The new scam worked in the following way. There was a client who requested a search and a target who was the person to be found. As long as the search was legitimate, the client remained a client and everything was legal. However, when the client got drawn into the con, they became a mark. It would all start very innocently. A client would submit a search request to the legitimate web site - The Finder. If the target could not be found, the searcher would reply to the client that the target could not be uncovered through standard search procedures and would offer their more advanced services. If the client asked for a more thorough search, the case would be turned over to Garner on his special assignment workstation. If Garner managed to track down the target, he would charge the agreed upon hourly rate and the deal was perfectly legitimate. However, if Garner could not find the person, or if he had discovered that the target was deceased, then the customer became a mark in this new con scheme.
Garner would email the client claiming that he had found the target but the target had fallen upon hard times and did not wish to be discovered. If the client, now the mark, took the bait, they would plead with Garner to at least forward a message to the target. Garner would resist just the right amount and then agree to forward an email to the target even though this was clearly against company policy. At this point the mark was hooked. Garner would then create a false email, supposedly from the target saying how everything in their life had gone wrong and how they were in desperate straights. The mark, now desperate to help the target, would offer to send money. Garner would resist again citing company policy. After enough resistance to ensure his credibility, he would allow the mark to charge a credit card to a blind site. Garner, of course, would pocket the money and send an email back to the client thanking him or her for the charity.
If the client persisted, Garner would say that he had broken company policy too often and could not help the client any more for fear of loosing his job. If the client still persisted, he would refer them to a dark web site accessible only via an IP address. It was a blind website, Garner would explain, and the target, not wanting to be found, agreed to exchange email only if his or her located were hidden by the blind web site. The only drawback, of course, was that the site charged ten dollars per email exchange to provide anonymity. The emails, of course, came to Garner who would masquerade as the target carefully writing the return emails to keep the mark at bay and on the line.
With a directory full of standard email replies and all manner of chitchat, Garner could crank out a return email in a few minutes by cutting and pasting his standard replies. On a good day, he could put together over two hundred reply emails which brought him two thousand dollars in email charges. But this was still chump change. The real money came at the end with the sting.
At some point, Garner would have the target stop sending reply emails. The mark would panic and contact Garner via the Finder site. Garner would reluctantly agree to look into it. After a delay of a few days, Garner would report that the target had gotten arrested for something they didn't do and did not have the money to hire a good attorney. After some careful cat and mouse, Garner would get the mark to wire a sum of money (anywhere from $5000 to $25000) depending on how much he thought he could get away with. Figuring out how much to charge was fairly easy. Once Garner had a mark on the line, he would check out their financial situation. "Know your mark" was a rule that Garner lived by.
After a couple weeks, Garner would report that the attorney had wired him back the remainder of the funds (usually not very much) and reported that the target had simply left town and did not report a forwarding address. Garner would report to the mark that if the target ever showed up again, he would certainly contact the mark immediately.
The mark would thank Garner for his help and believe that the money was lost on the target. If the mark ever found out that he or she had been scammed, there was no way to trace the email or the credit card charges back to Garner or the Finder site. It was a sweet deal and Garner was pulling in between 10 and 20 grand per week from marks all over the country. A single mark might be bilked for as much as $50,000 over a period of a couple of months. He was in the money and back on top again.
Who knows how long Garner may have been able to keep this up if it weren't for the oddest of coincidences. The fates that had twisted in his direction so many times seemed determined to twist against him now at every opportunity.
* * * * * *
Professor Wentworth returned to his office to find Angel, his network administrator and occasional research assistant sitting in his office with a much older but very attractive northern Indian woman who bore a strong family resemblance to Angel.
"Hello, Angel," Wentworth said as he came in.
"Professor Wentworth, I'd would like to introduce you to my mother, Sonia Chakravarthy." Angel's voice quivered a bit as though the strain of introducing her mother was almost as much as she could take.
"It's nice to meet you, Mrs. Chakravarthy," Wentworth responded.
"Please, call me Sonia."
"OK, Sonia, its still nice to meet you. Are you here in town visiting Angel?" Wentworth cringed just a little as he said this. Her real name was Anjali. Angel was just a nickname that he had given her. But Sonia did not seem to notice.
"No, I'm here on business," she said tightly, "and I need your help."
"You need my help?" Wentworth replied. "What in the world would you need my help for?"
"You know that Finder web site that Rose's boyfriend set up?" Angel began, interrupting.
"Yes, I am aware that Garner set up a site that would track down people for a fee. As far as I know it isn't working very well. I gave him a guy to track down and he never got back to me."
"Oh, it's working OK," Angel assured, "I think it might be working a little too well."
"Please explain," said Wentworth as he settled comfortably into his chair.
"Well, I went to the Finder site," Sonia began, "because Angel told me about it and I thought it might be a way to track down Anjali's father."
Angel shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "Yeah, I found out about it from Rose. My stepfather died a year or so ago and my mother has been trying to track down my real father ever since. I don't know why she wants to find him," she continued, her voice wavering. But then she got control of herself and continued. "So I thought that for ten bucks it was worth trying this guy's site."
"And did he find your ex-husband," Wentworth asked directing the question to Sonia.
"No he didn't," she replied.
"And so you are out ten bucks. What's the problem?"
"I am not out ten bucks," Sonia replied, "I am out ten thousand bucks. And it isn't even the money that I care about. I care about being misled and cheated."
"I think you better tell me everything, starting from the beginning," Wentworth advised.
Sonia Chakravarthy went through a long involved story that took several months to unfold and nearly an hour to relay. She told about how her ex-husband had been found and how they had exchanged email and how she wired him money for legal fees and how he just disappeared again.
"At first, I thought I had lost him a second time," she said. "But after thinking about it for a while, I think the whole thing was just a scam."
"Why do you think that," Wentworth pressed.
"There was a popular Beatles song during the time that Anjali's father was living with me in India. The song was 'All You Need is Love'. Anjali's father, being somewhat cynical, used to say, 'All you need is love, a good tailwind, and a lot of luck.'"
"Go on," Wentworth encouraged.
"Well, in one of the emails I sent him I said 'Don't forget, all you need is love.' He replied that love wasn't enough but made no reference to what he used to say. At first, I thought that maybe he just forgot. But after a while I began to believe that I was never communicating with him to begin with. I went back over all of our emails and they just didn't sound like him. They sounded like somebody who was just reflecting back on what I said."
"I think you're right," Wentworth said thoughtfully. "It does sound like a scam. In fact it is a cyber version of a fairly well known and all-to-common scam. In the old days, these guys would hold séances to located departed loved ones. Now it seems as though the medium is the web." He paused for a moment contemplating the situation and then continued. "But its really hard for me to believe that Rose Miller is mixed up in something like this."
He pondered it for a few minutes more and then concluded, "Well, I guess we'd better find out for sure."
With that he picked up the telephone and when the person answered he said, "This is Dr. Wentworth speaking, please put me through to Gita Ramana." Then, after a short pause, "Gita this is Tad. I think we had uncovered a cyber con originating from here in Foggy Bottom. I don't know how big it is yet, but it has enormous potential. I think you should get down here as soon as you can."
Wentworth was silent as Gita spoke on the other end. "Maria who? Well it doesn't matter. Bring her along if you want to. What the hell, maybe she'll be of some help or maybe she'll learn something.
Of course he was right on both counts.