Queen of the Con · iHeartPodcasts and AYR Media

The California Girls: Ep. 3, Reverse Shopping

September 19, 2024·33 min·3 clips

A professional shoplifter explains how Walmart's facial recognition tracks her across stores after a minor theft.

The racket begins behind the wheel. A guest says they were getting about one hundred to two hundred dollars a day to drive sellers around. At first, it almost sounds like a strange day job. They are watching where the product goes, who buys it, and how a fence's house becomes the place everyone circles back to. Then someone knocks on the wrong door. One seller turns up with product at a random neighbor's house, asks to sell it, and the baffled residents call police. The host catches the problem right away. His reaction feels like someone replaying the scene in real time, stuck on how the whole setup could fall apart because of one wrong house. The neighbor was the tripwire. From there, the guest explains how driving started to blend into the life around the fence, where shoplifting, product, and housing were all tangled together. A room could cost fifty dollars a day. The same house apparently rented every spare room, even the garage, and people could pay what they owed by handing over product. That detail makes the story feel darker. What sounded like errands now looks like a rough little system, part shelter and part marketplace, with people in trouble getting pulled further in. The host keeps pressing, but gently. He asks when driving turned into wanting to do what the others were doing, and the answer is bleakly practical. They needed somewhere to stay. Someone they knew had moved from shoplifting to dealing drugs, the fence had rooms, and the door code made the whole arrangement feel weirdly normal. The danger sits inside the convenience. By the end, the host is staring at the obvious risk of putting shoplifters under one roof and asking why anyone thought that could last.

As heard by us

A small-time hustle grows loud enough for the whole neighborhood to notice.

The episode turns a fence's house into the center of a small, oddly organized side hustle, where stolen goods, daily cash, and a steady stream of strangers make ordinary logistics feel bigger than they should.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a scam story that starts with a fence renting rooms by the day and ends with the cops getting called, press play.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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