Some hoarders saw an opportunity to make a quick buck — others were just trying to do the right thing.
s the world shut down in March 2020, anxious knowledge workers barricaded themselves at home, scrubbing produce with soap. Fear sometimes manifested as altruism: checking on neighbors, organizing mutual aid. But the crisis also prompted cynics to root around for new loopholes to exploit, for ways to raise prices, feign hardship, get a rent reduction, slack off.
His first move was to level up his home life. Kaplan had been on a few dates with a Brazilian woman named Milla, who barely spoke English. She worked in fashion and had come to the United States hoping to open a showroom for designers from back home. Now she just wanted to be safe. Everything was closed; everything was canceled. The borders were closing, and the friend she’d been staying with had COVID-19. Kaplan asked Milla to move in with him for however long this lockdown lasted.
This was it: his chance to make a difference, to feel like a hero, to donate his time in service of a greater good while also making money and leveraging the uncertainty. It was perfect. He felt emboldened, inspired by his own luck. He’d been training his entire life for this. He was ready. The time had come for him to use his skills to save the world.s a kid, Kaplan got in trouble at school for peddling candy and shoelaces and erasers in the hallways and stairwells.
All day, Kaplan was on calls, on Telegram, on WhatsApp, chatting, schmoozing, connecting to people all over the world who said they represented hospitals and factories and financiers, figuring out who had access to what and who had the right paperwork and who wanted to buy and who wanted to sell and how could he get a few cents set aside as a broker’s fee on each box of 3M masks to add up to his own personal fortune.
“Those are the people I just blocked and disconnected from,” he said. “Either you’re too stupid to know you’re being scammed, or you’re in on it.” Shadowy actors seemed to loom behind every deal. Kaplan heard about PPE shipments stolen at gunpoint and federal agents seizing orders. At one point, he asked someone to go to Miami to check a pallet of supplies. Around 10PM, the guy told him the warehouse seemed sketchy. Then he stopped replying to texts. Kaplan panicked, thinking the guy had been killed or kidnapped. Ten days later, he resurfaced, claiming he’d simply left the country to visit family in Latin America.
To make matters worse, living with Milla was becoming stressful. “We were completely isolated,” she later wrote. “After 3 months repeating the same scene every day, I felt like a plant, vegetating, always in silence, and despair started to hit hard.”mentioned one of Kaplan’s Telegram groups in an article about shortages. A retired army officer turned government contractor named Rob saw the article and joined the group the next day.
“Next time, we’ll take care of it,” Rob said. If someone else tried to deceive them, they would report them to his friend at the Department of Treasury, who could freeze bank accounts. “Treasury can do stuff that these other guys can’t do. You’re guilty until you’re proven innocent,” Rob told me. Soon, Fong was helping a Malaysian glove company with distribution. By the time Kaplan called, in August 2020, all of the company’s gloves were spoken for: the ones that had already been produced, the ones that were being produced at that moment, and the ones that would be produced for the next year. But Kaplan and Fong hit it off, and they stayed in touch, talking and texting at all hours.
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