Scam Likely | 7. Take the Deal
38:16 Share

If somebody says the right words, promises the right things, anybody can become a victim. Since the early 2000s, millions of handwritten letters were landing at people's doors all across America. She truly believed that this was going to save her mind from going further.

into the depths of demand shut. I'm investigative journalist Rachel Brown, and I'm going to tell you the story of a scam unlike anything I've ever seen in the shape-shifting mastermind who evaded capture for more than 20 years. We never in our wildest dreams thought that these schemes were at this scale. They'd been without water for two months. All they wanted in return was whatever it was that Maria Duval was promising them.

From ITN Productions and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to The Greatest Scam Ever Written. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. Campsite Media. Hello, can you hear me? Right, okay. Hello? Hello? So, what do you want me to say? Oh, it's just a... Hello? Camellia. Camellia. Season four. Scam likely. A production of Campsite Media. Oh.

The takedown raid and the arrests that followed were a capstone for Operation Outsource. By January 2017, two months after the takedown, 23 defendants were being held in Houston, where the prosecution was preparing to take them to trial. That's around the time a young guy who lives out in the Houston suburbs got a phone call. My name is Mohammed Atik Baradar, and I work as a freelance interpreter.

for a few languages. Atik, as he goes by, is 31 years old. He's worked as an interpreter since he was a teenager. He does a lot of this work for federal court.

It might seem like a dull job, but Atik has the outgoing personality to enjoy the work. And this case came around and they saw that I speak Gujarati. So they called me and they told me, hey, we have about 20 defendants. It's a big case and none of them speak English. So we will need your services. So Atik, how did it feel to be in such great demand all of a sudden because this was like a bonanza of business for you?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it felt great. I felt like the man of the hour, you know, like they couldn't talk until I would walk in because, I mean, the federal agents wouldn't be able to communicate with the defendants. Their own attorneys wouldn't be able to communicate with their clients. So it was kind of like things just couldn't move forward without me being there. So it felt nice.

Atik didn't have to be a lawyer to figure out that the defendants were in a tough spot. He stood beside them in court and told them exactly how much trouble each of them was in. We would go in front of the judge, you know, get arraigned. Then we would go in a private room where it's the attorney, the client, and me. And we would kind of talk about what happened and hear their side of the story.

At various points during my reporting, I tried reaching the defendants. I never got an interview. But because of the work he did, Atik got to know some of them pretty well. And the defendants were right to think they could be comfortable around Atik, because Atik, he had a soft spot for them.

As an immigrant striving to achieve the American dream, he identified with them. Majority of them were like either working at a Subway sandwich shop or, you know, cashier at the gas station. And they were deliberately recruited by these recruiters knowing that these people need money.

All of these defendants were Gujarati, and Atiq understood them particularly well because he too was a Gujarati, and he admired Gujaratis, who are known for their entrepreneurship. The secret behind their success as a community in the United States is no mystery to Atiq.

I think it's just hard work and consistency. Like I know people that have been doing the same job for 20, 30 years. And even if they're tired, they just go at it. They never give up. Just the other day, I was reading in the hospitality industry with the hotels and motels, Gujaratis combined all over America own $40 billion in

worth of real estate as far as hotels and motels go. That's a staggering number. Atik was primarily working with the low-level players in the scam, the runners. And in Atik's analysis, most of the runners were not all that different from other enterprising immigrants in America, except for the fact that they'd been roped into a criminal activity without entirely understanding the full scheme or its consequences.

They were like, "Sir, do something. Please save me from this madness. I didn't mean to do this. I didn't even know what was going on." And I was like, "Let me clear it out first of all. I am just an interpreter. I cannot do anything for you.

If anyone can do anything for you, it's the man next to me in the suit. He's your attorney and whatever you want to tell me, tell me so I can tell him and he can then try to save you in court. From Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Scam Likely, the fourth season of Chameleon. I'm Udjit Paricharjee.

Episode 7, Take the Deal. While the defendants sat in jail wondering about their fate, their lawyers negotiated with prosecutors. They pretty much had to. Every single one of these individuals that we arrested was held with, I think,

Two exceptions. And that, I think, was a huge, huge benefit to us. Chris and the other DHS investigators were excited that the defendants had to stay in jail because it put more pressure on them to cooperate. And those defendants also weren't in a position to coordinate a cover story to mask what they had been doing. They all have to tell the same lie if they're going to lie, right? So then you can start to gain a more full and complete picture.

