53: Imposter Posing as DEA Agent Targets Dentist – with Dr. Ursula Levine

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Welcome, everybody, to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. I'm excited today because we have a really unique story for this podcast. It's the first time I've heard of this story happening, but it may not be the last. And it is about an imposter attempting to fraudulently obtain financial information from a dentist. And I have now, working with dentists, I have seen fraud occur in various formats in dentistry. And I've learned that dentist practice owners need to be very aware of the different attempts of fraud out there. I've had some doctors had their software lock up and they had to pay a ransom to get their data back. I've had plenty of front office theft has occurred in dental offices. I have had drugs stolen out of dental offices. I've seen. I've seen all of this. This one was a first. And so I want to invite our guest on the show. This is Dr. Ursula Levine. Dr. Levine, thanks for joining the Dental Boardroom podcast today.

Thank you for having me.

I am excited about this one because this is the first time I've ever heard of this version of an attempted fraud. And it's about a de. I'm just going to sort of give a quick intro. It's about an attempted fraudulent DEA agent, an imposter attempting to work directly with you to obtain information which could then be used to transfer money or obtain other assets from you. So go ahead. Before we jump into this, give me a little bit of a backdrop into you, your practice, maybe, maybe just like a 60 second backstory of who we're talking to or who, who we're hearing from today.

Okay, so, Ursula Levine, I'm a general dentist. I am originally from Germany and I am a green card holder. This is also important because it entered into the whole stuff there. And I have had my own practice since 2004, ongoing until now and hopefully some more time moved from one location to another until I finally built up my own space in 2017 and we're still in that space. So I'm 60 years old today and doing well. The practice is a general practice, but we do things like, you know, I've added Invisalign into it and we do, you know, soft tissue lasers and so on. But generally I refer my patients to specialties for things like the root canals, the endo and oral surgery and such.

That's a great backstory. And we have, of course, been working with you for a number of years now. And it's been a great experience, Dr. Levine, to sort of see you evolve and grow As a company, as a dentist, as a business owner, and thanks.

To you, really, you guided me expertly from the get go and crucial decisions you helped make. And they were all good. And so, in part, I want to thank you too, that I'm here today doing as well as I'm doing.

Thanks. All right, let's jump in. Kick off your story with. How did this.

Start? How did the unfolding of this event occur?

We were contacted by someone saying there was an issue with my licensing and not much more detail other than they were calling from the dea. So we ignored it at first. I could not quite imagine what kind of a problem there should be. And then they called two, three times. On the third time, they said, it is imperative that we speak before things would get out of hand. So that's kind of disturbing to hear. And so we accepted the call. There was going to be a connection made to DEA officer during that call. And so I was on the phone with that person and that's how we started. His story was that my prescriptions, including my information that is on prescriptions, was found in impostor's car full of narcotics and these handwritten prescriptions. Now, it puzzled me at first because I don't do handwritten prescriptions. We either print if the patient wants to have a copy, and I sign it then for the patient, handed directly to the patient. But most of the times we use the digital portals to the pharmacy to transmit that without having any kind of a paper in the middle of it. But yeah, so that's how we connect it.

So this DEA agent claimed to have prescriptions and drugs in his. I think you said it's a him in his car.

No, no, in the. In the imposter's car. The drug addicts or whatever the heck the criminals. Criminals were apprehended and in their car. Besides narcotic drugs and prescription medications, supposedly, obviously, supposedly there were also printed prescriptions or handwritten prescriptions with my signature on it. So that's why he was calling me, because he said, you know, we need to sort out whether you are implicated in this, whether you are part of this, or whether you are victimized. And obviously it was going to be where if I am victimized, which that's what it would seem like that he would be, then help me by guiding me through questionnaires and such to give correct information that would eventually exonerate me from this. That's how we started. He also, he gave a name and a badge number. And I should say I did not have the Presence of mind to have someone in the background call the DEA and find out if that's legit today. I would.

Now, how was the communication style of this person? Was it professional? Did it sound like they knew what they were talking about? Was it compelling?

