Matthew Cox

Cox says he earned a fine arts degree and tried jobs such as insurance adjuster before entering the mortgage brokerage business at about 29; he later started his own mortgage company and admits that a large share of its business involved fraud.⁠[1]

On February 19, 2002, Cox was convicted of mortgage fraud in Tampa; on December 22, 2003, he was charged with probation violations and became a federal fugitive.⁠[2]

After a local reporter published a story about his Tampa schemes, Cox left Tampa and began almost three years on the run; he was occasionally caught on bank surveillance footage, but authorities always seemed a step behind.⁠[3]

Prosecutors said that he and a co-defendant rented properties, fraudulently erased the existing mortgage liens, stole the owners’ identities and took out multiple new mortgage loans, moving on to repeat the scheme elsewhere; he also obtained identities from homeless people by posing as a Red Cross worker taking a survey.⁠[4]

In July 2004 Cox and a co-defendant were first charged by criminal complaint in the Northern District of Georgia; on September 29, 2005, a federal grand jury indicted the two on 42 counts, alleging that they used stolen identities to obtain driver’s licenses, buy vehicles, lease mail drops, rent apartments and open bank accounts to receive scheme proceeds in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina and North Carolina.⁠[5]

In May 2006 Cox was placed on the U.S. Secret Service’s Most Wanted Fugitives list.⁠[6]

On November 16, 2006, after a tip from a source who had seen Cox’s photo on the Secret Service’s Most Wanted Fugitives website, agents from the Secret Service Nashville Field Office arrested him in Nashville, Tennessee.⁠[6]

On April 10, 2007, Cox pleaded guilty in federal district court in Atlanta, on charges brought in Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, to conspiracy to commit mortgage fraud, bank fraud, aggravated identity theft and passport fraud, and admitted violating his probation; prosecutors said that as a fugitive he had used a passport obtained under a stolen identity to travel to Jamaica, Greece and elsewhere.⁠[2]

At that day’s hearing the prosecutor disclosed that he had also stolen the identities of children and people in drug rehab, and had obtained birth certificates in the names of babies who did not exist to continue the fraud; under the plea agreement 41 other counts were dropped, and Cox agreed to cooperate with further investigation and to pay restitution.⁠[7]

Having pleaded guilty to charges including bank fraud, mortgage fraud and identity theft, Cox was sentenced to 26 years in prison.⁠[3]

He says his presentence report put the range at 32 years to life, which was argued down with the prosecutor to 26 years and four months.⁠[1]

Cox met arms dealer Efraim Diveroli in 2012, and in 2013 the two signed an attorney-drafted co-author agreement for Diveroli’s memoir, Once a Gun Runner; in November 2017 Diveroli sued Cox, arguing that he had no claim to his life rights or story, while Cox said in court filings that he was the book’s true author.⁠[8]

While serving his sentence in Florida, Cox studied nonfiction writing and produced a draft memoir, after which fellow inmates began asking him to write their stories; he pitched The Atlantic on an article about himself, which appeared in its August 2019 issue.⁠[9]

On January 17, 2024, he appeared on episode 409 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, which introduced him as a former con man who served 13 years in federal prison for bank fraud, mortgage fraud and identity theft and the author of many books, including his memoir Shark in the Housing Pool; topics included mortgage fraud, creating fake identities, the FBI investigation, life on the run, his arrest and prison.⁠[10]

His YouTube channel Inside True Crime describes him as having served 13 years and being “100 percent guilty” of all the charges; it says he wrote dozens of fellow prisoners’ true-crime stories while incarcerated, and the channel mainly features his interviews with criminals about their crimes.⁠[11]

YouTube: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@InsideTrueCrime (opens in a new window)⁠[10]