On December 5, 2022, Tyler Mancuso, a 29-year-old salesperson at the adtech firm Ezoic, stopped by the precious-metals company Oxford Gold Group’s nondescript gray building in Beverly Hills.
He had told Oxford Gold that he wanted to “get the lay of the land” ahead of picking up a $9 million order for 151 gold kilo bars. He was supposed to return for the order on December 7, and he told employees at Oxford Gold that he planned to bring additional people and multiple SUVs to collect the bars, according to court filings.
At 6-foot-7, the former college water-polo player was a hard man to miss. Other things stuck out about Mancuso that day, like the dark circles under his eyes, said a source with direct knowledge. But most unusual was that Mancuso wanted to pick up the order from the Oxford Gold office, the source said. Most clients want their orders shipped directly to them.
Mancuso would never get his hands on the gold. En route to picking up his bounty at an authorized precious-metal location in San Diego, he was arrested by the FBI, according to a warrant.
Mancuso had illicitly acquired the millions he’d used to pay for the gold, according to the complaint. Two weeks earlier, he had exploited his employer Ezoic’s adtech systems and rerouted a $9 million payment from Google to his own Chase bank account.
Mancuso, who pleaded guilty to the charge of wire fraud and now faces up to 20 years in prison, didn’t respond to a request for comment. His attorney, George Gedulin, declined to comment, while the prosecuting attorney, Valerie Chu, did not respond to a request for comment.
The harebrained heist was quickly curtailed by the FBI. But it shocked Ezoic to the core, leaving it with a gaping hole in its finances at the end of the year, when advertisers heavy-up on spending. It also happened at a time when the ad market was slumping and tech layoffs were piling up across the industry.
The episode also raises questions about the security of advertising-technology systems that route billions of dollars from marketers to tech giants and on to publishers and other online destinations. If Mancuso could pull this off, could others do the same across the industry?
Mancuso had a history of getting involved in ill-advised financial schemes, according to other legal filings.
In 2020, he was a relief defendant in a lawsuit that also involved his mother and father, brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. While Mancuso didn’t carry out the fraud, he was a beneficiary of it, the CFTC alleged. In its complaint, the CFTC said that Mancuso’s father, Christopher Mancuso, had been involved in a Ponzi scheme and transferred around $340,000 of fraudulently acquired money to his son.
Mancuso and his mother spent the funds on “personal travel, limousine expenses, spa and hair care expenses, and home renovations,” according to the suit. None of the Mancusos appeared before the court. A default judgment last year ordered Mancuso’s father to pay back a civil monetary penalty of more than $12 million, representing three times the gains he netted from the scheme. Mancuso was ordered to pay back the $340,000, according to court documents.
The CFTC, which brought that case against the Mancusos, didn’t respond to requests for comment. Christopher Mancuso couldn’t be reached for comment.
Tyler Mancuso was also capable of jump-starting his own ideas.
In early 2021, he convinced Caulin Donaldson, a social-media influencer passionate about climate issues who had 1.4 million TikTok followers at the time, to move from Florida to California to start a nonprofit called Down 2 Earth, Donaldson said. The nonprofit’s aim was to implement the use of large vacuums to suck up trash from the street.
In a TikTok video from November 2021, Donaldson wears a pink Down 2 Earth T-shirt and enthuses about using these powerful machines to replace brooms and sweepers. There’s a brief shot of the wand from one of these vacuums sucking trash from a gutter. “It’s time to modernize our efforts,” Donaldson says. “The future is now.”
Mancusco had sourced the vacuums from Europe, Donaldson told Insider.
“He’s a really good salesman,” Donaldson said. “He likes to set an atmosphere — he took me out to fancy dinners, and I believed him.”
The two lived together in Irvine and created TikTok videos for eight months. In one beach-cleanup video, Donaldson struggles to pull out a piece of cord attached to something buried in the sand. Mancuso eventually pops it free of whatever it was stuck to, and Donaldson jumps rope with it before handing it to two passersby out collecting beach detritus.
Mancuso and Donaldson would drift apart months later. The two differed on their goals for Down 2 Earth, with Mancuso more focused on money and Donaldson focused on the nonprofit’s impact, Donaldson told Insider.
“I remember having conversations with him about how I refuse to be used for greenwashing and don’t want to aid in corporate greed or virtue signaling,” Donaldson said. “After a few conversations of this, I came to the conclusion that we wouldn’t see eye-to-eye on that topic.”
Donaldson said he moved back to Florida in December 2021 and took his name off of the joint bank account in May 2022. A website for the nonprofit registered under the name Down4Earth still exists and is listed by the IRS.
Down 2 Earth would eventually get tangled in Mancuso’s alleged scheme to defraud Ezoic, which began around September 2022, according to court documents.
Ezoic is a midsized adtech company founded in 2010 that helps small to midsized publishers like GuinessWorldRecords.com and PercentageCalculator.net sell ads and optimize their sites for performance and usability.
