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![The torso of a FBI agent wearing a blue FBI jacket and typing on his computer. A fake FBI agent scammed a woman out of thousands of dollars.](https://cdn.aarp.net/content/dam/aarpe/en/home/money/scams-fraud/info-2023/fake-fbi-agent/_jcr_content/root/container_main/container_body_main/container_body1/container_body_cf/container_image/articlecontentfragment/cfimage.coreimg.50.932.jpeg/content/dam/aarp/money/scams-and-fraud/2023/1140-fake-fbi-agent-scam.jpg)
Leslie Fumega, 78, lives a quiet life on the Connecticut shore, in the same tidy house where she and her husband, Chris, raised their two daughters and owned a liquor store together before he died in 2002. Long retired and ever frugal, Fumega mows her own lawn twice a week and is a DIY pro, taking care of her home’s electrical work and plumbing.
But her peaceful, penny-wise life was completely upended this year, starting with a disturbing phone call on May 24.
How it began
Fumega, who doesn’t own a computer or use email, had been receiving repeated calls from what appeared to be the Norwalk Police Department, according to her caller ID. She ignored the first few, assuming they would be requests for donations. When they persisted, she finally answered, planning to tell the caller that she was unable to donate at that time.
But the call was far more alarming than a donation pitch. The man on the line introduced himself as James Walsh, the chief of the Norwalk Police Department, and told her he had some terrible news: Her identity had been stolen, and her financial accounts were in jeopardy — but not to worry. She could speak with an FBI agent to discuss the situation the next day.
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Walsh called back the next day and, as promised, transferred her to someone who said he was an FBI agent in Washington, named James Dawson. The so-called Dawson, whose number had a D.C. area code, told Fumega that her name had been used in a string of crimes, and the money in her bank account was at risk. To safeguard it, she would need to send it to a secure location, where government officials would keep it for her until they could resolve the issue.
Emphasizing that she shouldn’t tell anyone about what had happened, Dawson was a near-constant voice in Fumega’s ear as he guided her through a high-stress, multiweek effort to supposedly protect her life savings.
First, he told her she had to go to Walmart to buy supplies: gray duct tape, bubble wrap, cardboard boxes and student notebooks. Then she was to withdraw money from her account at a specific branch of her bank (later he’d send her to other branches).
“He said, ‘Go in the bank and tell them, ‘I wish to withdraw $20,000 out of my money market account.’ And if they asked what it was for, I was to tell them it was for renovations,” Fumega recalls.
She did so, with her cellphone in her pocketbook so Dawson could listen to her transactions. He then gave her elaborate packing instructions for the cash. She was to place two or three bills at a time between pages of the notebooks — this took hours — box and seal them, and wrap the box in bubble wrap, followed by more wrapping and boxing.
Then he directed her to a UPS Store near her home, where she was to mail the package overnight to an address in California. “If someone asked me what was in the box, I was to tell them photo albums,” she says.
Fumega ended up essentially repeating this procedure, with multiple days in between transactions, nine times over the next six weeks, withdrawing a total of $165,000 from different branches of her bank and sending it to different addresses in California at Dawson’s direction. On days she made withdrawals, he would sometimes be on the phone with her for more than seven hours.
“A few times I had to call the night before because the bank doesn’t always have that kind of money on hand,” she says. “I would tell them, ‘I need $20,000 for tomorrow out of my account,’ and they said OK.”
Between these cash withdrawals, Dawson would call her twice a day, morning and evening, like clockwork, to check on her and reassure her that the money was being held for her in a locker in Ventura, California. He even gave her the locker number, and she began to receive official-looking letters confirming the number and the fact that her money was safe and would be returned soon.
She was anxious and overwhelmed, she says, but when she’d cry and say, “Mr. Dawson, I can’t do this anymore,” he’d tell her, “Don’t worry, you’re doing the right thing.”
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