Yes, all of that. He most definitely had the, he had authority in his voice urgency almost. Also annoyed that we had not taken the call sooner, that it took this long for me to get to the phone and that this was a very important thing to be cleared up here before he stated before, the DEA would have basically turned it over to law enforcement and would have had me arrested. That shocked me. I mean that was not good. Okay.

Now a lot of, a lot of fraud that I've seen often occurs from foreigners. So people who aren't actually inside of the U.S. did all signs point to this person being a U.S. citizen? I mean, if they're de age and addressing a case here stateside, they would supposedly be living here as well. Did all sort of signs point to somebody who was here stateside?

I can't say because you know, when people have an accent, not being US born, English speaker, native speaker, like I have an accent, I'm German and I've lived here for over 30 years. He had an Indian accent, but I could not say that, you know, that makes him someone who's potentially sitting half a continent away in India or somewhere else. So I dismissed the fact that there was an accent as a pointer to this being a problem.

Yep. And that's definitely not a sure sign indication. I have seen a lot of these fraud attempts occur from. This is a unique case where there's actual human to human dialogue. A lot of these are just through the Internet, through emails, through other ways. So okay, so very believable. And what information was he asking for in the first couple dialogues with him?

He asked for a printed prescription because he knew I should say this. I did not divulge what my typical prescription writing looks like, which is most of the times for antibiotics and relatively innocuous pain meds. Nothing narcotic. He knew that. He said, I see that from your history. And he stated to me that you typically only prescribe what I just said. So that also made it more credible. So then he said, I would like to see what your printed prescription looks like to see if potentially one of those found its way into these perpetrators hands. And I did print it. And in retrospect, I handed him what he was looking for. I don't know how he obtained information about my prescription writing that is that Continues to be a mystery. I don't know if he. If there was any leakage somewhere from the dea. I have no idea. I'm not insinuating anything, but, yeah. So it made me believe that, in fact, he had this information already, but today I believe he did not. So I printed a prescription. I put my own name on it as the patient for Paradox Rinse, and it has all of these numbers that are now compromised. And I sent it to him by, I think, screenshot to a phone number, a secure phone number that I needed to send it to, which became subsequently the phone and the phone number. That contact was made when we were not speaking on the phone.

Okay. And why do you think, Dr. Levine, that you were targeted in the first place?

I don't know. That's a very difficult question for me to say, because in addition to this little bit of information that he seemed to have, he had further information about me. I also want to say potentially because I was not or I'm not a citizen, which kind of circled around in the fact that without going into detail with one of my daughters, there was an incident where police was called and I was charged with something I did not do. However, there is now an official record, and until this was all dismissed and went away, there was a time frame of roughly two months where this would have been information out there for anyone to find. It's no longer there. But he had details about this, too. So I think, you know, that potentially could also be a risk to my green card status if that was pushed further or if I was found to be part of further activities involving law enforcement. So I think that might have been just a proof that he figured this out or he was targeting perhaps my gender as. I don't know, maybe. Maybe we're considered easier to get. I have no idea, to be honest with you.

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It's really hard to identify sometimes why a given individual was the target. And I think the reason why is there is a whole marketplace. It's underground, but there is an entire marketplace. It is a world of its own that exists and it coexists with our world, which I'll say is above board. But there is this entire world of a black market of personally identifiable information. And there's like a profile. It's like all of us, if we're caught in that, there's a profile on you, Dr. Levine. There's a profile on me and these people who work in this underground world. And I know this sounds a bit of a conspiracy theory, but I have taken a number of fraud classes. I almost was going to become a certified fraud examiner or cfe. And I've been very sort of interested in this space for some time and I've learned in my research of this over the years that this is a very, very vibrant and active space. This is why you hear about these big breaches of data at big companies, is because somebody breaks that, they get it and then they Sell it for millions of dollars to all of these, I will say, black market parties. Within this black market, you got people who specialize in a given area of data. You have people who specialize in electronic. You have people who specialize in what just happened to you. Sort of this, what's called social engineering fraud. This is a version of that. And it's a whole economy underneath that's occurring. And so we don't know what, in that underground economy, what information on you is circulating about. And I don't know what information on me is circulating about. But it's like they're trying to put together this puzzle of who Dr. Levine is. And the more pieces they get on that puzzle, the more clarity they have, the more they can start to make and execute decisions as if they were you. And that's how they ultimately can try to sift the assets away from you. Either money in a, in a checking account, charges on a credit card account, setting up a new identity, getting out a loan, Tax fraud, where they essentially file a tax return in your name and the false report information and get a large refund and it gets routed back to them and then they close the account. I mean, TurboTaxes has a whole team every year dedicated to trying to prevent this tax fraud which has become completely rampant over the past decade. So I don't want to say you did anything wrong. I think you were just targeted. And there's a very sophisticated attempt or process out there that targets people. And so this one really intrigued me because it involved a human to human conversation which gets a little bit more unique, a little bit more sophisticated. And in that sense I thought it would be interesting to learn about this story. So let's now plug back into your story. What clued you in that something didn't seem right.

