Catch Him if You Ken: The Dating Scammer Who Targeted Influencers

Summary

Chameleon: Catch Him if You Ken — The Dating Scammer Who Targeted Influencers

Podcast: Chameleon (Audiochuck | Campside Media)
Host: Josh Dean
Air Date: May 14, 2026

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Overview

This episode of Chameleon unpacks the wild, globe-hopping career of “Ken Yanai” — a charming, seemingly harmless figure who inveigled his way into the lives and wallets of numerous victims (chiefly young women and families) by telling ever-shifting tales about his wealth, background, and ambitions. Veteran journalist Josh Dean, with guests Natalie Robamed and Abakar Adan, follows the thread of Ken’s cons across continents, social media, and dating apps. As the episode unfolds, listeners are drawn into a suspenseful underworld of digital-age deception, heartbreak, and traces of psychological insight, highlighting how romance and “can’t-miss” investments can mask a devastating con.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Seduction of “Ken Yanai”: A Modern Scam

• Main victim “Sophie”: A German influencer studying in NYC who met Ken on a dating app in fall 2021. They quickly grew close over shared love of crypto and books.
• Initial persona: Ken presented as non-threatening, slightly awkward, “short, baby-faced,” sometimes bearded, and always with a “disarming smile.” (Natalie Robamed, 01:51, 02:02)
• Ken’s story: Claims to be the son of Tadashi Yanai (Uniqlo founder), and a Google programmer. Loads of emotional backstory: family trauma, cutoff from his trust fund for dating a “white European woman.”
• Escalation: Ken leans on Sophie for money when his credit card is declined and claims he’s hit hard times because of his family. Sophie lets him move in.

2. The Pattern of Financial Manipulation & Emotional Abuse

• Fake ventures: Ken convinces Sophie to invest $20k, her parents to add $6k, in a cryptocurrency scheme. Then “tragedy”: the crypto wallet is hacked.
• Coincidences stack up: ATM “robbery,” claims of being unlucky. Sophie grows suspicious (“This is one too many things. Things just keep going wrong with this guy.” — Natalie Robamed, 05:16)
• Turning detective: Sophie checks Ken’s phone, finds messages from others he owes money. Directly contacts a previous victim and finds the Instagram account @kenyanai.scammed.me — stories abound. Ken reportedly isn’t Japanese, but from Singapore (06:04).

3. Ken’s Broader Web of Deceit

• International scope: Ken’s scams weren’t limited to Sophie. Before her, he had moved from LA (where he was married to Becca, an Instagram model) to New York.
• Common technique: He always presents himself as “very wealthy” but down on his luck so he “doesn’t need your money,” just temporarily cut off (09:40).
• “Peacocking” with the dog: Ken’s French bulldog with different colored eyes becomes a social tool to break the ice with women. (“His very cute little dog… would disarm, specifically women.”— Natalie Robamed, 10:31)
• The long con: Patiently builds trust, offers victims a “special” investment opportunity (11:07).

4. The Family Angle: Ken’s In-Laws and Housekeeper

• Victims close to home: Becca (ex-wife)’s father, grandfather Mike, and housekeeper “Rita” all invest significant sums in Ken’s business ideas (an upscale Airbnb, then a “weed farm”).
• Crystal Sable, Becca’s aunt: “You could invest $50,000, and in six months you will get a million dollars back.” (12:02)
• Desperation and trust: Mike invested in hope of affording his wife’s care. Becca’s family splits over suspicions Becca might be complicit, but evidence is circumstantial and she remains silent. (16:01-16:28)

5. Ken’s Early Life & the Roots of His Grift

• Piecing together the backstory: Abakar Adan finds only about 10 years of Ken’s life verifiable.
• Not raised rich: Despite his act, Ken grew up in Singapore, among but not within the wealthy elite, attending “a really good school” with subsidized tuition (19:52-20:12).
• Bowling metaphor: “It’s all about spin… playing alone, essentially. And that is just a sort of beautiful metaphor… Ken would put a huge amount of spin on his story.” — Natalie Robamed (20:47-21:30)
• Avoiding scrutiny: Cultural reticence in Singapore (“People don’t like to start trouble.” — Abakar Adan, 21:46) made tracking Ken’s past harder.

6. The Chase: Crime Across Borders, Crypto, & Law Enforcement Hurdles

• Changing locations: Eviction complaints in Florida. Moved from LA, to Florida, to NYC, then Europe as scams caught up to him (22:15-23:31).
• Justice eludes victims: Sophie finally has Ken arrested in Germany, but police can’t confirm his crypto wallet ownership — and must release him after 48 hours due to privacy and blockchain anonymity (24:05-25:13).
• “Love scam” (German police): Authorities are sympathetic but hamstrung by the technicalities of cryptocurrency.