The investigators were keen to fill in the gaps, learn details about the scam that they hadn't been able to see from the outside. The runners were the insiders. They would know. But the way Atik saw it, at least some of the defendants were basically clueless. These poor runners, most of them did not know what was happening. They did not even know where the funds were coming from. And knowing their background...

They were not very literate, so it was probably hard for them to even think that what they were doing was wrong. In their minds, they were doing their job, and it's their bosses. They're running the business, and they thought they were just an employee for some business. This might seem pretty hard to believe, but Atik says, look, one of the runners I was translating for actually got scammed himself.

He went through all the steps. We're going to deport you or send you to jail unless you buy a prepaid debit card and read off the number.

And all this while he was participating in the scam. He went and he paid. And while he was doing that, he realized, like, this is what I do on a daily basis. I go to these places and I pick up money or I go pay money or I make deposits. But again, he didn't think much of it because he didn't know the backstory of his job itself.

He didn't know where these funds were coming from. His job was just to go and pick up these funds or buy these green dot cards and pick up the money orders and deposit it in the accounts that were given to him by his bosses. Maybe this guy wasn't the smartest cookie among the runners. But I could see why his story made sense. The runners didn't need to know about the scamming side of the operation to do their job effectively.

It seemed likely that most of the runners didn't have a clue about where the money was coming from, at least when they were first recruited. They had figured it out at some point, you know, six months down the line or a year down the line, that something just isn't right. But at that point, they were in it. It was part of their job. They were getting paid double, triple of what they would make at Subway or gas station cashier. So they didn't care too much.

Who knew what and when didn't matter a whole lot anyway, because ignorance is not a defense when you brazenly abet a criminal conspiracy. A jury wasn't going to buy the claim that they didn't know what they were doing. Just the fact that they were using fake IDs to conduct transactions was enough to prove that they knew that they were engaging in a criminal act.

Besides, how were the runners going to explain all the efforts they took to conceal their activities, like dividing up a city into quadrants and driving from store to store? But the investigators didn't know exactly how much the runners knew. A lot of takedowns of criminal organizations rely on informants. Find the weakest link: a member of the gang who's willing to rat out the others. You use that information to identify others in the organization who might be willing to cooperate.

In Operation Outsource, the investigation had been different. Mike Sheckles, one of the DOJ attorneys leading the prosecution, he said they didn't even want an informant before making arrests. We did not have someone that was sort of an inside baseball witness when we charged the case.

It was everything else we could do but that, because if we approached one person to try to, you know, flip them, for instance, before we went live with the case, so many potential negative consequences, people fleeing, people closing up shop, evidence disappearing. And so we really didn't think it made sense to do that in the case. We had to do it once the case was live. But now that they had everyone in custody, it was a different story. Mike was determined to get the defendants to talk.

When I visited the Department of Justice, I asked Mike and his colleague, Hope Olds, about how that played out. Was there anyone that was particularly helpful? Are these public, by the way? What's that? Who's cooperating? Yeah, I don't think we want to get into that piece of it. Yeah, that's fine. That's fine. I mean, the answer, of course, is yes, there were, but I'm just not going to tell you who those people were. Okay.

That was a lawyerly answer, which I kind of expected. But Atik, he wasn't so circumspect. He remembered the first guy who agreed to cooperate. He was very eager to tell his story to the agents and to his attorney because he just wanted to just come out clean and tell them everything he knew.

and how he was getting calls from India, like how he was getting orders from India and what he needed to do, where he needed to go, get the green dot cards and all that. So he was very, very eager. All the defendants were housed in the same detention facility, and word got around to them that this runner had begun talking. Some of the other co-defendants got together and complained to...

Other inmates were not involved in this case. And, you know, the jail code, snitches get stitches. And this poor guy, man, he was jumped because he came for the second meeting and he had all these marks on his face. He had cuts on his lips, his nose. And he started crying to the agents and said, look, I'm here trying to help you guys. And this is what I'm getting for it. And you guys are not doing anything to protect me.

