Devin Friedman wanted a pool. The pool contractor wanted him to pay by app, in this case, mobile banking app, Zelle. And in our Sunday Long Read this week, we find out how Devin and his wife spent $31,500 on a pool that wasn't a pool, but a scam.
I was trying to reach Gary Kruglitz, the proprietor of Royal Palace Pools and Spas. Gary cuts a certain figure. Just a hair over 6 feet tall, wears a mustache, square wire-rimmed bifocal glasses, thin short-sleeved dress shirts through which it is occasionally possible to glimpse just the hint of nipple when the lighting is right. He has an unusually high voice for a man his size, as if a Muppet crawled down his throat one night and couldn't get out again. I wouldn't say Gary is perplexed by this modern world we find ourselves living in as much as he might not be aware it exists. Sometimes when you talk to him, he'll look up from his papers, turn in your direction, and blink, like a bird that has heard something in the underbrush.
Gary — I changed his name so I could be as honest about him and his nipples as possible — spends his days working out of his pool warehouse, in an office covered desk-to-credenza in product manuals and spa brochures and invoices produced in gold-, pink-, and white-triplicate. A man trapped in the amber of another era, the type of guy who answers his phone yellllow and says bye now when he hangs up. But at this moment, Gary was not answering his phone at all. And I was desperate to reach him, because my wife and I had paid him a deposit of $31,500 to build us a pool, and he had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth.
"I'm sorry, Gary is not available right now," said Cheryl when I phoned that morning.
As best I could tell, there were three women who worked at Royal Palace Pools. Cheryl, Cheryl, and Sheryl. (Could be wrong on that.) The Cheryls didn't have offices. They stood point at the front of the store, behind the glass cases where the chlorine tablets and pool thermometers are displayed. There was a rumor that one of the Cheryls — Sheryl — was Gary's wife, but I couldn't imagine Gary making love, or having breakfast each morning with someone in his home. I believed the likelier scenario was that each night when the Cheryls went home, Gary climbed into an empty Jacuzzi shell with a bag of Funyuns and a worry-worn pad of invoices that served as his transitional object, pulled the thermal cover over himself, and waited in the dark with his eyes open until he could go back to the office. Regardless, if you wanted to get in touch with him, there was going to be at least one Cheryl between you and Gary.
"Do you know where he is?" I said. "This is urgent."
"Um. And who is this?" said Cheryl.
I gave her my name and her tone changed a bit.
"I see," she said tightly. "Well, I'll tell him that you called. Again."
"Please do," I said, trying to sound both grateful and angry. Then I hung up.
It's true that my wife and I had been calling Gary a lot. About a year and a half prior, we'd walked into his office in the Berkshires, in Massachusetts — home to white folks who love the Boston Pops, farm to table, and Lyme disease — and signed a contract for Gary to build a pool in our backyard. It made me feel a little bit like an asshole to be honest, the idea of having a pool. Just the rich-person-ness of it. But what is life if not a long march toward losing all your morals and shame. And thanks to the support of my friends and family, I was able to bury my feelings deep inside and become invested in the idea of having a pool. A pool could be evidence that my life hadn't amounted to nothing. When I found myself at a party with intimidating people, I would sometimes say to myself, I am a person with a swimming pool, so I could believe I had the same right to exist as anyone else. And people would have to be friends with me, right? Because who doesn't want a friend with a pool? It would be like when Jeff Allen's mom used to let him have pool parties at his house in eighth grade. Sure, after everyone ate all the grilled cheeses his mom had cut into triangles and sneaked shots of vodka and then thrown up in the bushes, they all left and didn't invite him to come along. But wasn't that better than sitting at home alone on a Friday night, which was probably what Jeff would have been doing otherwise? Wasn't that a win?
(Side note: Jeff grew up to be a heavy Facebook poster who writes screeds about how if people are so sure a man has a right to marry a man, then shouldn't a man have the right to marry a dog? He lives in Tennessee now with his wife, Krystal, whom he proposed to by having a trained dolphin swim up to her strapped with an engagement ring. Some people stay true to themselves.)