7. Sophie's Retaliation: Turning the Tables

• Manipulating the manipulator: Sophie uses Ken’s affection (and his dog) to get him to return some money piecemeal in exchange for visits. (“If you give me x amount of money… you can see the dog.” — Natalie Robamed, 25:45)
• Where’s the payback coming from? At this time, Ken is scamming “Antonio,” an Italian crypto newbie, for $100,000 — likely recycling funds to keep earlier victims at bay.
• Victims’ paradox: As “Kenyaniscammed.me” Instagram group grows, a tension arises between supporting each other and wanting restitution from whichever pot Ken is filling next. (“On one side, you want to be friends… but probably there is no real solidarity.” — Abakar Adan, 27:43)

8. The Vanishing Act

• Disappearing completely: By 2022, Ken vanishes from social media and life. Huntington fails; even with private investigators, no digital traces found after March 2023 aside from possible crypto wallet activity (28:50-29:35).
• “He’s made himself a ghost.” — Natalie Robamed (28:50)
• Potentially alive, maybe still scamming: The only clue is movement in the associated crypto wallets.

9. Reflections and Warnings

• Intention behind the podcast:
  • “If we… build some sort of case against him, or get somebody to pay attention… or at least stop him from traveling…” — Natalie Robamed (30:14)
  • “If somebody does find out his real name and Google it, they won’t give money to him.” (30:43)
• Final thoughts:
  • “I hope he… gets a conscience because it’s ruined people’s lives.” — Natalie Robamed (31:05)
  • “Ken, if you’re listening, our number is in the credits. Give us a call.” — Josh Dean (31:23)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “He’s relatively short and… has this baby face… a disarming smile and kind of seems pretty harmless.”
  — Natalie Robamed (01:51)

• “This is one too many things. Things just keep going wrong with this guy.”
  — Natalie Robamed (05:16)

• “[Ken] always presented himself as very wealthy. So this was a guy who actually never needed your money, is how he would frame it. But he just happened to have fallen on hard times.”
  — Natalie Robamed (09:40)

• “He would build relationships, and then when people gained his trust, he would con them… Essentially, he was playing the long con.”
  — Abakar Adan (10:56)

• “You could invest $50,000, and in six months you will get a million dollars back.”
  — Crystal Sable (12:02)

• “I personally think that it sort of seems like this may have been a really painful, awful chapter of [Becca’s] life that she wants to close.”
  — Natalie Robamed (16:28)

• “Look, I’ve never been a professional bowler, but… it’s about putting your spin on the ball… a beautiful metaphor… for what Ken would do later in his life.”
  — Natalie Robamed (20:47-21:30)

• “He really, really has been able to kind of make himself a ghost.”
  — Natalie Robamed (28:50)

• “I hope… we can get the word out about him… So if somebody does find out his real name and Google it, they won’t give money to him.”
  — Natalie Robamed (30:43)

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Important Timestamps

• The Sophie scam & Ken’s persona: 01:08–04:30
• Sophie discovers the scam, finds other victims: 05:03–06:04
• Family and housekeeper investments: 11:07–15:44
• Ken’s early life and formation of his con artistry: 18:05–21:30
• Criminal complaints and Ken’s movement through the US: 22:15–23:31
• Sophie manipulates Ken into repayments: 25:45–26:57
• Ken’s final disappearance and attempts to trace him: 28:50–29:35
• Final warnings and hopes from the reporting team: 30:14–31:23

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Recurring Themes and Tone

• Nuanced empathy for both victims and the possibility that some partners (like Becca) were also conned or emotionally manipulated.
• Blend of suspense and frustration: The doggedness of the reporters and victims is palpable, matched only by the slipperiness of Ken and the impotence of global law enforcement.
• Cautionary: A consistent warning about blind trust in online romance, cryptocurrency, and rapid investment pitches.

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Conclusion

The episode exposes the vulnerability of even savvy, resourceful people in the age of online deception and unregulated digital finance. Despite technology’s promise of accountability and transparency, cases like Ken’s show how easy it still is for a determined con artist to slip through the cracks — and yet, the community of victims, journalists, and digital sleuths offers hope for eventual justice or, at the very least, increased awareness. The hunt for Ken continues, both as a mystery and as a cautionary tale for listeners everywhere.

Transcript

[Ashley Flowers]

Hi, I'm Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And if you're on the edge of your seat listening to this show, Crime Junkie needs to be your next listen. Every Monday, I dive into a new true crime case that our reporting team has been on the ground looking into. From lesser known disappearances to the most chilling cases hitting the headlines. And I'm gonna walk you through it the way I tell my best friend, because, well, that's what I'm doing. Yeah, that's me. And I'm right there with you as we listen together, react to every wild detail, and of course, I ask all the question and I'm going to have the answers because we have case files, we're talking to detectives and family members, and we're going to stay focused on the facts. So if you're not already listening to Crime Junkie, what are you waiting for? There are over 300 episodes available right now, and you can listen to new episodes of Crime Junkie every Monday, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Natalie Robamed]

Campsite Media

[Crystal Sable]

Hello.

