by Diane Kelly
He hesitated briefly but finally agreed. “All right. I suppose there’s no harm in that.” He picked his computer up from the coffee table, situated it on his lap, and tapped a few keys. “Here he is. Jack Smirnoff. His profile was taken down several weeks ago.”
“After Nataya Lawan, Leslie Gleason, and Julia Valenzuela complained to you about him?”
“I suppose that cat’s out of the bag,” J.B. said, “so yes. My notes indicate that I tried to call the guy, but his phone had been disconnected. I sent him three e-mails, too, but he never responded. He listed a Denver address in his account information, but in his profile paragraph he says he’s in the process of relocating to Dallas.”
I asked him to read the Denver address, e-mail address, and phone number aloud and jotted them down as he recited them. The phone number was the same one Smirnoff had given to Leslie, Nataya, and Julia. They had reported the number being disconnected when they’d tried to call Jack Smironoff after learning the checks he’d given them were fraudulent.
“What about his credit card information?” I asked.
J.B. ran a finger over the mouse pad and clicked a few more keys. “He used a Visa.”
Though I was fairly certain the Visa would prove to be one of those prepaid cards, I requested the number and wrote it down anyway. If I could determine where and when it was purchased, I might be able to nail the guy.
I looked over at J.B. “I realize you don’t want to give me the names of the female clients he contacted, but can you at least tell me how many there were and when he got in touch with them?”
He played around on his laptop for a minute or so. “Other than the ones you know about, there were only two. One of them replied to his wink by saying she appreciated his interest, but she’d decided to get back with her old boyfriend. The other never responded to him. Guess she wasn’t interested.”
This news was both good and bad. While I was glad no other women seemed to have been duped by Smirnoff, without more victims I had less chance of getting a clue that would help me track the guy down. There was also less chance he’d receive a meaningful punishment. Still, I wasn’t leaving here totally empty-handed. I had a phone number, address, and credit card information. Maybe that would get me somewhere.
I stood. “Thanks, J.B. I appreciate your help.” I raised a palm. “I’ll show myself out. Don’t get up.”
Not that he’d made any move to escort me to the door. But at least he sent me off with well wishes.
“Good luck catching the guy.”
chapter six
Back in the Dating Game
On my return trip to the office, I drove through a taco stand and picked up a bean burrito for lunch. A special agent can’t concentrate on an empty stomach. I ordered a couple extra for Nick. After all, the way to an hombre’s corazón is through his estómago.
While eating my burrito back at the office, I logged on to my computer, input the card number for the Visa the catfisher had used to pay for his Big D subscription, and confirmed it was an untraceable prepaid credit card. No surprise there. A call to the credit card company told me that the card had been purchased at a big box store in Dallas.
“It was loaded five months ago,” the woman said.
“How much was put on the card?”
“Twenty-five hundred.”
The same went for the phone. Also prepaid and untraceable. Also purchased at the big box store. To my chagrin, the store no longer had any security camera footage from that time.
“Ninety days is our limit,” the store manager told me. “We don’t keep footage any longer than that.”
“All right.” I sighed in resignation. “Thanks for your time.”
As I hung up the phone, I wondered if there was any chance the martial arts lead could pan out. Of course I wasn’t even sure the guy performed martial arts. Maybe the strap in his gym bag really was some type of workout equipment and the award in his glove compartment really did belong to his stepson. Then again, maybe not. Maybe I could visit the local martial arts studios with his picture and see if anyone recognized him.
I put my fingers to the keyboard, typed in “martial arts Dallas,” and hit the “enter” key. Holy frijole! My search returned thousands of entries. I hadn’t realized just how many different types of martial arts there were. Karate. Tae kwon do. Jiu-jitsu. Kung fu. Capoeira, which incorporated dance movement. Kenpo. Kickboxing. Tai chi. Judo. Aikido. Eskrima. Krav Maga. And that was only the ones I could pronounce. There were dozens more, originating in Asia, Israel, Germany, Brazil, and nearly every country in between. Some forms involved using only the body, especially the feet and hands, while others incorporated weapons, ranging from knives and maces to staffs and clubs. Who knew there were so many—and such horrifying—ways to engage in combat? And did Jack Smirnoff know how to handle a mace? Would this investigation end with my name on a death certificate along with cause of death: blunt force trauma?
As my intestines tangled themselves in anxiety, the words on a screen for a mixed martial arts studio caught my eye. Free introductory lesson. A single lesson wouldn’t get me far, but it could give me a better understanding of exactly what I was up against. And, hey, free. Only a fool would pass up such a bargain. Besides, mixed martial arts, or MMA, would likely give me the best overview, right?
I logged into the site and signed myself up for a class the following night. Nick, too. As a former linebacker on his high school football team and MVP of the Tax Maniacs, the IRS softball team that played in the federal interagency league, Nick was always up for sports. Besides, if I got scared at the lesson I could hide behind him. He wasn’t just the love of my life; he was a potential human shield.
Of course my fears would be for naught if I couldn’t track down Jack Smirnoff. Out of ideas for the moment, I sat back in my chair to think. If I was going to find this guy, I’d have to go about it a different way. But how?