Originally, the pool work was supposed to commence in April 2020. But obviously that didn't happen, because that was when everyone was sealed in their homes rinsing groceries in a solution of three parts water to one part Clorox. But now it was 2021. The construction trade was beginning to lurch back to life. There were delays, of course. We were in the throes of the great pandemic renovation boom, and there weren't enough workers or materials. Container ships were lined up for miles at the ports, and the cost of lumber had become something normal people talked about. The New York Times was publishing hate-reads about people from cities moving to places like the Berkshires and building swimming pools and bringing their obnoxious, demanding, me-first city culture with them.
And so that March, we began calling Gary to say me first. Can you ensure we'll be first in line once the ground thaws? He'd try, he said. We took that as a promise.
We called him in April. We called him in May. The further into summer we got, the less responsive he became. If you've hired a contractor, this will sound familiar. Why answer the phone just to get yelled at by some people from a New York Times hate-read? June crept along, and Gary went completely dark. We were anxious. We felt wronged. We let our feelings be known: Gary, and here I'm paraphrasing our email, we Karen-ed our way into being first in line to build a pool in the spring and now here it is in the middle of summer and we literally cannot get ahold of you.
Finally, on July 5, we received a response. Gary emailed us that he was ready to begin. He said he could start within the week and reminded us that, according to the contract, we owed him $30K-plus before construction commenced. We checked the contract and saw that he was right. He sent another email with instructions for payment. Because a lot of bank branches were still closed, and the crew wanted their money, he requested that we transfer the money via Zelle. But because there are daily Zelle limits, he said, we should just transfer a little bit every day.
We Zelle-ed $3,500 on the 6th, $3,500 on the 7th, $5,000 on the 8th and again on the 9th. Now that he was getting his money, Gary was more responsive. Do you have all the materials you were waiting for, we asked in an email. Yep, mostly. Can you start next week? Yes. The emails were strange. We sometimes had to read them aloud: What if you put a period here, would it make sense then? What if there were a verb? But Gary's emails had always been weird. After all, you don't go into the Cheryls business because you care about the syntax in your electronic correspondence. This man ran his company from an AOL account, which I didn't even know you could still have.
After we Zelled more money, we got worried. What if Gary said he never got his deposit? We asked him to send us a signed receipt for the $23,000-ish we'd sent. Certainly, he said, I'm on a job, give me a few minutes. A few minutes later we got a signed receipt from Royal Palace Pools and Spas, printed on letterhead and photographed. All we had to do was send another $3,500 on the 12th and another $5,000 the 13th, his start date. If things went our way, the construction would be finished in a few weeks.
And then July 13 arrived. Early that morning we received an email from Gary that he was down the road with his crew and would be there imminently. But hours passed, and he didn't show. That's when we reached Cheryl and she said, "Oh, it's you," and told me she'd get him a message. We started calling every 15 minutes. This guy had taken our money and who knows when — or if — he was ever going to start building us a hate-read-worthy swimming pool.
Then, early that afternoon, we got Gary on the phone. Yellllow he said. We asked him where he was. He was confused by that. He was at the office, he said. But you told us you were on your way here, we said. You emailed us and said you were already on the road.
Gary was silent for a moment.
"I haven't emailed you in a month," he said.
Then my wife said holy fuck.
Zelle made it astonishingly easy to pay "Gary" and also astonishingly easy to scam Devin. The cautionary tale here this week is in an era of massive disinformation, that information can also include the ones and zeroes in your checking account. It's the biggest P2P banking app in Americ, way bigger than Venmo. And the fraud and scam potential for it is massive.
And worse, nobody's actually responsible for covering that fraud, because there are no laws or backstop behind it like bank deposits and the FDIC for example. On top of that, the one federal agency that should be involved, the Consumer Banking Protection Bureau, is currently facing a Supreme Court case that argues that the entire agency is unconstitutional, because the banks and the GOP want it gone.
So yes, take Devin's pool as an example. Be careful out there.
Be careful out there.
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