[Abakar Adan]

What is. What do you want me to say? Chameleon, Chameleon, Chameleon Weekly.

[Josh Dean]

It's your typical modern dating story. Boy meets girl on an app. It was the fall of 2021 and a young German student we'll call Sophie was studying abroad in New York City. Sophie, who asked to be anonymous in this story, was an influencer and she was good at it. She was also into crypto investment, which combined with her work on social media was making her quite a lot of money. Sophie was new to the city and wanted to meet people, so she got on a dating platform and a few weeks later matched with a nerdy seeming older guy named Ken Yanai. Ken said that he'd moved from Japan to work as a programmer at Google. He was 13 years Sophie's senior, but he seemed nice and non threatening.

[Natalie Robamed]

He's relatively short and he sort of has this baby face.

[Josh Dean]

That's Natalie Robamed, a journalist and podcast host. She interviewed Sophie for a podcast last year.

[Natalie Robamed]

Sometimes he has kind of a beard that's a little longer and he has this sort of short, pretty cropped hair. People say that he has this sort of disarming smile and kind of seems pretty harmless.

[Josh Dean]

On their first date, they went out for a casual dinner. Ken was awkward, but he was smart and Sophie liked that. They kept seeing each other, bonding over their shared love of crypto and reading. Sophie was starting to fall for Ken and his dog, a French bulldog named Luigi. She was also starting to learn about his Family.

[Natalie Robamed]

He's dropping little hints about his private jet and they're shopping in Soho or whatever, and he wants to stop by the Uniqlo store just to check how it's doing so he can report back to his dad, who he claims is the founder of Uniqlo.

[Josh Dean]

That's right. Ken told Sophie that. Oh, by the way, his dad was Tadashi Yanai, the founder of the multi billion dollar global fast fashion clothing chain, Uniqlo. But Ken wasn't like a lot of other uber rich guys. He was shy, sensitive. He opened up to her about his difficult past, his mom's death, his abusive father, and his struggles with drug addiction. And because of this rocky past, he said his wealthy family kept him on a tight leash. A few weeks into dating, the couple went on a trip to Disney World, Ken's treat. But when it was time to pay for the hotel, his card was declined. He was embarrassed, but he had an explanation.

[Natalie Robamed]

He'd been cut off from his trust fund because his family didn't like that he was dating, like, a white European woman.

[Josh Dean]

It turned out that Ken was having major money problems. And it wasn't just the trip. He had been living in a hotel in New York, the Ludlow, a trendy and expensive hotel on the Lower east side. But now he was running out of cash. So, considering that her new boyfriend's lack of funds was more or less her fault, Sophie let Ken crash at her place.

[Natalie Robamed]

He says, oh, it's just going to be a few days. Guess what? It's not a few days.

[Josh Dean]

Ken and Luigi the dog moved in that December. Ken had an idea that would solve all of his problems. He was going to start his own cryptocurrency. He convinced Sophie to invest, starting with $20,000 plus 6,000 that her parents put in. She also gave him extra money so that he could pay for marketing and for more programmers. It would be worth it. He assured her. There would be huge returns. But the day these investors were supposed to get their money back, tragedy struck.

[Natalie Robamed]

Oh, my God. Somebody hacked my crypto wallet. It's all gone.

[Josh Dean]

It was horrible. But it wasn't Ken's fault. Hackings happen. Sophie trusted him. Around this time, the couple went on vacation in Marbella, a city on the coast of Spain. Ken was still cut off from his family, and he'd lost money on this crypto venture. So Sophie was paying for everything. One time, she gave him her ATM card so he could get some cash. And when Ken came back, he told

[Natalie Robamed]

her, I've been robbed. You won't Believe it. Like, I went to the ATM and I got robbed. Sophie just kind of thought, huh.

[Josh Dean]

Now Sophie was starting to get suspicious. The hacking, the family drama, and now the robbery. Sure, it could all be a coincidence. Some people are just unlucky. But it was starting to seem like a pattern.

[Natalie Robamed]

Like this is one too many things. Things just keep going wrong with this guy.

[Josh Dean]

So Sophie decided to go through Ken's phone.

[Natalie Robamed]

Ken was incredibly secretive around his phone and his laptop. He would take his laptop even into the shower with him when he went to shower. Whatever's going on with this guy, it'll be in his phone.