Mancuso was relatively new, having been hired as a remote employee in early 2022, said Ezoic’s founder and CEO Dwayne Lafleur. The company it relied on to do employee background checks didn’t pick up any criminal history or other red flags on Mancuso, Lafleur said.
At Ezoic, Mancuso did little to distinguish himself, for better or worse. He was not particularly high-performing, Lafleur said.
“He was primarily a remote employee, there wasn’t a lot of social cues,” Lafleur added.
It was in this environment that Mancuso would test the viability of his plan without sounding any alarms.
One late September evening, Mancuso used his company log-in to access Ezoic’s Google AdSense account and changed the payee from Ezoic to his own Chase bank account, according to filings. One minute later, he deleted his bank account from the system.
From September through November, Mancuso would continue to use his Ezoic log-in to direct Google’s payment to his personal bank account, then quickly change it back, according to the filings. On the surface, it appeared he was checking whether he might get caught.
“I think everyone has looked at that detail and been like, ‘Huh, I could probably change that to my account today,'” said an ad-industry source. “It’s a joke in the industry. Nobody ever does it because it’s so obviously traceable and reversible.”
Even if the consequences are likely to be swift, the crime itself could still be carried out.
Many former staffers described a flat organizational structure at Ezoic where executives were largely hands-off when it came to employees’ day-to-day activities.
“We were basically given keys to the kingdom,” said one former employee.
Lafleur said Mancuso didn’t have authorized access to this particular area of the Google AdSense platform.
A flaw within Google AdSense enabled Mancuso’s exploit, Lafleur said, adding that Ezoic has since moved to a new way of doing things and is no longer susceptible to such a breach.
Google did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
On November 19, Mancuso finally pulled the trigger on his multimillion-dollar scheme, according to the court filings. He added his personal Chase account as the payee account for a final time, and didn’t change it back. On November 22, a $9,149,001.65 payment from Google intended for Ezoic landed in Mancuso’s personal bank account, and he would transfer $45,000 to a Down4Earth bank account, the filings allege.
The next day, Mancuso contacted Oxford Gold about buying $9 million worth of gold, and the company agreed to sell him 151 gold kilo bars.
But Oxford Gold was alerted on December 2 that this was a fraudulent transaction, said a source with direct knowledge.
The company played along when Mancuso showed up to scope out the building on December 5. Unsure what to do, Oxford Gold contacted the Beverly Hills Police Department, and eventually got in touch with the FBI, this source said. Mancuso had wanted to pick up the kilo bars at the Oxford Gold location in Beverly Hills, but the FBI agent walked Oxford Gold through changing the pickup location to San Diego, according to this source.
What happened next was swift. Mancuso did not bring along the extra people and multiple SUVs as he said he would, according to the source. He was arrested in San Diego, according to court filings, and about $1,400 was seized from a 2014 BMW he was driving. By February 15, he’d pleaded guilty to wire fraud, and now faces up to 20 years in prison when he’s scheduled to be sentenced in May.
The loss of a $9 million payment put Ezoic on the brink.
In a February court filing, Ezoic’s lawyer said that the company would “suffer irreparable harm” if its money was not returned quickly, stating: “The company will either have to take extraordinary measures to maintain solvency, which may include laying off numerous employees, or risk becoming entirely insolvent.”
Ezoic did lay off roughly 35 workers from its then 300-person staff in December, and about 10 layoffs followed in February, according to multiple former Ezoic employees.
One former staffer said they were surprised the layoffs happened shortly after Lafleur had announced that the company had secured a new line of credit.
Lafleur said that none of the layoffs had to do with the $9 million missing payment, and the cuts were a result of the same over-hiring practices and economic downturn afflicting the entire tech sector. Fourth-quarter ad spend was also disappointing across the industry, Lafleur said.
He added that while Google represents most of Ezoic’s monthly revenue, it’s not the company’s only revenue source, though the loss of the $9 million payment scuttled Ezoic’s initial growth plans for the year.
But the company is moving forward, according to Lafleur. He declined to comment on the company’s financials but said the audience visiting the sites that use its platform is growing year over year.
“That’s really what we focus on. We can’t control the ad market or rates, but we can control how many people use our technology,” Lafleur said.
He said that “about 90%” of the missing funds have since been returned to Ezoic. However, Oxford Gold is still haggling with the court to get back around $430,778 of the millions that Mancuso took from Ezoic. In its own motion, the metals company cited that as the cost of its “bona fide” services brokering the deal for the gold bars.
Meanwhile, Mancuso, under the supervision of his uncle and compelled to remain in Southern California under the terms of his bond agreement, is still making bold asks. In February, he made a vacation request to go on a five-day “reunion trip” with five friends to a nine-bedroom Airbnb in Sandy, Utah — a small town near premium ski resorts like Alta, Snowbird, and Deer Valley.
The judge on the case denied the request.
Jack Newsham contributed reporting.
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