Before I do that, I wanted to comment about what you said. I do think that it's true. I think that anything that can be perceived as a weakness, in my case the US citizenship versus not US citizen is definitely a weakness for me, where he could hook and have a threat to my existence here in this country, which ties to all of my life, basically.

That's a great point.

Big point. And so that also causes immediately an anxiety and a, you know, not having your alerts up where you say, well, let's see what he comes up with or what else he wants. Right, that's one of them. The other thing is that I do think that they are very well prepared when they do come into a conversation. And I'm sure that happens More than he had information about previous business addresses that I had been at and connected with that, that there was something was sent to that address by, you know, whomever. I don't actually know the detail anymore, but he had me confirm these. Is this an address you recognize? And it was perfectly my address back then from nine years ago. So they reached very far back and I think they very carefully and thoroughly researched my background.

So there's that what signs started to give it away that this was not legitimate.

All right. So basically, you know, I thought about this when I wasn't speaking to him what I had given. And I was not really comfortable with having given that information, even though he seemed to have it. And also that I didn't check more. But then I did notice that, you know, he then continued to speak to me by text messaging from that phone. And I basically was asked to give my locations relative if I was leaving from here and going home and so on so forth. And I asked if I was being tracked and he said, no, absolutely not. We would like to be sure that you're basically that I'm not on a drug bust or something or whatever. So I went along with it. That was one of the things I didn't like and that I thought was. Seemed extreme. I did. My iPhone alerted me that there was actually a tracking happening. But then I pressed on that and it went away. I should also say that I did go to the Apple Store and I asked if there is a profile installed in my phone, which there wasn't. So they did attempt that, but they dropped it. So that was definitely a pointer, something not comfortable there. And. And the fact that it was there and it wasn't there was not comfortable. The other thing then when I would say day two or three where he was sending me arrest reports with pictures of these individuals that I had to identify. And of course I didn't know any of them. And then he was telling me, you know, and this was trying to prove that the investigation is legit, how they were going to be fingerprinted and their names were different and so on so forth. So all that stuff. So keeping me abreast of the investigation and on my side I'm like, okay, what do I do here? What am I doing with this? So no focus on anything with me just yet. And that came sometime following when he told me after this drug stuff that they found is that they discovered that there was an account opened at a particular bank in Canada in my name and a large amount of money, $43,000 were deposited there. So they are hoping to find the person or people who would be withdrawing from that account in order to see who is coming. That apparently did happen too. So that was round two. So I was not involved. And by keeping in contact and talking, you know, they. I guess they established that I was not involved. So now we're moving about four or five days in his tone of voice, if you can say that, with the texting became more casual and, you know, little, little not business like things were part of that, you know, where I needed to be available. And I said, I'm out walking dogs. And he said, oh, I have a dog too, blah blah, blah. So a couple of times that. And that struck me as odd that an officer would not necessarily be telling me about their dog or their day, how long their day was, and so on and so forth. That was weird. And I took note of it. Yeah. I had already in my mind I was going through who I can speak to on my side of things to see whether there is something happening or not. I sensed it, but there had also not been made any request of me up until that point. So I sat with it for a little while and see where it was going, basically. So yeah, okay.

