Money /
GQ profiles somebody who's made tens of millions of dollars exposing fraud
Richard Overum is a rich man, and he has Bernie Madoff to thank. Federal law enacted after the infamous Madoff Ponzi scheme put incentives in place encouraging people to report financial wrongdoing to the government. As Gordy Megroz writes in GQ, these whistleblowers are entitled to a cut of up to 30% of any big sanctions levied on violators. Most who get rewarded these days are one-offs—employees who collect their single payout and move on. Overum, by contrast, has become what you might call a professional whistleblower. He "is not a member of law enforcement or a government official," explains Megroz. "He's something else: a rarefied practitioner in a line of work he's all but created for himself."
Overum goes undercover again and again, typically posing as an investor to someone in business. He then works to extract damning information—Megroz even goes undercover with him to meet a real estate developer—which Overum then turns over to the feds. Getting that info isn't as hard as you might think. "Their guard is down because they think I'm an investor," says Overum, which is a pseudonym. "I'm like an undercover cop in a world where undercover cops don't exist." Totaling funds collected and those still pending, Overum estimates he has made tens of millions of dollars over the last several years. However, he expects his cover to be permanently blown at some point, and he's...
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