As Leslie had pointed out, this suspect certainly didn’t follow the typical catfishing pattern. Most of the people who engaged in a catfish scam never actually met their victims face-to-face. While they might schedule dates or meet-ups, they usually failed to show or bowed out at the last minute, claiming some type of emergency. It was unusual that Jack Smirnoff had actually shown up for multiple in-person encounters.
Like the guy who’d duped Nataya, Leslie, and Julia, many of the catfishers were after money. They’d prey on lonely people, developing a seemingly intimate relationship over time online. They’d share supposed secrets, engage in heart-to-heart discussions, and encourage their intended victims to do the same. Pure bullshit designed to develop a sense of closeness and trust. Once the catfishers thought they had their quarry on the hook, they’d ask for money to be wired to them, perhaps claim to be stranded somewhere after a mugging with no cash to get home. Still, most of these scam artists spent no money courting their victims. Jack Smirnoff had actually invested some money to further his illegal endeavors.
Of course some who engaged in catfishing simply seemed to get a thrill out of toying with people or living a fantasy existence online. After all, people could be anyone they wanted to be in cyberspace. A bored midwestern housewife with too much time on her hands after milking the cows could pose as a young lingerie model. A thirteen-year-old boy stinking of puberty hormones could pretend to be a successful architect in his mid-thirties and solicit dirty pics from young women he met online. A sixty-eight-year-old retired taxi driver from Sheboygan could become an all-star athlete turned aspiring feature film star and flirt with women young enough to be his granddaughters. Really, the Internet was one big masquerade ball.
Putting my meandering train of thought back on track, I pulled up the photos the women had e-mailed to me. I enlarged them to see Jack Smirnoff’s face in more detail. He wore his eyeglasses in every snapshot. Attempting to make himself less readily identifiable without them, perhaps? In each picture, he had blue eyes and dark-brown hair. Nothing unusual immediately popped out at me.
/> I enlarged the pictures and zoomed in, looking the man over in minute detail. On closer inspection, I noted that he had a small freckle or mole on his jawline just under his left ear and that his roots were several shades lighter than his dark hair. It wasn’t necessarily unusual for men in their forties to use hair color these days. After all, aging now seemed to be viewed more as an act of surrender than acceptance of a natural biological process. But I had to wonder if the dark hair was more of a disguise than an attempt to fight the forces of nature.
Hm-m …
My best bet for solving this case seemed to be posing as a potential victim for Jack Smirnoff on whatever dating site or sites he might be using now. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to track him down online. Though the Big D dating site had taken down his listing once the women registered complaints, he could be listed on other sites. He’d surely have used a different alias, though. Thanks to Nataya, Leslie, and Julia, anyone who ran an Internet search for the name Jack Smirnoff would discover his shady history and steer clear of him.
I ran a simple search for “online dating sites.” A multitude of general dating sites popped up, including Match.com, Chemistry.com, eHarmony, OkCupid, Zoosk, and Tinder. There were also niche dating sites. OurTime catered to the fifty and over crowd. Cougar Life matched women seeking younger men with men seeking older women. Mommy issues, anyone? VeggieDate catered to vegetarians, the only meat on its site coming in the form of beefcake. There was one called FarmersOnly.com for people interested in rural romance, a roll in the hay, perhaps. The Big and Beautiful site featured full-figured people. Sugardaddie.com matched successful men to the shallow women they deserved, while the Ashley Madison site connected married people looking to have affairs with unscrupulous people willing to indulge their adulterous desires. There were also sites for people looking not for lasting relationships but mere sexual hookups, no strings attached … unless, of course, one wanted to be tied to a bedpost. Ick. Just looking at the latter sites made me want to disinfect my laptop screen and keyboard.
There seemed to be as many dating sites as there were forms of martial arts. I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised by the number and variety of services. After all, online dating had become a multibillion-dollar industry. Love may be blind, patient, and kind, but it doesn’t come cheap these days.
Clearly, trying to find Jack Smirnoff on the sites would be like looking for a needle in a cyber haystack. Short of signing up for memberships on the sites and paging through all of the listings one by one, which I didn’t have time to do, I didn’t know how to find the guy.
But while I didn’t know a better way to go about cornering this guy on the Internet, I knew someone who might. Luckily for me, he sat right down the hall.
I picked up my phone and punched the three-digit code for the office of Josh Schmidt, my fellow special agent who was the office tech specialist. Maybe there was something he could do to help me keep this case moving along.
“You busy?” I asked when Josh answered.
“I could spare a minute.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll be right down.”
I scurried down the hall to Josh’s office, sliding my laptop onto his desk next to his state-of-the-art Alienware machine. Like me, Josh was on the short side, another “pipsqueak.” He had pink cheeks, baby-blue eyes, and cherubic blond curls. But when it came to technology, the guy was a virtual cyborg. He made technology his bitch.
After explaining the situation and showing Josh the photos, I raised my palms. “I’m at a loss here. Since the three women I met with have gone public, I’d hazard a guess that if Smirnoff is still soliciting victims online he’s changed the name and photo he’s using for his profiles. I need to track this guy down, but I don’t know how to do it. Do you have any ideas?”
