Employee of the Year

Chapter 22 - Hard Landing

            One of the biggest surprises of the whole identity theft caper was that Ram got all the war room regularly hooked on his Indian restaurant out on Pioneer Boulevard.

            That day we went there again—me, Roland, Ram, Teresa, Larry, Charlie—seated in two booths underneath the picture of Lord Rama sitting on the shoulders of his giant monkey god fighting a ten-headed blue demon king to save his marriage.

            “I think we missed our chance,” Ram admitted.

            “We did the best we could,” Charlie said. “We have a better understanding about how these thieves work. We learned a lot from you, Ram. You’re a genius.”

            “I don’t know about that,” he said. He was about to take a sip of tea when his smart phone buzzed. He looked at the message on his screen and got excited. “My program detected a pattern. Let me check it out.” He brought up a report on his phone. “Oh my goodness!”

            “What is it?” we cried.

            “We have to call those FBI agents immediately,” Ram said. “We’ve got something really remarkable.”

            We left our half-finished plates of Indian food sitting on the table and drove back to work. Forty-five minutes later, Chang and Weisbein were in the war room with us. Ram described the pattern his program had detected.

            “As you know, my system is looking for one or more Elite Gold members making unusual high value purchases from the same merchant. That’s the one thing that links together all the fraud cases so far.”

            “And that’s what you’re seeing this morning?”

            “Yes, that’s right. This is the same pattern, but it’s executed on a much grander scale. These transactions dwarf any of the prior purchases. I am seeing charges for nearly sixty airline tickets. They are all international trips that cost nearly $1,000 per ticket. So we’re talking about a total spend of around $60,000 spread across two Elite Gold members. One of the cardholders is a real estate developer in Santa BarbaraCounty. The other is a retired aerospace executive living in Palm Springs.”

            “So the flight tickets are all through the same merchant?”

            “That’s right. It’s an online travel site that I’d never heard of before. Based on the domain name, it seems to be hosted in France,” Ram said.

            “That’s definitely shady,” Charlie said. “Our Elite Gold guys wouldn’t go to some ticket site in another country if they were planning to travel.”

            “It gets better,” Ram continued. “Not only are all sixty tickets purchased through the same merchant, they are all for the exact same itinerary, travelling from Eastern Europe to Los Angeles. The tickets are all for flights that left Kiev last night. They connect for the second leg of the trip in Amsterdam and arrive in LAX this evening.”

            “They’re all for the same flight?” Larry said. “What the hell they do that for? They must have bought up every ticket on the plane.”

            “Sounds like a pretty lucrative project to me,” Charlie said. “I’ll bet a lot of people in that part of the world would love to come to America. If they can do it on some Elite Gold member’s dime, then it’s probably all the better.”

            “How’d this all happen so fast?” I said. “How they use the cards for a flight happening on the same day?”

            “Well, the transactions happened yesterday. My program couldn’t catch the pattern immediately. We have high volumes of transactions on our system, and I have to feed the live data into the program, which creates a lag,” Ram explained. “Even then the timing is a little odd, Temo. I agree with you on that point. It seems like everything happened too fast. I think the thieves must have reserved the seats under some temporary arrangements—maybe held them under a different set of cards—and then transferred the terms of payment to these Elite Gold accounts at the time of departure.”