The FBI: Part four of seven in the Scammed series.
Judith Boivin didn’t accept that she had been conned until a Maryland state fraud investigator pointed out the scammer’s email: [email protected].
An official FBI email address, he told her, would have ended with @fbi.gov.
“How would I have ever known that?” Judith asked.
Exactly.
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Scammers count on victims not being able to discern what’s authentic and what’s not. We know from major corporate and government data breaches that even workers who regularly receive cybersecurity training fall victim to fake emails.
After that first phone call with a man professing to be special agent Wayne A. Jacobs, Judith searched for him online. She was reassured after finding his name on the bureau’s website.
But she hadn’t been talking to the bona fide Jacobs; he’d never heard of Judith until I contacted an FBI spokesperson. I later told Jacobs how a con man had co-opted his resume as part of a multistate impersonation scam.
By the time the impersonator was done with Judith, she was out nearly $600,000. Add in the 12 other known victims, and losses spike to $2.9 million.
“Obviously, you feel terrible because the real impact here is to the victim, the folks who are separated from their money,” Jacobs said. “In this case … quite a bit of money.”
The scheme was effective because there were large breadcrumbs of truth.
With Jacobs as his avatar, the con man had an unimpeachable backstory. The real agent got his start in 2003 at the FBI’s New York field office, where he worked on government and financial fraud cases. He later was promoted to supervisory special agent in the Criminal Investigative Division at bureau headquarters in Washington. He took over the Philadelphia field office in November 2023, two months after scammers first contacted Judith.
At different phases of the three-month con, scammers name-dropped other legitimate members of law enforcement. Judith was tricked into believing she was on the phone with members of the Rockville police force, including then-chief, Victor V. Brito.
“This is disturbing,” said Jason West, interim police chief for the Rockville City Police Department in Maryland. Brito had not heard about the use of his name in the scam until I reached out for comment. “I can assure you that no member of the executive command staff of the Rockville City Police Department would ever make a direct call like that and refer someone to a government agency,” West said. “That just would not happen.”
Because the con man said he was with the FBI, Judith Boivin says she didn’t pick up on the scam until after it was over. (Joshua Carroll and Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
Jacobs said these schemes are frustrating because they happen “way too much in our estimation” and despite efforts to raise awareness.
“It just goes to show how good and sophisticated these folks are in executing their scams.”
Though scammers target all age groups, seniors generally make the most lucrative targets. Baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — are the most prosperous generation that’s ever lived with a collective $84 trillion in wealth as of the second quarter of this year, according to the Federal Reserve.
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Even when they have significant retirement savings, many seniors fear it’s not enough. Criminals exploit this worry.
“Victims often suffer the loss of entire banking, savings, retirement, or investment accounts under the guise of ‘protecting’ their assets,” according to an FBI alert.
Judith’s scammer had persuaded her to move most of her retirement funds into a “government safety locker” as a precaution, to ensure her assets wouldn’t be conflated with the criminal’s and seized.
She didn’t know the government didn’t have depots for private assets, or that no federal official would ever make such a request.
“An application by F.B.I. DIRECTOR MR. STEPHEN LAYCOCK to the federal government requested for safety locker,” read one document the scammer sent her.
Judith Boivin on her computer at her home in Rockville, Maryland, on July 26. (Allison Robbert/The Washington Post)
Laycock never headed the agency. He retired from the FBI in 2021 as executive assistant director of the Intelligence Branch after a 29-year career. He thinks criminals are taking information from his LinkedIn profile.
“I can also see where people are misled because I had a director’s title,” Laycock said. “It’s just a shame. You hate to hear these stories. And they used me against somebody else.”
Because Judith could match names and titles online, she didn’t question it when her handler had her drop off large sums of cash to couriers at a public parking lot. She was so convinced of the legitimacy of the entire operation that she went against the warnings of her longtime money managers.
— FBI special agent Michael McGillicuddy said of the scam carried out against Judith Boivin
Concerned that Judith was being scammed, Morgan Stanley contacted the Maryland Attorney General’s Office before she withdrew all her retirement funds last fall. A financial fraud investigator with the securities division reached out to Judith in January 2024, according to an email exchange she had with the Maryland official.
By then, all her money was gone.
“That really disturbed me,” she said.
Judith Boivin looked online to verify some of the information provided by the scammer. (Joshua Carroll and Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
Maryland Securities Commissioner Melanie Lubin said she could not discuss Judith’s case or confirm her office’s contact with Morgan Stanley. She could only say that financial institutions are required to report suspected fraud to the Securities Division and appropriate Adult Protective Services agency under a 2017 statute designed to combat elder financial abuse.
Under the Maryland Securities Act, brokerage firms and investment advisers can delay disbursing funds from an adult’s account for up to 15 business days (25 days under appropriate circumstances) if there is a reasonable belief that the withdrawal would result in the financial exploitation of a vulnerable adult.
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Similar laws have been adopted in 42 states and Puerto Rico based on model legislation from the North American Securities Administrators Association.
The law is designed to be enough of a speed bump to derail fraud, Lubin said.
“It’s a very delicate balance because it is the account holder’s money,” she said. “You put these protections in place, and you try to ask the right questions. You try to say to them, ‘Are you sure?’
“But it’s very hard because psychological warfare is going on, and manipulation is going on in the person’s ear. The criminal will be on the phone nonstop with … their victim, telling them what to do.”
A small victory
Judith and others tied to the Jacobs impersonator filed a complaint with the FBI through IC3.gov. Those complaints were then routed to the appropriate law enforcement or FBI field office for handling, according to an FBI spokesperson.
A special agent with the FBI’s Washington field office, Michael McGillicuddy, identified a dozen other victims who had been manipulated by the Jacobs impersonator, including one person in Virginia who gave him over $380,000. The other victims reside in Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Oregon and Texas.
As a result, Judith’s complaint was routed to McGillicuddy’s case. He traced her scammer (the Jacobs impersonator) to a call center in India. U.S.-based accomplices handled the cash drop-offs with Judith. McGillicuddy is coordinating with the FBI’s legal attaché in New Delhi, who is working with law enforcement in India. No arrests have been made, but the investigation is still pending.
“They seized upon her wealth and patriotism, her wanting to help,” McGillicuddy said. “If you think you are doing everything possible with a representative that you think is official, that’s a big motivator to work with that person to clear your name.”
Judith Boivin described how she was instructed to wrap up bundles of cash before handing them off to a courier. (Joshua Carroll and Amber Ferguson/The Washington Post)
It was clear that Judith “really, really, truly believed that she was being of value and helping in a larger investigation for the greater good,” McGillicuddy said. “That was relatively unique in the victims that I spoke with.”
To date, there has been one small victory in Judith’s case thanks to one Maryland law enforcement official.
Montgomery County police Detective Michael Adami tracked down two cashier’s checks Judith was told to send to a woman in California. They had been shipped overnight to an auto parts store.
The woman realized she was being duped and cooperated with police to return the money to Judith. So far, it’s the only money she’s received back — $50,000. Often scammers will tell other victims they are part of an investigation, too, and get them to pick up money as part of the ruse.
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“What we try to do with these cases is recover any funds we can and identity potential suspects or the couriers who are picking up this money,” Adami said. “When she realized she was part of a scam, she didn’t want to have anything to do with it.”
Sometimes other fraud victims are unwittingly used by their scammer to defraud others. Adami said the California woman also lost a substantial amount of money, in a separate government impostor scam.
“In these particular scams, once people put cash or gold bars in the back seat of cars, they don’t know, and we can’t identify, the money is gone,” he said. “It’s gone forever. ”
This story publishes on Thursday.
