by Diane Kelly
With the limited resources available to the state and federal governments, priority normally went to scams perpetuated on a wider scale. But when Lu had received an urgent and impassioned letter from the women she’d empathized with their plight and decided to offer some help. Or, more precisely, she decided to offer them my help. After all, it was unlikely that the crook had paid taxes on the funds he’d weaseled out of his victims.
I’d just returned from filling my mug with coffee in the office kitchen when Viola, Lu’s secretary, buzzed me on the intercom. “Your nine o’clocks are here.”
I jabbed the button. “I’ll be right down.”
I left my coffee on my desk and headed down the hall, where I found three surprisingly attractive, nicely dressed women engaged in conversation at Viola’s desk. Perhaps it was wrong of me, but I’d assumed women who’d fall victim to an online con artist would be older, lonely sad sacks. These women appeared to be anything but. In fact, they looked more like the types of women you’d see sipping chardonnay with their friends at a book club.
“Good morning,” I told the ladies, holding out my hand. “I’m Special Agent Holloway.”
“Leslie Gleason,” said the first, giving my hand a firm shake. Leslie looked to be in her mid-forties, with cute blond ringlets framing her thin face. Her turquoise dress brought out the blue of her eyes and hugged her slim curves, stopping just below the knees to show off well-toned calves that told me Leslie was a runner.
The next woman was a petite Latina with skin the color of cajeta. She looked to be in her mid- to late thirties. She wore a silky blouse and jeans with a pair of cute wedges. My gaze stopped on her pendant, which featured the face of a friendly feline.
“Cute necklace,” I said. “I love cats.”
“Me, too,” the woman said, taking my hand. “I’m a veterinarian. Dr. Julia Valenzuela.”
The third woman appeared to be a mix of Asian and Caucasian, fortyish, and tall. Her sleek black hair hung in a face-framing bob. She wore a pale-blue blazer over an ivory blouse and navy dress pants. “Nataya Lawan,” she said, introducing herself.
I gestured for them to follow me back to my office, stealing a wing chair from Nick’s space so that I could accommodate all three.
Once they were seated, I slipped into my chair. “I’ve read over your letters and looked at the documentation you sent.”
They’d submitted documentation including copies of the fronts and backs of the checks the catfisher had each of the women cash for him. All three were third-party business checks made payable to Jack Smirnoff and drawn on an account purportedly in the name of Wellsource Insurance. All three checks were the amount of two thousand dollars, all three were dated on the same day in late March, and all three had been returned when the account had been found to be false.
I pulled the copies from the file and held them up. “What can you tell me about these checks?” I asked. “And about the man who asked you to cash them?”
After exchanging glances with the other two women, Nataya spoke first. “The man I knew as Jack Smirnoff gave me the check at breakfast one morning. He’d asked me to meet him at a pancake house. We’d been out several times and had really hit it off. Or so I’d thought.” She frowned in memory and continued. “Anyway, he’d told me that he was a psychologist and that he lived in Colorado—”
“Colorado?” I repeated. This was news to me. Their letter hadn’t mentioned that he lived out of state.
“Right,” Nataya replied. “Denver, to be exact.” She looked at me expectantly, and I nodded for her to continue. “He said his wife had suddenly passed away last fall. He told me he was having a hard time dealing with all of the memories in Colorado and was ready to make a fresh start in Dallas. He was living in one of those extended-stay suites while looking for a place to buy here in town.”
Leslie chimed in. “That was the same story he told me.”
Julia let out a frustrated breath. “Me, too.”
Nataya continued. “He said that his wife had a twenty-two-year-old son from her first marriage and that the son had lived with them. The son was supposedly a deadbeat who couldn’t hold a job because he’d stay out all night partying with his friends and was too lazy to get up and go to work in the mornings.”
Again, the other two women nodded in agreement.
“Jack claimed that his wife had provided well for her son in her will, though she’d directed that the funds be placed in a trust for his benefit so that he couldn’t squander it all away. The terms of the will appointed Jack as the trustee of the trust. Jack had also said that his stepson received two thousand dollars a month from an annuity, payable directly to him, no strings attached.”
Nataya went on to tell me that Jack’s wife had left him only twenty grand in her will, but her son had nonetheless filed a lawsuit, claiming Jack had unduly influenced his mother to put the funds in a trust and that she’d always told the son that he would get all of her property outright on her demise. In other words, Jack’s stepson was challenging both the trust and Jack’s token inheritance.
Leslie continued the saga. “Jack’s bank accounts and property were supposedly frozen by the court until the lawsuit could be tried or settled. Jack said the check was a payment from an insurance company for sessions with his clients, but that he couldn’t deposit the check into the joint checking account he owned with his dead wife or her son might get his hands on the money and blow it going out to party with his friends.”
Julia chimed in now. “That’s what Jack told me, too. It all made sense to me.”
“Me, too,” said Leslie.
“It’s certainly a plausible story,” I said. It was all a lie, of course, but not so far out in left field as to be immediately recognizable as a fabrication.