And then after that, he was moved to a different facility since he was the very first one to start talking. This runner, the one who got kicked and punched, may have been the first one to cooperate, but he wouldn't be the last. More after the break. The file of immunobuild is being videotaped at the Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami-Dade County, Florida. And sir, would you identify yourself? My name is Robert F. Carver III.

In 1976, a man in Florida tells a cop he has a confession to make. But instead of becoming his victim, I became his confidant, one of the people closest to him, as he recounted and was tried for his horrific crimes.

From Orbit Media and Sony Music Entertainment, listen to My Friend the Serial Killer. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you get your podcasts. You're listening to Camellia from Campside Media. Through the summer and fall of 2017, Dave, Dylan, and Chris managed to interview some of the other runners in custody. That helped them build an even stronger case than they had.

And so, by November, a year after the takedown, all the defendants had pleaded guilty. As the judge in the case prepared to hand down sentences, he read through statement after statement from victims describing how the scam had upended their lives. The investigators came across victims who lost their entire life savings, as much as half a million dollars. Other victims lost less money, but still enough to create hardship.

The entire scam added up to hundreds of millions. But it wasn't just money that the victims lost. Many also lost trust in society and institutions. The trauma, in many cases, was long-lasting. For Dhruv and his wife, the couple that got scammed on the same day, it caused a strain in the marriage.

Michelle, the woman in the Chicago area who fell victim to a payday loan scam, told me that her self-esteem took a big hit. I learned of a grandfather whose grandkids were so angry at him for being scammed out of money that could have paid for their college that they stopped speaking to him. The consequences could be even worse.

One of the stories submitted to the court came from a woman who, for reasons of privacy, asked that I call her Ophelia. It begins in the fall of 2014. Ophelia's parents were separated but still in touch. Ophelia's mom called her to tell her that her 60-year-old dad seemed to be in trouble. So I ended up calling him, and he was just in a panic, saying, I screwed up on my taxes.

and they say I owe tens of thousands of dollars and I have to start paying or they're going to start taking the property away. They said they already have a warrant. Ophelia thought it sounded fishy right away, but she couldn't convince her father it was a scam. He was stubborn, under the spell of the scammers. He seemed to be hearing me but not listening. He was just a mess.

At the time, Ophelia's father was living in rural California. He was the kind of guy who found happiness in the outdoors, fishing, golfing. He also valued his self-reliance and his ability with numbers. He took care of the family's finances, rarely making any mistakes. So you can understand how the IRS telling him that he'd messed up his taxes might throw him for a loop. So...

If he knew or felt he screwed up on something, he sure as hell wasn't going to tell anybody and he'll try to fix it on his own. When the first call came in, Ophelia's dad was especially vulnerable. He was grappling with alcohol addiction. His mind wasn't as sharp as it used to be and he wasn't as confident as he once was.

He was a soft target, and the scammers pounced. They kept intimidating him with the same lies you've heard before. One day, Ophelia's dad called her. She missed the call, so he left her voicemail. Hi, it's Dad. I tried to dispute this matter I have with the parents, and they said they were going to send the police out by 2 p.m.,

After that, he started isolating himself. Weeks passed. I got a text message from my aunt.

and she told me I needed to call, there was an emergency. I called and he was dead. He was gone. Ophelia learned that her father had died by overdosing on medication. She believes he took his own life. When she went to his house, she found it in disarray. Scattered on his bedside table were receipts for bank withdrawals. She also found a stack of prepaid debit cards.

Later, she discovered that he'd been scammed out of at least $20,000. There was nothing left in his bank account. From the dates on the withdrawal receipts, Ophelia could tell that the scammers had contacted her father over weeks to extort him repeatedly. Every time they called, he would get in his car and drive for more than an hour to get to his bank and withdraw money, again and again.

Did you feel like this loss and this fraud actually pushed him over the edge? Obviously, there's many factors, but there's certain things that are like the straw that breaks the camel's back. You can't explain your way out of $20,000 being given away to a supposed government agency. It does...

Ophelia kept the withdrawal receipts on the cards. They were valuable evidence. She went through her father's phone records and sent a complaint to the IRS.