[Josh Dean]

Sophie started to watch Ken unlock his phone to learn the password. And one day, when he went to shower and left the phone behind, she took the opportunity to look through it.

[Natalie Robamed]

She went to his text messages, and she said she just searched money or, like, anything to do with money. And a message came up from a woman that said, essentially, you owe me money.

[Josh Dean]

She took a picture of the contact and told Ken she was going out for a walk. Then she called the number. A woman picked up.

[Natalie Robamed]

That woman said that she'd given Ken $20,000 and he'd never paid her back.

[Josh Dean]

Ken, the woman told her, had also scammed her and then disappeared. And she wasn't the only one. She told Sophie about an Instagram account she had created called Kenya. And I scammed me. Sophie went to the page and scrolled through story after story of people getting scammed by the man she was sharing a bed with, the man she had given more than $50,000 to. It suggested that everything Sophie thought she knew about Ken was a lie. He wasn't rich. He wasn't the heir to the Uniqlo fortune. He wasn't even from Jap. He was actually from Singapore, more than 3,000 miles from Japan. What else was he lying about? Who was Kenyanai? I'm Josh Dean, and this is Chameleon, a show about people who invent themselves. This week, the story of an unassuming guy who traveled the world, scamming as he went, and then disappeared.

[Yvette Gentile]

Whispers in the dark phenomenon that slip past to logic legends that refuse to die when the unknown stirs. Its trail leads to our podcast, so Supernatural. I'm Yvette Gentile. And I'm her sister, Racha Pecorero. Together, we explore all of the world's most bizarre mysteries. Listen to so Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Dean]

This is Chameleon, the weekly.

[Abakar Adan]

So there's this guy who is living this lavish Instagram lifestyle.

[Josh Dean]

This is Abakar Adan. He's a journalist and podcast producer who worked with Natalie Robomed on Catch Me if youf can, the podcast they made about Sophie's scammer boyfriend, Cammie and I.

[Abakar Adan]

He's very cunning and charismatic, and he is. He's really effective at disappearing.

[Josh Dean]

Ken was prolific, an international con artist who had never been in police custody for more than 48 hours because the only thing he was better at than convincing people to trust him with their money was disappearing when they asked for it back. That's what Abokar and Natalie knew about Ken when they started working on the project, which was already in development as a documentary. So when they were looped into the story to pick up where the doc team had left off, some reporting about Ken had been done, but there was still a lot of work to do.

[Abakar Adan]

Where is he? Who is he?

[Josh Dean]

There was plenty of information out there about Ken. That wasn't the problem.

[Natalie Robamed]

The problem with somebody like Ken is that he tells so many people so many different things that it's incredibly hard to figure out what's true or not. And things that you would just take as fact for somebody else. You cannot take as fact for this guy.

[Josh Dean]

Like he'd told Sophie he was the heir to Uniqlo, but he deployed different lies about the origin of his alleged fortune to try and hook other victims.

[Natalie Robamed]

He at one time was saying that he was the co founder of Pokemon Go. He also said that he worked at Google X and that he was like this crypto wunderkind who just knew so much about it and was an investing genius.

[Josh Dean]

Natalie and Abokar's challenge was to find out what was a lie and what was real, if anything was.

[Natalie Robamed]

This is the story of who Ken is, what he pretended to do, and who he actually was.

[Josh Dean]

From documents including his passport, they knew that Ken's real name was Kendrick Chu Wen Long, but he went by many aliases. One detail was consistent in all of Ken's cons.

[Natalie Robamed]

He always presented himself as very wealthy. So this was a guy who actually never needed your money is how he would frame it. But he just happened to have fallen on hard times.

[Josh Dean]

He would use that unassuming personality Sophie fell for to his advantage.

[Natalie Robamed]

In the case of every single victim that I spoke to, he actually met them in person, which I think is so rare compared to most kind of con artists or alleged con artists these days, you know, and I think that speaks to, like, how disarming he seems in person. Like, maybe it helps his case to see him in person because he Seems so sort of like whatever.

[Josh Dean]

Ken came off to his marks as so shy, so mild mannered. He knew how to draw people in. And he had another tool in its arsenal of manipulations, his dog.

[Natalie Robamed]

It was if he took, you know, kind of the ideas from Neil Strauss's the Game and sort of like had a peacocking item or a thing that would start conversation. In this case, his very cute little dog that had two different colored eyes and then that would disarm, specifically women who'd be like, oh, my God, your dog's so cute. And then you instantly, instantly have a way to start conversation.

[Josh Dean]

Once he got them talking, Ken would lay the groundwork.

[Abakar Adan]

He would build relationships, and then when people gained his trust, he would con them. Essentially, he was playing the long con.

