Where is Matthew Cox now? My True Crime Story Update

By the time federal agents caught Matthew Cox, he was suspected of being part of a massive mortgage fraud that took place in several states and cost millions.

“My True Crime Story” on VH1 focuses on his early life and the time he spent on the run scamming people and stealing their identities. It also tells the story of how Matthew changed his life while in prison and became a writer on his own. So, we’ve got you covered if you want to learn more.

What is his name?

Matthew Cox grew up in Tampa, Florida, in a Catholic family. Early on, he was told he had dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, and a school counselor told him he would never get a job that required using his brain. Matthew even thought that because of his diagnosis, his parents didn’t think he would ever finish school. Still, he attended the University of South Florida and earned a degree in art.

Matthew started a mortgage business in Tampa in the early 2000s. Around the same time, he started committing crimes. In an interview with The Atlantic, he said, “A real estate agent would come in and say, ‘This guy makes $65,000. If he made $75,000 a year, I could lend him money.’ I would tell them to bring me his W2s and pay stubs and I would change this and that I hate to call it ‘minor fraud’ as there really is no difference but compared to what I ended up doing it was light.’

Matthew was caught in 2001 sending a false appraisal to the person whose name he had used to create a false one. He admitted he was wrong and instead of going to jail, he was put on probation. He later sold his company to a friend and started working for him as a consultant. But his son Casio’s child support bills and payments kept piling up, so he came up with other ways to make money instead of going broke.

Matthew went to the Social Security office and gave them a fake birth certificate and vaccination record of a baby that didn’t exist. He was a good forger because he had a degree in art, but he got caught. He did this several times with made-up names and then signed up for credit cards with those Social Security numbers. As part of another scam, Matthew had a fake person buy and value derelict properties that were more than what the properties were worth. Then he would use the higher value to get loans.

When the bank stopped receiving payments, the bill would be sent to people collecting debts. Matthew found a way around this by finding a newspaper article about a car accident, renaming it, and retyping it. He would then send it to the bank, along with a letter from a sister who didn’t exist. This has led to the bank seizing the house. Matthew was working with other people and at the time the whole scam was worth about $12 million.

Matthew found out in December 2003 that the police were after him, so he and his then-girlfriend, Rebecca Hauck, ran away. He tried to scam a Florida homeowner while living in Atlanta, Georgia. He did this by forging signatures on a fake mortgage form stating that the mortgage had been paid. The two then applied for new mortgages and ran the same scam on several other people who didn’t know what was going on. After a fight, Rebecca broke up with him and moved on.

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Where is Matthew Cox right now?

After getting a tip, police eventually caught up with Matthew and arrested him in November 2006. They believed he was posing as a Red Cross worker to steal the identities of homeless people. He also stole the names of people who were in rehab. Matthew admitted in April 2007 to bank fraud, identity theft, passport fraud, two counts of conspiracy to commit mortgage fraud, and violating the terms of his probation. Matthew was sentenced to 26 years in federal prison the same year and he began his time at Coleman Federal Correctional Institution in Florida.

There Matthew began to write. Initially, he wrote about his own life and crimes. Later he worked on the autobiography of another prisoner. When it came out, he got a lot of requests from other inmates who wanted him to write their stories. Soon Matthew had a list of people who wanted to talk to him. He would sit with them for hours. As part of his investigation, he would even go through official files he got through the Freedom of Information Act.

Matthew later said, “Everyone has a different way of spending their time in prison. Some inmates are appealing their sentences, while others play sports at the recreation area. I wrote the true crime stories of my fellow inmates. During a 2013 hearing to reduce his sentence, his lawyer told how his client assisted in an FBI investigation and fraud case. This removed almost 12 years from his sentence.

Matthew was released from prison in July 2019, after nearly 12.5 years. Wanting to focus on writing, he had already written a book while he was in prison called “Generation Oxy: From High School Wrestlers to Pain Pill Kingpins”. He currently appears to live in Florida and has a website called Inside True Crime where he posts his writing.

