot of the scamming happens from internet cafes, partly because it's rare for a young Ghanaian to have a whole computer set up at home. But also, it's just good cover. What job doesn't involve having a computer? Very little. So that's how you're able to kind of mask that. Hannah's reporting took her to some internet cafes, and it didn't take long for her to find some people who were involved. One rainy afternoon, she and her producer just walked into one cafe in Accra. We literally saw within five minutes of being there, two boys probably aged between 16 to 19 on a dating website. Their profile was of a white European brunette woman. And you could see the men that they're speaking to, older middle-aged men from one of these target countries. Just two young boys in the middle of their workday. Because this really is a job. That's how they treat it. You think you're in this kind of high-stakes glamorous or like at least sort of, I don't know, shady underworld, but also it's just like a lot of administrative tasks and spreadsheets. Some actually describe the victims of romance fraud as clients because it puts them in that mindset of this is my job, this is my client. It's a job with training. Knowledge passed through this informal group of highly trained catfishers. You could find yourself in a network that comes with a Sakawa handbook, a literal guide on how to be the best of the best romance scammer. There's a pretty widely held perception that victims of romance scams are rubes, lonely losers. But this isn't fair. People of all kinds fall for these scams for many reasons. And one of those reasons is that the people behind the images know exactly what people are looking for. How to turn the screw. It's an approach that Vanessa herself, the real woman behind the Janessa photos, understands well. In fact, it was her whole business plan when she too was openly wooing men to send her money online. The incredible skill that Vanessa, the real person, the cam girl, had in her sex work is this sort of psychological manipulation. She's really good at breadcrumbing the men who are sitting across from her on screen and giving them just exactly what they want and mirroring back to them their deepest needs and desires, even anticipating what they want and reading them. Here's how she explained it to the Love Genessa team. They get hooked and they get like, oh, shoots, I really like that. I didn't even know I liked that. I do. I know you like something before you actually like it. Because I read and research. I read endless books on psychology, hypnotism, and how to manipulate their minds, but not in a bad way. That's what they're there for. So let's play. You win their hearts, you win their wallets, and the rest is history. All of these techniques, all of these tools are the same ones that the scammers use, right? That's exactly what this person on the other end of the line with Simon was doing, was saying, oh, thank you so much. You found me. I am broken. I do need you to patch me up. Can you just wire this money to this hotel in Toronto where I'm holed up right now? The people on the other end of those catfishing schemes, the ones holding the rods, they understand this intuitively. They are or have become master manipulators. They're really good, these guys. They will meet the need, you know, they will meet the void. They'll slip in there and take the shape required to get what they want. Victims will quite naturally often push for face-to-face communications. But the scammers have a strategy for this. Can we just hop on a call? Can we just talk? Oh, my phone is broken. Oh, my carrier cut me off. Oh, this happened, that happened. Or the victim might set up a Zoom with the person and then they just won't show. And then the scammer will say, well, no, I was there. You weren't there. Like, it just goes on and on. There are some clients that aren't too fussed about seeing them because to them, pictures are enough. Some of these people may not also be technologically savvy. So texting and speaking on the phone occasionally is fine for them as well. Because you've also got to bear in mind a lot of the people that they target are much older. So because of that, that means that they're not using technology in a way that young people would. But no one is actually safe. Because the Sakawa boys are definitely keeping up with the latest technology. One of the Sokoa Voice We Interviews said that they have recording devices that can turn a male voice into a female voice. So they will have these long, very intimate, often sexual conversations. And I love this as a podcaster, that so many of these guys talked about these long conversations, these audio experiences. Because audio, as we all know, is the most intimate medium of all, right? The voice is literally in your body. You're in the dark with your headphones, and this other person is right inside of you. It was more than three years ago when Katrina and Hannah reported this story. In that relatively short time, artificial intelligence has completely transformed online truth. A scammer today can probably map Janessa's image onto his own face and become her in a video. You really can't even trust your eyes anymore. Combine that with the ever-evolving skill of the catfishers, and, well, this isn't an industry that's going to be stomped out anytime soon. These scams all follow a pattern. It's