[Josh Dean]

After they'd become friends or something more, Ken would present an opportunity, usually an investment. A lot of the time he made it seem like he was doing the mark, a favorite. It wasn't to help him. He was rich after all. He didn't need the money. This was a special chance to invest in a can't miss project that would help them. Natalie and Aboukar found that this was the way Ken conned most of his victims, including his own in laws. Before Sophie in New York, Ken was living in LA and married to a woman named Becca. Like Sophie, Becca was much younger and an Instagram model, I guess Canada type. Becca introduced Ken to her family, and soon he had convinced Becca's father and grandfather to invest in a business he was starting, a home rental website called your Sky.

[Natalie Robamed]

It was going to be kind of like an upscale Airbnb. He told several people that LeBron James was an investor.

[Josh Dean]

It was, Ken promised, an incredible investment opportunity.

[Crystal Sable]

You could invest $50,000, and in six months you will get a million dollars back.

[Josh Dean]

This is Crystal Sable, Becca's aunt. Natalie and Abokar interviewed her and her husband Steve. They didn't invest themselves, but they helped Steve's dad, Becca's grandfather Mike, get the money he invested with Ken.

[Steve]

I took my dad to the bank to get a check drawn for $50,000.

[Josh Dean]

Steve was a cop and something smelled fishy to him. He tried to warn his dad.

[Steve]

Right before we go in, I remember asking him, I go, you know, easily, you could lose $50,000 just after writing this check.

[Josh Dean]

But Mike was struggling to afford his wife's medical care. He was desperate for cash.

[Steve]

He goes, yeah, I understand, but I trust Becca. I'm like, okay, that's your choice. I can't tell you no.

[Josh Dean]

Mike passed away before he could see any return on his investment. After he died, Steve took over his dad's finances and tried to get an update from Ken.

[Steve]

I communicated with Ken and Becca. I was asking about the investments, and apparently they informed my dad that it switched from your sky investment into a weed farm in California.

[Josh Dean]

Hmm. It didn't make sense. This just wasn't something Steve's dad would have agreed to.

[Steve]

It's just not my dad. He's definitely not a weed farm guy.

[Josh Dean]

And then more tragedy struck.

[Natalie Robamed]

He can't pay you back because the weed farm got destroyed.

[Josh Dean]

But in reality, of course, as far

[Natalie Robamed]

as we can tell, those companies never really existed.

[Josh Dean]

Steve described the situation to his colleagues at the local police station that he thought his family was being scammed, but they told him there wasn't really anything they could do.

[Natalie Robamed]

Police would say, oh, you know, this isn't really a criminal complaint. You know, you signed a contract.

[Josh Dean]

Eventually, Becca and Ken stopped responding, and so Steve and Crystal were left watching them live their glamorous lives on Instagram, Lives that might have been funded by money stolen from their own family. Steve's brother, Becca's dad, still thought that Ken was legit. And that created a fissure in their family, which grew deeper when Steve and Crystal became convinced that Becca was in on the scam.

[Natalie Robamed]

You had to have known, you know, that this is not a legitimate business. I mean, Becca had to know.

[Josh Dean]

Natalie and Abacar also spoke to another victim, Rita. That's a fake name. She wanted to be anonymous for the podcast. But Rita also thought that Becca might have known about the scamming.

[Crystal Sable]

I think he had to tell her at some point. I mean, you just had to know it, like thinking about her face that day when I walked in to hand the cash over and clean their house.

[Josh Dean]

Rita was Ken and Becca's housekeeper, who Ken also convinced to invest in your sky. She's talking about the moment she went to Ken and Becca's house to give them her $60,000 cash investment.

[Crystal Sable]

Yeah, she knew at that time for sure.

[Josh Dean]

Ken told Rita that he was choosing her, that he was giving her this amazing opportunity to invest in a budding business because he cared about her.

[Crystal Sable]

Basically, because he respects me and loves me as a friend and wants to see me not work so hard and do good. But, you know, at the same time, he's not the kind of person that just hands out money. Like, he needs people to prove that they would take a chance with him to make it big.

[Josh Dean]

So Rita took a chance on her friend and boss, Ken, and she thought she would never have to clean a house again.

[Crystal Sable]

He did say things like, oh, by this time next year, you should be a millionaire.

[Josh Dean]

Instead, she lost $60,000. So Rita, Crystal, and Steve all thought Becca might have been in on it, but Natalie isn't so sure.

[Natalie Robamed]

She was really young when she was with him. That's the other thing that, that is worth noting. Like, she met him when she was still in college.

[Josh Dean]

Natalie's point is that Becca was so young and was dating this seemingly wealthy, much older guy who she surely would have trusted if he told her he was rich and had investment opportunities. Why would she doubt him? Maybe she didn't see the signs or maybe she didn't want to see them. Natalie and Abokar tried to ask.