When investigators contacted her, she started to help them. It was tedious work, but she gathered together all the records she had found in her dad's home and handed them over, hoping it might help bring down the scammers. It was not a good year by any accounts, but the upside was that I took...

my grief, my anger, everything, and just put it towards that. This one little thing that I could do to make something good come out of something so terrible. Never mind the money, it's the people behind it that these scammers, they're destroying people's lives. The judge in the case delivered the sentences over a period of three days. Chris remembers the judge saying that stories like Ophelia's had shaken him. He made a point to talk about

having read every single victim impact statement that came to him. And there were thousands of victim impact statements, and they were heart-wrenching. So by the time he rolled in to sentence these folks, he had a very strong opinion. He was obviously very knowledgeable what the federal sentencing guidelines required. He pretty much was hitting the upper limits on every one of them. There wasn't, I think, at any point a downward variance. He was pretty strict.

The judge issued sentences of between three to five years for some of the lower-level players in the scam. Then came mid-level operatives like Mitesh Patel. He had helped to launder potentially as much as $25 million. He got 20 years. The total sentence over those three days, aggregate, was over 191 years in jail for our defendants over that three-day period. It was huge.

But of course, the original indictment named 56 individuals. Only 24 had been brought to justice, and many of the alleged masterminds were still at large. I asked Hope Olds how she felt about that. So one of my last questions is, you know, would you say that Operation Outsource was a success? Have we been able to bring all of the defendants together?

to court and hold them accountable? No. But have we restricted the individuals in India from traveling to places that they previously would travel because they would have fear potentially that they would be arrested on this case in those countries? Yes. We'll be back right after this. You're listening to Camellia from Campside Media.

Dave, Chris, and Dylan were pretty sure that their top two targets were in India. Shaggy, the alleged flashy whiz kid of scamming, and Hitesh Patel, the less flamboyant but very powerful kingpin. But they couldn't compel Indian law enforcement to hand them over, and the Indian authorities never responded to requests to start that process. However, the U.S. government had put out red-corner notices in their names.

which meant if the indian masterminds traveled abroad the investigators and prosecutors would get notified chris is well versed in this stuff in the perfect scenario in the movie version of this our foreign fugitive lands the red notice pops up when he scans his passport or whatever and they take him into custody and he sits there in a cell until dave and i go walking in to bring him back to the u.s and in reality it's a

much more paper-heavy process. And every country, every treaty that's organized between two countries comes with different standards and different ways of doing business. The Red Corner notices had been issued right after the indictment was unveiled in October 2016. Just weeks later, the investigators learned that Shaggy, who had managed to evade the authorities in India, had flown to Thailand.

Thai officials notified the DHS attache at the embassy there, who then alerted Dave, Chris, and Dylan. But before the investigators could send in the paperwork needed to detain Shaggy, he had left the country. Nearly two years later, something similar happened with Hitesh Patel, the other high-profile target. It was in late 2018, several months after all the defendants in the U.S. had been sentenced, and Hitesh,

probably feeling safe and complacent, traveled to Singapore. The authorities there notified DHS. I think they know what hotel he's staying at. And it comes back to us and we say, "Yeah, we definitely want to grab that guy. Let's do it." And before we could get a provisional arrest warrant out to make that happen, he was on a plane back to India. So he was there like a day, day and a half. Not enough time for the agents to react.

Yeah, we were disappointed, of course. You know, wish she had stayed a week longer or something so we could have worked out the kinks. But, you know, now we have a couple of countries where somebody's flown in, somebody's tested the waters, and maybe we've got a system in place now. Maybe we have the connections in place now. Somebody goes to a vacation somewhere, they're often going to go back. So whether that's Thailand or somewhere else.

So they were lying in wait, on high alert, when they got word that Hitesh had gone back to Singapore for a second visit. This time, some of the needed paperwork was ready in advance. And so the Singaporean police didn't even let Hitesh go check into his hotel.

They handcuffed him and took him to jail. I was teleworking that day, and so I was downstairs in my dining room. I was like, we're like literally getting ready to feed the family and like got that notice and was like stoked about it. It was like, all right, it's go time.

But even at that point, there was no guarantee that Hitesh was coming to the U.S., or even that he'd be kept in jail in Singapore for long. The investigators and prosecutors in the United States had to convince a judge in Singapore that there were enough grounds to extradite Hitesh.

