Chew Toy: Luigi Forino

A serial fraudster pretending to be royalty.

2017 was the year when no lead was too crazy to be real. Someone in the Democratic activist world contacted me with a thirty some page dossier that purported to provide proof of a massive transfer of funds from a corporate source to the Trump campaign.

And from there the foolishness quickly spiraled out of control …

Attention Conservation Notice:

Just another dirtbag grifter profile, if you’re wanting to sharpen your claws, come on in.

2017 Caper:

My initial take was that it was nonsense, but a little bit of money came in via Paypal, so I started trying to authenticate the files. It was indeed nonsensical, but the number of people taken in by “Baron Louie” Forino was truly impressive. This BuzzFeed article exposed the scheme. I was the original source of the documents for Ken Bensinger, but since I was treating it as BS until proven otherwise, they kept my name out of the reporting.

The 1.6 Billion Dollar Hoax

I have an associate who retired from AISE and I asked him to take a look at it. It’s been eight years and this is from memory - there was a poor quality image of a passport that we could not connect to anything real, various contracts that lacked the requisite amount of paper for the dollar amounts on them, and it was an otherwise not very professional looking muddle. That isn’t a lack of capability, it’s intentional - people like this do not want to deal with anyone sharp enough to immediately catch them, it’s the same principle as the spam mail that starts “hello dear”.

Back then he was Baron Louie Forino of Little Staughton, and I think this is the original YouTube. I see he’s now transmorgified to Louis Forino Von Thyssen.

The whole episode was so stupid that I simply pitched the entire dossier and the Hunch.ly file on him was four or five computers ago. The one thing that survived was a Maltego graph of Twitter accounts belonging to him. @mccoilgas is Luigi, @anielloforino was presented as a sibling, but I suspect it’s really him, a quiet alias he maintains for when he needs to lay low. @Morganti_and_P was a company named tied to things not in the political dossier, it was something older.

Most of these are big name Italian accounts, the three with Twitter birds are his presence, and they’re still there, waiting to be crawled.

Today:

I just looked around and he’s now dr. Louis Forino Von Thyssen on LinkedIn. I was mortified to find I had a couple shared contacts with him, they’ve been advised of his true nature.

Note the same company name as the Twitter account.

Back in 2017 there was a sort of Baron Louie fan club on LinkedIn, about a hundred accounts in a group, and one obvious sock was posting details about his various con jobs as they surfaced. That’s long gone now, instead if you Google various permutations of his aliases you can find a variety of more current resources.

Forino is fond of threatening legal action against those who write about him. Given that I am a California resident with a precedent setting anti-SLAPP case under my belt and lawyers/reporters handy, I don’t imagine he’s going to have any appetite to try me.

If you are going to dig into this, here’s what I would do.

• Get a ratty Linux laptop or build a virtual machine.

• Get a ProtonMail account.

• Set up ProtonVPN using their software.

• Get yourself a Hunchly Free Trial

• Poke around until you’ve got a sense of what’s current.

• Use CaseFile or Maltego CE to document as you go.

• Create a way to publish your findings - a Substack might be good.

Infrastructure:

The mccoilgas[.]com domain I recall from back when, the mccpetroli[.]com is new to me. I ran an L1 footprint of the domains and it’s mostly a cPanel hosting setup, he’s using Microsoft Office 365 for email (discoverable!), and the really intriguing bit is this pay.mccpetroli[.]com. Since everything this guy does is a scam, if there really is a payment processor under there, a well done report to their security people will be the end of him using their service for fraud.

Conclusion:

I put the two Maltego files for this in the Forino folder on Dropbox. As I said, he threatens litigation, but never actually does anything. Even so, treat this like a U.S. corporate intel smear job if you’re going to profile him. Make sure any frivolous litigation attempt dead ends at an email/VPN provider in an uncooperative jurisdiction.

If you’re gonna caper, be careful out there. This one has a little bark and no bite at all, but you should practice the tradecraft required for hunting dangerous game. The bullet points above are a good foundation, see if you can work out what additional exposure you might have, and then get going on what additional exposure HE has.

Credit:Buzzfeed