[Natalie Robamed]

I mean, we tried her many different ways, voicemails, calling, emails, and we received no response.

[Josh Dean]

Becca has never spoken publicly about Ken.

[Natalie Robamed]

I personally think that it sort of seems like this may have been a really painful, awful chapter of her life that she wants to close.

[Josh Dean]

They couldn't talk to Becca or anyone who still knew her, but they did find out that she was living in New York and modeling. So they got some closure to her part of the story. Things seemed to turn out okay. Ken, on the other hand, was in the wind. Natalie and Aboubacar wanted to answer the questions that all of his victims were desperately asking. Where was Ken? And maybe more importantly, who was he? We'll explore those questions after the break.

[Yvette Gentile]

Whispers in the dark. Phenomenon that slip past logic. Legends that refuse to die when the unknown stirs. Its trail leads to our podcast, so Supernatural. I'm Yvette Gentile. And I'm her sister, Racha Pecorero. Together we explore all of the world's most bizarre mysteries. Listen to so Supernatural every Friday, wherever you get your podcasts.

[Josh Dean]

Welcome back to Chameleon. Over the many months they spent investigating this case, Natalie Robomed and Abacar Adan uncovered a lot about Ken's life, but only about a roughly 10 year section of it.

[Abakar Adan]

Prior to 2012, there's a black hole. And then post 2022, there's a black hole.

[Josh Dean]

Abakar started to look into Ken's past online. He was skilled at wiping his information from the Internet, but there are some things that are tough to get rid of.

[Abakar Adan]

You know, you can delete as many things as you want off of Facebook, but there are certain things that you were tagged in.

[Josh Dean]

Abakar scoured social media for traces of Ken.

[Abakar Adan]

This one day I was just like, going through Facebook and I am, like, looking for anything about this person, and I just find this treasure trove of photos of him and his friends. This would have been like, 2008, 2009.

[Josh Dean]

Ken would have been about 20 years old.

[Abakar Adan]

These images that told a story of what his life was like. He had this group of friends that he traveled with, and they did a lot of stuff together, Taking all these trips from Singapore to London to Hong Kong.

[Josh Dean]

Just like in his 30s, Ken's early social media presence Was full of pictures of him living glamorously. Abokar wondered if this was just another version of what he was doing later, if this young Ken was trying to present a life he wasn't actually living. To confirm that abokar needed to track down his family.

[Abakar Adan]

I just started going through, like, singaporean newspapers, and this one night, I encounter essentially, an obituary for one of his cousins who tragically died at 25 in 1998. And it literally had all of the members of his family on his mother's side. And that really gave us so much more about his childhood and where he comes from.

[Josh Dean]

They were able to confirm that Ken wasn't an heir or a trust fund kid. He hadn't grown up rich. Despite the extravagant life that his facebook showed and the stories he told his victims, Ken didn't grow up with money. He was, however, surrounded by people who did.

[Abakar Adan]

He went to a really good school. It's a school called maristhela. It's inexpensive, but you kind of like, test into it.

[Josh Dean]

It was a private international school where students from Singapore had their tuition subsidized While kids from other countries paid in full. This dynamic seems to be important, formative.

[Abakar Adan]

He was always around wealthier people than him.

[Josh Dean]

So abokar could guess that this school was where Ken developed his ability to act like a rich person.

[Abakar Adan]

He wanted to fit in with this group of people, and he always wanted to appear wealthier than he actually was, which is something that he continued to do through his adulthood.

[Josh Dean]

Abokar thinks it might have been where Ken started his grift, too.

[Abakar Adan]

And so I think part of the reason why he's so good at it Is because he's been doing it for so long.

[Josh Dean]

There was one detail about Ken's adolescence that really stuck with Natalie.

[Natalie Robamed]

He was, by all records, a pretty good bowler.

[Josh Dean]

She saw the bowling as a metaphor.

[Natalie Robamed]

Look, I've never been a professional bowler, but even if you're playing on a team, it strikes me that it's really like you versus the pins. And it seems to all be about spin, about putting your spin on the Ball and hitting your mark, hitting your target, and you're playing alone, essentially. And that is just a sort of beautiful metaphor, at least to me, for what Ken would do later in his life, where he would put a huge amount of spin on his story, to present himself one way and really set his eye on the target and try to strike down his marks.

[Josh Dean]

Was Ken striking down marks in Singapore? They wanted to ask someone who knew him back then. So Abokar reached out to a bunch of his old friends, but no one wanted to be interviewed on tape. A local Singaporean reporter they worked with had an idea about why that was

[Abakar Adan]

basically said, you know, with Singaporeans, especially upper middle class, they don't like to start trouble. And he was like, as someone who grew up here and the US it's just so different culturally, where people don't want to start trouble. And a lot of people may have skeletons in the closet themselves.