Nataya crossed her ankles. “Jack asked if I would mind cashing one of the checks for him. He said it was no problem if I was uncomfortable doing it, that he could cash it at a check-cashing place, but he said that those places charge very high fees and it seemed ridiculous for him to pay the fee to them when he could give it to me instead.”
The other women murmured in assent. Looked like he’d given them the same story.
“He was very nonchalant about it,” Nataya said, heaving a sigh, “not pushy at all. So, I decided to go ahead. I figured if the check was bogus my bank would know right away and tell me on the spot. With as fast as everything gets processed these days I didn’t think there was any risk.”
Unfortunately, the idea that one bank could immediately verify the existence and balance of an account at another bank was a myth that led many an unwitting victim to their financial doom. The truth was that each bank’s information was kept private from the others and that it still took a day or more for checks to be run through the systems and verified. Meanwhile, the victims’ banks often gave their customers the benefit of the doubt, cashing the check immediately rather than making their customers wait for the funds to clear. It wasn’t until later, when the check proved invalid, that the customers would suddenly find themselves holding the bag, the funds debited from their own account to repay the bank for the NSF check.
Nataya frowned. “He made me feel pretty damn stupid.”
“Don’t,” I told her. “Con artists can be very crafty.”
She wouldn’t be the first person to be taken in by one of these scammers, and she wouldn’t be the last. Even celebrities had fallen for catfishing scams, including Thomas Gibson, star of the TV shows Criminal Minds and Dharma & Greg, who’d sent a video of himself in a hot tub to the fictitious woman who’d lured him in online. Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o had also fallen for a young woman he’d met online. He’d mourned when the girl allegedly died, only to find out she’d never even existed in the first place. What kind of sick person would play on someone else’s emotions like that?
Of course I had to admire the Chechen women who catfished some members of ISIS online and conned the jihadists into sending them thousands of roubles
via QIWI Wallet, a Russian electronic cash transfer system. The women might be con artists, but it was hard to fault them when their victims were responsible for killing so many innocent people and instigating a heartbreaking refugee crisis. As far as I was concerned, the men got what they deserved. A little bitch slap from karma.
Nataya sighed. “I can’t prove it, but I’m pretty sure Jack stole my credit card, too.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked.
“During our second date,” she said, “when we were in the middle of our dinner, I got a phone call from work. I didn’t want to be rude, so I took my phone outside the restaurant. I left my purse behind. A few days later, I went to use my MasterCard and I couldn’t find it. I called the credit card company and they told me there’d been all kinds of charges made at clothing and shoe stores in The Galleria the day after my date with Jack. Over four thousand dollars’ worth.”
Whoa. Not exactly chump change. “Did you report the fraud to the police?”
She nodded. “I know they can’t do much, though. This kind of thing happens every day and they’ve got more important things to deal with.”
It was true. The amount of credit card fraud was overwhelming. Most police departments merely took a report and filed it away, never to be looked at again. The perpetrators knew it, too. Few were caught and prosecuted. The risk was minimal.
“It didn’t even cross my mind that Jack could have taken my card,” Nataya said. “At least not until after the fiasco with the check. I just figured I’d accidentally left the card somewhere or dropped it or something. But when I found out the check I cashed for Jack was a fake I remembered that I’d left my purse at our table when I took the call. We were seated in a back corner, so it would have been easy for him to go through my purse without anyone noticing.”
Even if someone had noticed, they might have assumed Nataya trusted her date or she wouldn’t have left her purse in his care. Or they might have assumed Jack was her husband and that the situation was totally normal.
“Did you talk to security at the mall?” I asked. “Request to see videotapes?”
“No,” Nataya said. “My bank agreed to reverse the charges, so there was no harm done. At least not to me. The stores suffered losses, of course.”
“Can you send me a copy of the credit card bill?”
“Sure.”
Leslie leaned forward. “I’ve done a lot of online dating and I’ve had catfishers hit on me before, but usually it’s obvious. They’ll claim to be a model or an aspiring actor or a sports figure, post a photo of a really good-looking guy with washboard abs, and go overboard with the flattery to try to draw you in. But Jack did none of those things. He brought me a small bouquet of flowers on our second date, but he didn’t come on too strong.”
“That’s how he was with me, too,” Julia agreed. “He seemed like a really nice, down-to-earth guy. Genuine, you know?”
“Exactly,” Nataya said. “I mean, he was a cutie, don’t get us wrong. In good shape, too. But what really made me fall for him was that he was such a good—”
Uh-oh—
“Listener?” Julia interjected.
“Exactly!” Nataya said.
Thank goodness. I’d been afraid she was going to say he was a good lover. My stomach had turned at the mere thought of a guy misleading all these women and sticking his you-know-what all over the place like some type of sexual switchboard operator.
“I felt the same way about Jack,” Leslie replied, looking from the other two women to me. “He wasn’t like other men. He’d actually look you in the eye when you were talking rather than stealing glances at your boobs.”
Julia nodded. “He’d ask appropriate follow-up questions.”