a long game. The young man in Ghana described it as a courtship like any other, that essentially the first months are building up trust, that there's a little bit of love bombing. Birthdays, anniversaries, selling them things, knowing that it's not on the first conversation that you get your payout you have to build a relationship if they're questioning why they haven't seen you on video called in the months that you've been speaking there is a response for everything it may mean speaking to them throughout the day every day some may take turns probably send them a little profile of okay this is the client this is everything you know about them this is things that they like this how they like to be spoken to. Remember this about their mom. They have a test coming up. So it can absolutely be a combination of one-to-one work or group work, meaning that you're splitting the earnings. The multitasking skills are out of this world. Some of them could be speaking to up to a dozen people in the space of a month, 12 people, 12 different conversations, 12 bits of information to remember names, family members, the job that they do. And whilst I'm warming up that person slash client, I'm working on the next person. People's alarm bells aren't going off right away. And then once that groundwork is firmly established, then they'll say, oh, you know, actually, I just lost my phone. There's some elaborate reason that they can't access their funds. And a lot of times, if it's women being scammed, the men will be traveling or they'll be in the military. And they'll say that they are doing top secret work. And because of that work, they're not able to access their bank accounts. So it's a kind of slow drip, right? 100 here, 200 there. Nothing that might set off alarms. The really big scams will come much farther down the road. But usually it is about care in some way. Like it will be some kind of personal crisis. The way you would lean on anyone that you loved if you were in a moment of financial crisis and you said, this is terrible and I don't want to do this, but I really need this $10,000 because X, Y, Z. The real gut punch in the Love Janessa podcast is an Italian farmer who was taken for nearly a quarter million dollars by a scammer using Janessa photos. That was one person. I mean, yeah, 250,000 euros. Roberto, he's a young Italian stallion, as I nicknamed him. Around my age, I'm in my early 30s, so is he. He's not an old person with, you know, dozens of cats at home and widowed. He was I guess quite busy running the several farms that he did in beautiful Sardinia I think his point of weakness his vulnerability was his romantic nature Like, he was just a giant open heart walking around this planet, like, just ready to be squashed. And they had built a virtual relationship for just over five years. he fell in love like really and truly in love and at one point he sent her a plane ticket to come to see him in Italy and went to the airport and saw a dark haired woman getting off the plane and tried to follow her and thought it was her and thought she got in a cab and left and was convinced that she had been there like he had told himself this story that she had come but rejected him It was this really incredible kind of mind trick. The romantic mind is powerful. It creates massive blind spots. This is the love of my life. Why would I not give them a few hundred? Why would I not give them a few thousand? Why would I not give them tens of thousands? So it's a love trap filled with love bombing, filled with a really intelligent system that's operating on a 24-hour kind of schedule that turns into a relationship where the payout for the perpetrator is sweet because it's money. Anyone who's been in a bad relationship or who fell in love with someone who never truly paid that love back understands this on some level. But what's incredible, I think, is that people will see these gaps and victims will notice that things aren't lining up or that their lover has wrong information about them or is conveying something that's not true. And they'll give them a free pass, right? Like we talked to a psychologist about this and like, why does it take so long for the red flags? And she said, well, it's like sunk costs. The stories that we tell ourselves are so, they can just eclipse all logic and we become very irrational in the face of love. The scammers know that and exploit those holes. When we finally met Vanessa and asked her, We had many, many questions to ask her, one of which was like, did you actually go to Sardinia? And she said, I've never been outside of the United States and Brazil, the only two places I've ever traveled. And even to the point where when we finally got them together, which is the final episode of the show, even then it was almost like he couldn't fathom that she truly hadn't been the human at the center of this chaos in his life. I think he really thought that he had been scammed by Janessa Brazil. Obviously, the Sakawa boys aren't just using Genesis photos. But a lot of them were, still are. Probably will be for years and years. We asked her that, like, why do you think you're the one that's so iterated? And she said, I can be anything. She's Brazilian, but she says people think she's Italian, people think she's Greek. She's this kind of global look for global scams. It's just the image took on a life of its