[Josh Dean]

Since Ken's life in Singapore was a dead end, they followed his trail to the US through records and interviews, they were able to piece together a timeline.

[Natalie Robamed]

2010, he got a speeding ticket in Orlando. No big deal. But the real thing is an eviction complaint was filed against him in 2010 and in 2011 as well. So Ken started getting in trouble, and his first sort of wrongdoings, I guess, were just simply not paying his rent. And this was a pattern we would see throughout his life where he'd kind of live in these pretty nice places, and maybe he'd pay rent the first couple of months, but then, you know, allegedly, and this is according to his landlords and various legal complaints, he would perhaps stop paying the rent, and then they would have to kick him out.

[Josh Dean]

Around 2011, Ken moved to LA and then a few years later, started dating Becca. That's when he got investments from Becca's family, their housekeeper Rita, and some others. When these jilted people started coming back to him, wanting returns on their investments, Ken ghosted them. And he and Becca relocated to Florida. In 2021, the two separated, and Ken moved to New York City, where he started dating and scamming Sophie, who we met back in the beginning of the episode. When we left off with Sophie, she had just found out that her boyfriend, the Uniqlo heir, was a fake. And then she was able to do what many of his other victims weren't. She got Ken arrested.

[Natalie Robamed]

She started preparing a dossier of kind of all the money she'd given Ken, all of these crypto transactions, like everything that she'd sort of spent on him.

[Josh Dean]

It added up to around $100,000. Pretending that everything was fine, Sophie convinced Ken that they needed to travel from Spain to her home in Germany. And there she took her dossier to the police.

[Natalie Robamed]

And in Germany, they have this phrase, a love scam. And she says the police were very nice and immediately believed her and kind of looked through everything that they had. They felt that they had enough to arrest him, and then they could sort of fill in the blanks.

[Josh Dean]

After that, the police asked Sophie to lure Ken to a public place. And there's a recording of this. It's some of the only audio that exists of Ken. What did I do? You arrested. What did I do, though?

[Yvette Gentile]

What did I do?

[Josh Dean]

The German police had listened to Ken was in custody. Finally, justice could be served. But there was a problem. Sophie had given Ken money by sending it to his crypto wallet. And the police needed concrete proof that the wallet belonged to Ken in order to prove the theft.

[Natalie Robamed]

Now, cryptocurrency, famously anonymous. You just have your wallet address, which is a string of letters and numbers. So it's not like a wire transfer where it's, you know, my name, bank address, routing, blah, blah, blah. It's not that. And so in order to verify that the accounts that Sophie sent money to actually belong to Ken, they need the go ahead of kind of the cryptocurrency exchange that it's on.

[Josh Dean]

The crypto exchanges are famous for their privacy, and the exchange refused to give out any personal information tied to the account. So the German police simply didn't have enough evidence to move forward with the case.

[Natalie Robamed]

So they hold him for 48 hours, and then they release him.

[Josh Dean]

You would think Ken would run away, but he didn't. He had the nerve to show back up to Sophie's house. Sophie and her mom chewed him out. Ken was apologetic, and who knows if that was just another lie, but it seemed like he really did have feelings for her. He swore he would do whatever it took to get her back. So Sophie decided to turn the tables. She would manipulate Ken getting her money back bit by bit, by using his feelings for her and for his dog, who she was now caring for.

[Natalie Robamed]

It begins this process of where she says, all right, if you give me x amount of money, you know, if you send me $5,000, we can go for a walk, and you can see the dog.

[Josh Dean]

That dog that Ken seemed to use as a tool to draw in victims was now being used against him. Sophie kept in touch with Ken for a while, slowly making back the money she'd lost. She says that at one point, she got him arrested again in Switzerland. But once again, the police couldn't gather enough evidence against Ken and had to release him. Eventually, Sophie cut off contact with Ken. Playing this game with him was taking a psychic toll. But her scheme had been pretty successful. In the end, Sophie got back about half of what she'd lost, around $50,000. But where was Ken getting that money? Around this time, Ken was presenting himself as an investment genius in a discord group dedicated to crypto. His posts caught the attention of a guy we're calling Antonio. Antonio was an Italian guy, new to investing, and he asked this supposed crypto savant, Ken, for advice. The two became friends, and Ken offered Antonio an opportunity to invest in a new hotel in Costa Rica.

[Natalie Robamed]

He ended up taking, Antonio says, more than $100,000 from him.

[Josh Dean]

The timing aligns. So Ken could have been using that money to pay Sophie back.

[Natalie Robamed]

I obviously don't know if Ken ended up using some of that money from Antonio to pay back Sophie. I mean, Antonio certainly thinks so.

