Minkow was visited by his past when a homemaker who was overcharged just a few hundred dollars by Minkow tracked down a few others who Minkow had defrauded. When the homemaker located the others, she passed her findings onto the Los Angeles Times. The newspaper then ran a story exposing Minkow's relatively minor fraud. This caused a domino effect and ZZZZ Best was quickly outed as a Ponzi scheme.