If prosecutors have that you were

If prosecutors have evidence that you were committing wire fraud, I think it is probably a good idea to plead guilty. This is Christine Hunsicker, founder and former chief executive officer of CaaStle. She faces up to 20 years in prison for defrauding Mark Andreson, Peter Thiel, and other investors out of almost a third of a billion dollars. It's one of the biggest white collar crimes this decade. But the sad part is these investors really could have saved themselves a lot of trouble if they had just spoken to one person at one mall. Christine's business was called CaaStle, and what it did was provide the infrastructure and back end service for any retail company to turn the runway into rent through runway as a customer. For $95 a month, you could rent excess and prior season inventory from Ann Taylor. And according to Christine, it was a huge success with almost $800 million in revenue in 2024. You and I know that it's crazy to spend $100 a month from just Ann Taylor, but Peter Thiel and Mark Andreson are not as smart as us. And they bought her business hook, line and sinker to support the fraud and keep new investment coming in. She asked the finance team to send her documents in a word format so she could make the numbers whatever she wanted. CaaStle is burning through money and employees are starting to notice. Partners are starting to pull out. Banana Republic, Express are realizing that this is not a profitable business model. Even Rent the Runway has made maybe two quarters. It's really expensive to dry clean and send out clothes every single day. At this point, she pulls a Jen McCabe and searches for fraud, wire fraud versus bank fraud severity and created audit firm fake. Throughout this entire fraud, she goes through a physical transformation from like this moussy kind of soccer mom look to like a cool rocker chick. And as the fraud gets worse, for some reason, her hair turns pink and then gets taller. Christine Hunsicker has my favorite fraudsters because she's just very bad at it. We did an entire episode on CaaStle. It is called The Devil Rents Prada and it's available wherever you get your podcasts.