[Josh Dean]

Still, no one has been able to prove this, and Sophie was advised not to ask.

[Natalie Robamed]

Sophie herself was told not to ask where the money came from by. By her legal advice. And I don't begrudge her, like, getting her money back.

[Josh Dean]

Antonio met Sophie through The Instagram account KenyanisCammed me, where a growing number of victims had gathered to share stories. So it was an awkward theory to have. As much as the group wanted to help each other, they also all wanted their money back. Antonio described that odd feeling.

[Abakar Adan]

It's a very strange place to be, because on one side you want to be friends with these people. On the other side, you know that probably there is no real solidarity.

[Josh Dean]

Ken did pay some of his other victims back in small amounts, including Antonio, who got only about 6,000 of the hundred grand he lost. But in 2022, Ken vanished again, this time completely. Antonio, it turned out, was Ken's last victim. That we know of. Natalie and Abacar used everything in their arsenal to find Ken. They tried different numbers and emails. They tracked down family members, old friends, exes. Natalie even tried confronting him face to face. She drove to an address she'd found associated with Ken in Palm Springs, a few hours from where she lives in la, hoping to knock on his door and finally meet the man she'd spent so many hours thinking and talking and writing about. But that was a dead end, too. As a last ditch effort, the team hired a digital investigation company to search for Ken. They had no luck. Ken has somehow erased himself from the Internet.

[Natalie Robamed]

He really, really has been able to kind of make himself a ghost. And that's something we heard over and over again.

[Josh Dean]

They even identified and used a lamp post in the background of a photo of Ken's dog posted to the Kenyan I Scammed Me Instagram page in March 2023 to determine what might have been Ken's last location. Alicante, Spain. But they couldn't ultimately confirm that.

[Natalie Robamed]

There's just nothing. There's nothing on this guy. It's just so rare that you can't find anything about a person digitally.

[Josh Dean]

Kenneth Chu Wen Long was nowhere to be found. Some people think he might be dead. But there is one thing that makes Natalie wonder.

[Natalie Robamed]

I believe that Ken is still alive based on what I think is his crypto activity.

[Josh Dean]

What she means is that they tracked down the crypto wallets that some of Ken's victims had sent money to. While Natalie and Abakar couldn't confirm that Ken was the one actually using it, they were able to see the wallet's transactions, and it was still active. This wasn't the ending they'd hoped for, but it was something, a glimmer that Ken might still be out there somewhere. In an age of crypto wallets, it's easier for thieves like Ken to get away with it, especially when the amounts of money they're taking are too small for law enforcement to care about. Ken, if he's alive, could still be scamming. That was a big motivator on Natalie's part for making the podcast.

[Natalie Robamed]

I hope, you know, he gets caught. That was my main kind of impetus for wanting to do this project, is like, if it at the most, we can, like, build some sort of case against him or get somebody to pay attention and, like, put his name on some sort of watch list or at least stop him from traveling between these countries or stop him from opening crypto accounts.

[Josh Dean]

Even if they couldn't get law enforcement to pay attention, maybe they could prevent future potential victims for falling into Ken's trap.

[Natalie Robamed]

I hope that we can get the word out about him in some way, so if somebody does find out his real name and Google it, they won't give money to him.

[Josh Dean]

If you do meet a guy named Ken or anyone, honestly, who wants you to invest in a new cryptocurrency or home rental startup or weed farm, maybe think twice. As for Ken himself, I hope he

[Natalie Robamed]

doesn't just keep doing this forever. On a personal level, I hope he kind of gets a conscience because it's ruined people's lives.

[Abakar Adan]

We're hoping he listens to the podcast and hits us up and gives us his perspective and what he thinks.

[Josh Dean]

This hasn't happened yet, but Ken, if you're listening, our number is in the credits. Give us a call. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audio Chuck. It's hosted by me, Josh Dean. This episode was written and reported by me and Emma Simonhoff. Our producer is Joe Barrett. Our associate producer is Emma Siminhoff. Sound design and mix by Tiffany Dimmack. Theme by Ewin lytramuin and Mark McAdam. Our production manager is Ashley Warren. Campside's executive producers are Vanessa Gregoriadis, Matt Sher 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 you can email [e-mail] 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.

[Ashley Flowers]

I think Chuck would approve. In the world of true crime, the real story isn't always in the headlines. It's in the evidence. I'm Brandi Churchwell, host of 13th Juror podcast, and I'm here to take you past the news cycle and straight into the courtroom. Every week, I'll break down the investigation, the prosecution, the defense, and everything that unfolds beyond the jury box. We'll examine every testimony, every exhibit, and every hidden motive. Listen to 13th Juror wherever you get your podcasts.