My Stolen Identity (Complete)

Chapter 6 - Turning the Tables

**** Knox Hendrix's Point of View - One Month Later ****

I sat behind my desk at work, combing through the websites and online profiles that had come up when I did a Google reverse image search with Elodie's pictures. There were a few different sites using her pictures and judging by their similarities, my guess was that they were all created by the same person. Since they were part of an active police investigation I had already gotten access to view all the posts and private messages from these accounts and so far I had found ten victims.

 The evidence was piling up against the catfish and I was sure we would have enough for a conviction, but the path to finding out the catfish's real identity was proving a lot more difficult than I had hoped. They were really smart and covered their tracks up well. All of the victims had phone conversations with them so I knew it was a woman with an American accent. But after interviewing the victims and comparing notes I found out that she had created a different version of herself with each man, so it was impossible to tell if anything she said about herself was true.

"Detective Hendrix, I have a question," Scott said, knocking on my door frame and when I waved him in he brought a file folder over to my desk and sat it down. "So I've got this case where this guy created a fake profile on Facebook just to sell merchandise on Marketplace. When the buyer met up to exchange cash for the merchandise, they got robbed. He's already had four victims and he always meets them in a place with no security cameras and he wears a ski mask so the victim can't give a good description. I'm running into a brick wall here on how to figure out who this guy is." 

I looked down at the folder and skimmed through the messages. Scott was one of the three officers that had been assigned to me in the Cyber Crimes Division and I was still training him. 

"Ok. What you need to do first is contact Facebook and let them know you're with the police department and get access to his account to look for any clues to his real identity. Then have them send you the IP address of the computer the marketplace posts were made from. It can sometimes give you the general location of the person. Other times, the location it gives you is false because they're using a proxy server located in another country to mask their real location, like in this case I'm working on with the stolen identity. That makes things a lot more difficult. If they're an amateur though it could lead you to them. That's where I would start." 

"Ok thanks. That's a big help," he said with a smile, picking up the folder and walking out of my office. 

I looked back at my screen and clicked on the next dating site with Elodie's pictures on it. It was starting to get aggravating that it was taking so long to track this catfish down because every day that passed was another day for her to find another victim. I had tried to follow the money trail but they all led to offshore accounts created under a fake alias that led us nowhere. I had gone through all the conventional ways I knew of to find out who she was, so I had to start thinking outside of the box. As I sat there thinking of what else I could try, an idea came to me. 

The best way to catch her was to draw her out of hiding and I was going to do that by catfishing her back. I had a good friend that would be the perfect bait, because he was good looking and he wasn't on social media at all, so she wouldn't be able to trace the pictures back to my friend's real identity."

I picked up my cell phone and called him.  After hearing the whole story, my friend agreed to do anything he could to help me catch this woman. He gave me permission to use his pictures to create a fake Facebook profile for a man named Damien Scott.

It was obvious that her main driving force was money, so in the bio I put that Damien Scott was the heir to a hotel fortune. I also said he was 6'2, an active soccer player, a gourmet chef, and a world traveler. My friend really was a world traveler so I had him email me pictures of himself in some of the most exotic, expensive places all over the world, and I added them to the fake profile to make it more believable. I also added a video of my friend playing guitar and singing to the page. If this profile didn't attract her then nothing would.