own. It's a life that had serious implications for the real Vanessa. She became a victim, like Simon, Roberto, and thousands of others. And Vanessa herself, she said she never even fought to go to the police because what she told us was that she assumed they would just say, you're a porn star, you brought this on yourself. Anyone can be a target. I think the more that you share, the more that you naturally have that risk for someone to duplicate images of you and pretend to be you. And I've seen it even on a smaller scale of friends that I have on Instagram. Could have a few odd hundreds, maybe a thousand followers, and someone has gone on their profile. Hannah met several of the Sakawa boys who used Vanessa's photos and pressed them on their motivations and feelings. One boy definitely feels bad about what he did, although it's not clear-cut either. You could tell he's a family man, he's got a wife and kids. He said that he did feel bad, but the game is the game, got to keep it going. Like, you could see that he had some remorse. Others saw their culpability very differently. Young man, quite outgoing, but very low-key. No remorse. He sees it as reparations. He makes the link of Ghana being the first African nation to break free from colonial rule. And the fact that they were colonized from many of these countries that these romance scammers often target, there's no remorse because we're taking back what was taken from us. So I don't know if it's something that they do to make their conscious feel better about these crimes essentially that they've committed that have literally ruined lives. But I can imagine that that's probably something that's also widely spoken about in the networks, to encourage people to say, look, don't fall back. Their ancestors sold from us, so it's time for us to get back what's ours. There's no concerted effort to crack down on the gangs. The laws, when there are any, aren't enforced. The industry of romance, scamming, and fraud is continuing to thrive. It can be very hard in overpopulated countries where there are already so many other economical issues at hand. Not to mention unstable, unpredictable governance, and the fact that these countries have far more critical problems to solve. it will probably be at the absolute bottom of the list to prioritize something like this where there's already issues like infrastructure poverty unemployment water sanitation sustainability the list goes on so with that instability people found stability in romance scamming or scamming in general and i think the more that technology and the internet improved it just made it more attainable for people to keep on doing. I mean, no one is born bad, no one is born evil, no one is born with the intention to steal from others. But that is the result for many people when they just can't see a way out in a system that's repetitively failing them. Hannah is clear about the aims of the Love Janessa podcast. It's raising awareness about the dangers of romance scamming, the lives that it ruins, and the importance of how careful we have to be when pursuing anything romantic or not online. But I think it's right that the final thought should go to people like Simon and Roberto, who fell in love with a lie and saw their lives ripped apart long before the inevitable, embarrassing, crushing moment of realization. Some had medical conditions. Some were already not in a great place with their family. They were mentally in the space where they're preparing to spend the rest of their lives with someone. So it was a gradual deterioration of their lives. I mean, viewed through that lens, the takeaway here isn't all that bad. Love can make you imagine things, but then oddly it's quite warming and surprising to know how many human beings are willing to wear their heart on their sleeve like that. Our ability to love is our greatest strength as a species, but it's our greatest vulnerability too. It's something we all have, something that connects us, something that catfishers exploit. Still, it's never a bad thing to be reminded of our capacity to let people in. To believe. Because if we don't, we'll all be alone. We're all humans and we all absolutely make mistakes. And it's been great spending time with those people. And I just found it very fascinating how our digital lives are so manipulated by our very human, very animal psychology. We can't stop being human. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and AudioChuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean, and was written and reported by me and Joe Barrett. It was produced by Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Simenhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Theme by Ewan Leitremuwen and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Scherr, and me, Josh Dean. And finally, if I can ask a few favors before sending you on your way today, please rate, follow, and review Chameleon on your favorite podcast platforms to help spread the word. I know everyone says this, but it's true. Ratings and reviews really do help. And if you have any feedback, tips, or story ideas, you can email us at chameleonpod at campsidemedia.com or leave us a message at a special number we've set up. 201-743-8368. Add a plus one if you're outside North America. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week. I think Chuck would approve. Wow.