“Of course I do.” He nudged me out of the way to take control of my laptop.
While I had zero interest in technology, other than having it provide me with easy shoe shopping and the ability for my brothers to share cute photos of my nieces and nephews, I was curious to see what Josh might do to find the so-called Jack Smirnoff. I grabbed one of Josh’s wing chairs, pulled it up next to his desk chair, and plunked myself down in it, peering over his shoulder as he began to type on the keyboard.
He turned my way and frowned. “Give a guy some space to work, will ya?”
“Oops. Sorry, buddy.” I used my feet to scoot the chair back a foot or two.
Josh logged on to a site called TinEye and uploaded Jack Smirnoff’s head shot photo. “TinEye has developed some good large-scale image search and recognition software.”
Whuh? “Dumb it down for me.”
Josh cast a look my way, obviously pitying my lack of technological savvy. “This site will find the image if it appears in other public places online.”
Sure enough, a moment later the site gave a listing of two other places where the head shot had been posted. The first was on a site called Catfish Finder. Leslie Gleason had posted Jack’s photo there, along with the words: Does anyone know this a-hole? He ripped me off for two grand! The picture also appeared in a blog about online scams. Nataya Lawan had posted Smirnoff’s pic there and told women to avoid this con artist at all costs! Unfortunately, the listings didn’t get me anywhere.
“What about private sites?” I asked Josh. “Can you search those?”
“I’ve got a similar program I can use to match photos on private sites,” he said, “but you’ll need the site owner’s permission or a search warrant first.”
Poop. I doubted the dating sites would willingly let us go on a fishing expedition through their clients’ profiles. Too much personal information and too great a risk of backlash if their clients learned they’d turned over private data without a court mandate. I also knew there were dozens, if not hundreds, of dating sites. The chances of a judge issuing a broad warrant to cover even a small list of the most popular sites were slim to none. I’d probably be tossed out of court and told to prove a connection between the con artist and a specific site before making any such request again.
“What about these dating sites?” I asked. “Would they be able to run an internal search for the photo and see if he’s listed on their site?” If so, maybe I wouldn’t need a court order after all. Maybe I could get these sites to do the searches for me. After all, we had a mutual interest in stopping catfishers from preying on people online.
“It’s possible,” Josh said, “assuming their tech staff has the right programs and knows what they’re doing. If I handled the search, there’s less risk something will fall through the cracks.”
“Got any other tricks up your sleeve?” I asked Josh.
“Abracadabra.” Josh pretended to wave magic wands before pulling up another Web site and uploading the image a second time.
“What’s this site for?”
“To assist people in locating stolen cameras.”
“How’s that going to help us?” I asked.
“Expensive cameras imbed their serial number and other data in the digital images,” he explained. “People usually use this site to track down the person who stole their camera. But if we can find other images taken with the same camera used to take the catfisher’s head shot we might be able to find out who he is or find other pictures of him posted in other public places online.”
“Wow. The Internet is truly amazing.”
Josh cast me a look. “It’s only as amazing as the user.”
“True,” I said. “You are amazing, Josh.” Jeez. Still, I supposed I couldn’t fault the guy for having an ego in constant need of feeding. As small and nerdy as he was, he’d surely taken some crap back in high school. These were his glory days. Why not let him enjoy it?
A few seconds later, the site popped up with some information identifying the type of camera used—a Nikon D90—along with a seven-digit serial number. It also gave the date and time the image was recorded. Per the site, the head shot of Jack Smirnoff had been taken on January
14 at 2:33 in the afternoon. Gotta love the World Wide Web!
“Now,” Josh said, “I’m going to input the camera model and serial number and see what other online images were taken with the same camera.”
He typed in the information and hit “enter.” A few seconds later, a seemingly endless list of links with thumbnail photos appeared. Josh enlarged several of the photos at the top of the list. All of them had the copyright symbol and the logo of a photography studio in the lower right-hand corner. © GOODE PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS.
“A-ha! Now I know where the catfisher had his head shots done.” Of course Smirnoff had been smart enough to crop the logo out of the photo before posting it. But not smart enough to realize the photo could still possibly be used to track him down. That gave me one clue as to his identity. He wasn’t someone who worked in IT. “Thanks, Josh.”
“Glad I could help.” Josh handed my computer back to me. “The rest is on you.”
I took my laptop, returned to my office, and looked up the phone number for the photography studio online. Fortunately, the photographer, Savannah Goode, was in between shoots and was able to speak with me when I called.
“What’s this about?” Savannah asked, her tone tentative and suspicious. Who could blame her? I’d be a little hesitant, too, if someone in federal law enforcement phoned me out of the blue.
“You’re not in any trouble,” I told her. “I just have some questions about a photo that was taken at your studio.” Or, more precisely, about the person in the photo.
“I’m pretty busy,” she said. “Can I just answer your questions now by phone?”
In my experience, and as evidenced by my earlier trip to J.B.’s condo, in-person meetings yielded better results. Witnesses felt less accountable to agents over the phone and didn’t always put forth their best efforts to help. But in person they had a harder time refusing me. I’d like to think it was because of my charm, but more likely it was because of the gun holstered at my hip.