“Yeah,” Nataya said. “He really paid attention and seemed to care. I assumed that’s part of what made him so successful as a psychologist.”
Call me a cynic, but maybe his attentiveness and concern should’ve been their first clue that Jack Smirnoff was too good to be true. In my experience, men would just as soon keep the conversation light and paid only enough attention to a woman to keep her on the hook. Even Nick, as wonderful as he could be, gave me only his partial attention if I tried to engage in any real conversation while a Cowboys or Mavericks game was on. I’d learned to approach him with significant topics at more opportune times and to keep my musings short and to the point. Of course, the reverse was true, too. Unless something was on fire, he knew better than to interrupt my bathtub reading time. These things didn’t mean we didn’t love each other or weren’t fully committed to our relationship; they were just realities, the typical types of negotiations couples make.
I jotted down a note—good listener—and turned my attention back to the women. “Did any of you try to verify his identity or story in any way?”
The first thing I would do if approached by someone on a dating service site would be perform some cybersleuthing. I’d take a look at his Facebook page, Google his name and see what might pop up. Of course with me being an IRS agent, I had access to many more databases than the average person. I could take a look at the criminal records to see if the guy had a rap sheet, pull up his driver’s license to verify his address, check the motor vehicle records to see what kind of car he owned. I could also quickly search the vital records and court filings to take a look at birth certificates, marriage licenses, and lawsuit information.
“I did a little bit of snooping before our first date,” Leslie said. “I didn’t find a personal Facebook page for him or anything about his practice online. When I asked him about it, he said that he worked as a subcontractor at a mental health facility and that everything was kept very private due to the health privacy laws. He also said that he dealt with some emotionally unstable people, so he didn’t like his personal life and whereabouts to be easy to find.”
“That’s what he told me, too,” Julia said. “It sounded reasonable.”
Nataya cringed. “This might sound morbid, but I searched online for an obituary for his wife. I wanted to make sure she was really out of the picture.”
“Did you find one?” I asked.
“I did,” she replied. “It was printed in The Denver Post.” She gestured to my computer. “You can find it. Just search for ‘Christine Smirnoff.’”
I logged on to my computer, entered the name and the word “obituary” in my browser, and ran a quick search. Sure enough, an entry popped up on the Denver Post site, the black-and-white photo depicting a fortyish woman with a broad smile and dark, wavy hair. Per the listing, Christine E. Smirnoff, a local psychologist and avid hiker, had passed away from an undiagnosed heart condition late last October. She was survived by her son and husband. In lieu of flowers, the family requested donations to the Sierra Club.
Hm-m …
I pulled up the Colorado Department of Public Health information and searched for the name Christine Smirnoff among the death certificates. A few entries popped up. Some contained alternate spellings of the first name or similar names such as Christopher Smirnoff, but none of the deaths had occurred in the preceding year. I eyed the women over my screen. “There’s no death certificate for his alleged wife.”
Julia frowned. “So the obituary was a fake, too?”
“Looks that way.” Whoever this Jack Smirnoff really was, he’d probably bought the obituary to make himself look legitimate, to create an air of verisimilitude. Wow. Look at me using big words this morning. My high school English teachers would be so proud! I asked the women a few more questions to ascertain more about Jack. “How many dates did each of you have with Jack? Where did you go? What did you do? What topics did you talk about?”
As I listened to their stories, I learned that Jack had a standard MO. Over the course of two weeks, he’d taken each of the women out to dinner twice, first at a chain restaurant, then to a more upscale place on their second date. On their third outing, he’d suggested doing something more personal to each of them. He’d jogged at White Rock
Lake with Leslie. Taken Nataya to a traveling Broadway show. Went to a tasting at a local winery with Julia, even buying her a bottle to take home. It was after their third dates that, on the exact same day, he’d taken Nataya to breakfast, Leslie to an early lunch, and Julia to a late lunch, casually asking each of them whether they’d mind cashing the checks. He seemed to have found a tried-and-true formula and stuck with it.
By my estimate, he’d spent between two and five hundred dollars wooing each woman. Given that he’d taken each for two grand, he’d earned at worst a fifteen-hundred-dollar profit per victim, an immediate 300 percent return on his investment. He certainly wouldn’t get that kind of earnings from trading on Wall Street or a certificate of deposit. And all he’d had to do was eat some good food, spend a little time with attractive women, and listen.
My gaze ran over the women. “Did he go into the bank with any of you when you cashed his checks?” If so, there’d be surveillance camera footage that could be used to convict him.
“Not me,” Nataya said. “He received a phone call just after we arrived at the bank. He stayed outside to take the call while I went inside to cash the check.”
“Same thing here,” Julia said.
Leslie frowned. “Me, too.”
The incoming calls surely weren’t coincidence. Chances were the calls were as bogus as the checks he’d given them to cash. “Did any of you actually hear his phone ring?”
All three replied in the negative. “No.” “Not me.” “Didn’t hear a thing.”
Julia looked from Nataya to Leslie and back to me. “I’d just assumed his phone had vibrated in his pocket.”
The other two nodded in agreement.