Blog

EPISODE 2: THE COMPLEX WEB OF DECEPTION

Previously on Gary and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day:

I received a call, ostensibly from American Express (I’ve dispensed with the quotation marks around questionable institutions and people, as it tends to clutter up the text), telling me an unauthorized purchase of firearms had been made on a card in my name that I didn’t know I had. Given the serious nature of this situation, I was connected to the New York Office of the FBI. There, an FBI Special Agent told me that a bank account in my name had been receiving millions of dollars from fraudulent activities. I was told I was a suspect in the criminal network and given instructions on how to cooperate in order to clear my name.

Special Agent Esparza switched our conversation to Microsoft Teams, where she briefly shared her camera and showed herself against a background of the FBI logo (like you might do when you change your background for a group call to a tropical beach, or one of the moons of Saturn…). She informed me that as the FBI investigation was ongoing, I needed to consent to a non-disclosure agreement. My camera was required to be “on” during our real-time (i.e., non-texting) communications. She then shared detailed—unnecessarily detailed, I thought at the time—information about the investigation and the suspects who had already been taken into custody. But, she disclosed, the criminal network was extensive and included participants in major institutions and entities across the nation: financial institutions, law enforcement, investment firms, even churches. She read me biographies of the suspects and showed me mug shot photos. Even then, I was thinking to myself: why is she sharing all of this with me, especially since I am an alleged member of the criminal ring?

(A KEY AND REGRETTABLE OVERSIGHT ON MY PART, that my son pointed out only recently, was that I did not check the email address associated with the Microsoft Teams text exchanges that were initiated by the Special Agent(s). Had I done so, with any of the three supposed Special Agents that I would eventually deal with, I would have seen that none of the addresses were fbi.gov or official government email addresses. This would have been a sure tell that they were fraudulent, and I would have saved myself a LOT of time and grief.)

Another odious and burdensome requirement of my “cooperation” with the FBI was mandated check-ins via Teams messaging to report my activities and whereabouts. I pushed back on an every-two-hour check-in, but did wind up reporting when I went out to run errands or travel locally. Everything was couched as either being for my own safety or as a good faith showing of my innocence. As you can imagine, this all felt very intrusive and offensive. But at the time, I felt I had no choice.

Given the unusual (*understatement alert*) nature of this relationship, I was uncomfortable and wary. This Special Agent did not have me convinced that she was legitimate, especially with the odd sharing of details about those involved. This included one lengthy session where she shared the stories of victims of the financial fraud, which invariably were melodramas about people in need who lost all their money to the perpetrators, who had posed as investment experts. I recall thinking, who writes this stuff? Are there really FBI staff members who spend their time converting the facts of ongoing Federal investigations into embellished narrative vignettes? At one point, I told Agent Esparza that I wanted to check with my local Seattle FBI to get reassurance that, in fact, she was a legitimate Federal officer. Here is where the elaborate setup came into play to discourage this action. She reminded me that I had consented to a non-disclosure agreement, and that it applied to even other offices of the FBI because, as the story went, even law enforcement agents in different parts of the country were potentially involved.

In response to my required text check-ins and in-person “safety checks,” Special Agent Esparza was invariably polite. But she always warned me to be vigilant and to report anything out of the ordinary, that it was possible that I was being watched. After all, one of the stories that was related to me about the criminal participants described a member of the Tacoma Police Department.

(In retrospect, it was part of the deviously clever ploy to plant doubts about the integrity of law enforcement officials at local levels and above. By painting a picture of an extensive and deeply embedded criminal network spanning geography and institutions, this instilled a sense that no one could really be trusted. The “non-disclosure agreement” was an added insurance policy to keep me silent.)

This back-and-forth of my check-ins and the Special Agent’s cautionary directives continued for a time.

Then, just a week later, I received another call from American Express.

TO BE CONTINUED…