Every time authorities in Singapore had a question, Chris had to dispatch new statements. We were sending stuff literally like FedEx overnight express to land on desks at the right time to get in the judges' chambers. In April 2019, Dave and Dylan met up at the San Francisco airport. They had a direct flight to Singapore.

Singapore is probably the safest place on earth, but you're landing in a foreign country, you don't know where you're at, what you're going to do when you get there. We got there, it was already dark, you know, and not that there's probably even a sketchy place in Singapore, but it's just you show up, you don't have your bearings.

Chris got there the next day from Houston. The three met with State Department officials and the DHS attaché at the embassy. They made a presentation to the Singapore police about how scammers might be laundering money in that country. And then, finally, Chris remembers it was time to pick up Hitesh. Singapore has, as I understand it, one jail for the entire island, for that entire island city. And

Whether it's, you know, jaywalking or whatever the crime that you wind up there for, it's not like the system here where you have, you know, a local jail, a county jail, a federal facility. It's all one. They arrive at the jail, pass through a series of doors. This was the quietest, most just silent jail you can imagine. You could have heard a pin drop in there. It was just...

Not a peep, absolute silence. And finally we arrive at the building where Hitesh is and we walk in and it's an open room and on the floor they have these almost like one by one painted yellow squares, you know, set at regular intervals. And the only prisoner sitting there on one of those squares is Hitesh Patel. He's surrounded by guards.

Hitesh has a bag of books and the carry-on suitcase he brought with him when he first arrived from India. They get into the car. Chris is in the front. Hitesh is sitting in the back, next to a US federal agent who speaks Hindi. And he looks over and says, "In Hindi, what took you guys so long?" They go straight to the airport. They're still on edge. Until they land on US soil, they can't be sure it's really going to work out.

There could be a last-minute legal challenge from the Indian government or some other unknown. It could all fall apart. The hardest part of any deportation or extradition is the part where you're putting the guy on the plane. They board a commercial flight from Singapore to San Francisco.

Chris, Dave and Dylan are hoping not to draw any attention. The captain of that plane is like a general on the battlefield. It's like, you know, he has god power. He can kick anybody off that plane that he wants. It's his plane. And so if this guy were to flip out or create a scene or have a, you know, panic attack or start screaming and yelling, the captain could have easily ended the whole mission right there.

Chris has seen prisoners deliberately make a ruckus and bring the whole thing to a halt. Hitesh seems nervous and scared, so the agents bring him a cup of coffee. And then from there, you could tell he was, you know, he was resigned to the fact that he was going to the U.S. They had planned ahead of time. They read Hitesh's rights, and he signed a form that allowed the investigators to go through his phone. He spoke to the agents during the flight. There wasn't much else to do. He was...

you know, cooperative, but, you know, insisted and continued to insist for months after the fact that he was just a patsy. He was just a guy who, you know, yeah, he knew these guys, yeah, he was in and around the call center, but he was just, you know, he was being used. Dylan was there for all of this, too. One of the things he claimed is that he didn't even know how to operate the computer that he was holding, and, you know, that he didn't speak any English, which...

There were messages in English. I think he also at one point was claiming that he was hacked as well. This didn't last, though. In January 2020, Hitesh pleaded guilty to owning, funding, and operating scam call centers. He's currently serving time at the Fort Dix Federal Corrections Institute in New Jersey, a long way away from home. He's due to be released in 2035.

But after Hitesh pleaded guilty, things got quiet in the case. I knew that many of the masterminds, including Shaggy, were still at large. And that's a big part of why my producer Johnny and I went to India. We wanted to see if we could track down the people that Chris, Dave, and Dylan could not. Where are you right now? I will disclose my location. I'm sorry.

That's next time on the final episode of Scam Likely. Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Sony Music Entertainment. Scam Likely was produced and written by Eric Benson, Johnny Kaufman, and me, Yudhijit Petticharjee. Callie Hitchcock and Yvonne Lai-Tremuin were our associate producers. The show was fact-checked by Sarah Ivry.

Sound design and original music by Mark McAdam. Additional music by Samba Jean-Baptiste. Special thanks to Campside's operations team, Aaliyah Papes and Doug Slavin. The executive producers at Campside are Matt Scher, Vanessa Gregoriadis, Josh Dean and Adam Hoff.