phone scammer calls ex fbi/cia director

[Demovictory9]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/crime-law/2019/02/12/william-webster-ex-fbi-cia-director-helps-feds-nab-jamaican-phone-scammer/?utm_term=.4d55795dd98c

The caller with the Jamaican accent told the 90-year-old District man he had won $72 million and a new Mercedes Benz in the Mega Millions lottery, but the man needed to send $50,000 in taxes and fees to get his money. He also told the Washington man he’d done his research on the top winner.

“You’re a great man,” the Jamaican man cajoled. “You was a judge, you was an attorney, you was a basketball player, you were in the U.S. Navy, homeland security. I know everything about you. I even seen your photograph, and I seen your precious wife.”

The Jamaican’s research didn’t turn up everything. He didn’t learn that the man he was calling was the former director of the FBI and the CIA, the only person ever to hold both jobs. And he didn’t know that William H. Webster would call him back the next day with the FBI listening in. In that reverse sting, Webster obtained the man’s real name and email address, while stringing him along and never quite committing to sending the $50,000.


“It’s going to take me a few weeks to come up with it,” said Webster, also a former federal district and appeals court judge. “I’m as anxious as you are to get the money, but it’s going to take me a while to do it,” he tells the man on the recorded call that is part of the court record.

“You can pay a part in the meantime,” parried the caller, later identified as Keniel A. Thomas.

“How much is a part?” asked Webster.

“You can come with about $20,000 in the meantime,” Thomas said.

The conversation was one of many calls that Thomas made to Webster or his wife, Lynda, in 2014, including one in which he promised a bullet “straight to the head” of Lynda. Thomas was then charged in 2014 with attempted extortion. But Thomas wasn’t arrested until late 2017, after he landed in New York on a flight from Jamaica. He pleaded guilty in October and faced a prison term of 33 to 41 months under federal sentencing guidelines. But with Webster and his wife in the courtroom, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell on Friday added another 2½ years to Thomas’s sentence, giving him nearly six years to serve. Howell said that the scam qualified as “organized criminal activity” and that Thomas posed “a threat to a family member of the victim.”

[LakeSuperiorView]

1. His particular set of skills wasn't a nightmare for people like Webster...