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White Lies: The Scammer Who Left Brides In The Lurch And Couldn't Stop

January 8, 2026·36 min·2 clips

At the Houston sting operation, Carl Buccio looked at the journalist he had defrauded seven years earlier, paused, and said 'I knew you looked familiar.'

Justin Sales starts as a familiar kind of striver. The host gives him some sympathy: a writer from a non-glamorous place trying to reach a bigger media life. Providence was not the dream. Los Angeles, in early 2016, looked like the place where an ambitious late-twenties journalist might get a break. Then Newsarati showed up. A headhunting firm pitched a new media venture with money, offices, and the phrase the Huffington Post, but better. The tagline was Ambitious. Justin did not love the name, and the downtown Los Angeles WeWork setup already felt a little off. Still, nearly 50 people joined. Michael Esposito, the founder, seemed to be building something big enough that walking away could feel like losing nerve. The story widens years later, during Justin's pandemic reporting spree. He follows clues into unpaid work and repeated identities. Allie Tong becomes the person who makes the pattern harder to ignore. The food influencer had worked for Esposito when he was calling himself Mike White, and she had not been paid either. She kept digging. Because Allie had an online following, more tips reached her, including two Texas women with a separate unpaid wedding-industry story. Their loss was not small. They had done 40000 dollars worth of work for a man calling himself Lance Miller, then found the same Chronicle trail. Amy Civil makes the connection after someone in the wedding world tells her to search Michael Esposito and scam wedding, which leads her to Allie. Everyone had found the same doorway from a different side. Allie eventually points Amy and her friend toward Justin, whose reporting had become the place people went to compare notes. Even the Zoom felt uneasy. Amy and her friend wanted to see Justin's face because some part of them wondered if the person texting back could be the same man again. What comes through is not one neat con. It is a messy chain of ambition, unpaid labor, aliases, and people doing their own detective work because no one else had joined the pieces yet.

As heard by us

A dream media job in a downtown WeWork leads into a trail of unpaid work, aliases, and people comparing notes.

Chameleon starts with Justin Sales chasing the kind of media job that can make a rough move to Los Angeles feel worth it: political editor at Newsarati, a downtown WeWork venture promising to be "the Huffington Post, but better." From the first interview, though, something feels…

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Why you'd press play

Same scammer, three aliases, multiple cities -- and the scattered victims who all traced him back to one article.

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