Matthew has continued to work as an artist and now has over 50,000 people following him on YouTube. On the platform, he talks about various cases and conducts interviews with various people. Matthew also lectures at conventions and colleges about his life and what he learned from it.

Early years

Cox was born in Florida and had a hard time in school because he had dyslexia.

His teachers told him to find a job where he could use his hands, so he went to the University of South Florida to study sculpture and major in art. After college, Cox worked as an insurance agent, but he wasn’t satisfied with the pay, so he looked for work that paid more.

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adult life

Cox quit his job as an insurance agent and went to work as a mortgage broker for a local company. While there, he gained a reputation for being dishonest, compounded by the fact that he wrote a 317-page manuscript called The Associates that was never published. The main character of the book, who in many ways resembles Cox, goes all over the country committing mortgage fraud. Cox told his colleagues about the book and told them more about it. A former colleague said: “He sent it to a lot of people to see if they thought it worked.” Cox forged a good credit history and used it to buy dozens of homes and properties after being fired from his job in 2002 for mortgage fraud. In one case, he used a two-year-old’s Social Security number, and all of his paperwork, including references, bank notes, rental receipts, and W-2s from employees who didn’t exist, were faked. He used his skills as an artist to add elaborate art deco murals to the buildings. Several women who would date him said he was attractive because he could paint, but the St. Petersburg Times said his paintings were copies of Tamara de Lempicka’s murals. Alison Arnold, a young married woman in the area, fell for Cox’s charm and thought he could make her rich and give her a good life. She said that when she was dating Arnold, he took her to crime movies like “The Italian Job” and “Catch Me if You Can,” which she said he loved and watched more than once, and told her about his plans to do something bad.

Cox often filed false mortgage documents, and in some cases was able to pledge properties for five to six times what they were actually worth. In this scheme, called “shotgunning” in the real estate world, Cox either inflated the valuations himself or had others do it for him to increase the value of the mortgages. One of his partners was a detention officer who bought 14 properties worth nearly $600,000 while making $35,568 a year from his job. Cox took advantage of the Hillsborough County school district by selling a property for much more than it was worth. He also helped future Florida Representative Janet Cruz get a loan for a $90,000 house. He wrote down the sale was $233,000 and hired Cruz to look into repurposing. Cruz says she was unaware that he raised the price of the sale and that she was never paid for the research she did. As part of Cox’s plans, a female helper rented a house in Pinellas County and then pretended to own the house. The real owner found out about the scam. When Cox’s partner tried to get a loan on the house, the manager of the title company became suspicious and called the real owner of the house. Someone called the Clearwater Police Department and they started investigating.

Cox and Arnold drifted apart and Cox eventually started dating someone else. Rebecca Hauck, who was divorced and had one child, had moved to Tampa after she ran into too much debt in Las Vegas and filed for bankruptcy. Before she met Cox, she had already broken the law. Hauck was fired from a job in Las Vegas for forging her boss’ name on checks she used to pay off her debts. They met through a service to meet people online. She was willing to leave her son, but Arnold was not. Cox and Hauck left town when they found out Jeff Testerman, a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, was looking for him. “Dubious Housing Deals Line Avenue,” a story by Testerman, appeared in the paper on December 14, 2003, two days after it was written.

The story talked about Cox’s investment company Urban Equities Inc.

[19] One of the two shareholders was his ex-wife, Keyla Burgos, who is the mother of his son. Although she bought or sold 58 properties in six years, she said she and the other remaining shareholder “couldn’t operate or manage Urban Equity,” so the company was placed in receivership. His partners said they didn’t know what Cox was doing, but when the company went bankrupt, they lost everything.

This article appeared around the same time that Cox learned from a friend that the Tampa Police Department had assembled a task force to investigate him and that the FBI had just taken over the case to investigate further. Part of what betrayed Cox’s plan at this point was that all the false identities he created were based on the names of the characters in Quentin Tarantino’s gangster movie Reservoir Dogs and had obvious surnames like Red, Blue, Green, and so on. Cox used these different identities to give the impression that the neighborhood was growing rapidly. He was able to fool banks and appraisers into thinking that $40,000 houses were actually worth $190,000.

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