And you said, I want to make sure I understood that. Right. There was an account in Canada that was opened up in your name and there was $40,000 or so placed inside that account and then distributed out of that account to somebody.

Supposedly. I don't even know if it's true, but supposedly they apprehended an individual in Oregon somewhere who went and withdrew monies from different ATMs and you know, ultimately withdrew 18,000 something dollars. They arrested her.

Did this actually happen or is this the imposter telling you this happened?

That's exactly what I think. But basically continuing to find this being very intricate with now. We have drug stuff, we have money stuff, all with my name, my name. And I think that's how he kept me under a certain degree of fear and feeling uncomfortable with how my name is in the middle of this. Right. But I actually don't think any of it happened. It was just all made up.

It's a story. It's a story with a lot of granular detail. And the more granular detail there is, sometimes that can add to what appears to be a credibility to that story. That's good to know. During any of this time, did you freeze your accounts with the consumer reporting agencies like Equifax and Experian Transunion? Did you look into those at all?

Not, not fast enough. Now I didn't take damage, I have to say by, in terms of my money is intact. But yeah, I was not, I didn't have that presence of mind. What ended up happening is I did suspect that something, it just wasn't sitting right, especially because shortly thereafter there was then a discussion and that's really when it triggered where he came and he said, okay, so seeing that my name, apparently my name at the very least is involved in this criminal activity where, you know, we need to sort that out on our end with these criminals and you know, who's in charge of all of this, but looks like I may not be. So however, my funds need to be sent or sent to or seized by the US Government in order to have them go through everything, sources of where this money came from, blah blah, blah, in order to clear me from being part of this fraud with the money driven fraud, basically. So my choice would be to either give him then the amounts of dollars in various bank accounts and then agree to have that money be sent to the U.S. government and they would have it for roughly what, a month or so before they would return it if it's found to be good money, no criminal sources, and then I would have it back together with new credentials or if I didn't do it this way, then the US government would seize it and I would probably be out the money for a longer period of time. Now that definitely, definitely tipped it to the side where I said that's, that's just way over the top. So I went to see a friend who is a patient, also a retired FBI agent, and I brought the story to him and you know, he was very composed, but he said, well you gave way too much information and this is definitely a scam. And he made some phone calls and he guided me where to go from here. But the main thing is this discussion about how monies would need to be transferred to the US government that was on the phone with him. So then I basically, I said, look, that was very complicated and I don't remember all these points. And I said, I'm visual. Can you please write this down for me? You sent me emails before and the emails were these arrest, arrests, whatever with the pictures of the people and all of that. I said, so if email is not a problem, I'd like for you to write this down in email so I have it. And he didn't really want to do that. And I said, actually was bold. I said, you owe me that, man. I've been very compliant here and he said, well, you know, I'll think about it. And he. I then took the decision because I already knew it was nothing good to not respond anymore to his text messages where he was urging me to do the next thing and the next thing. And at one point he sent the email. He said there, even though I don't owe you anything, I sent you the email. So with that, that was my last communication. I have since reported everything to the FBI and all these tangible pieces of evidence went to the FBI as well.

Out of curiosity, the email address that this person used, was it an email? And at Yahoo, what was.

That's the first thing that my FBI person said. Oh, you just needed to look at that. I'm like, yes. What.

What did you say it was. It was at.

It was a protonmail.com okay, got it.

Yeah. Protonmail is. Protonmail is used for privacy. So anybody who has any concerns about Privacy, non traceability. ProtonMail is your go to email provider there. All of that is a fascinating story. Before I talk about what we can do to prevent fraud and what we should do if we feel like we're a victim, is there any final thought you think our listeners should know or think about related to your story?

Yeah. So I want to say the biggest danger is when we are being assaulted with news of various degrees of scariness that would potentially in this case really undermine your entire existence. Right. So that pushes you into a zone where. Or you one where one would be most compliant in an innocuous level. But I think that what I should have done or what I would advise is number one, is to ask identifying information. So in this case of the DEA officer, he volunteered a badge number, which I never checked. I should have had the front office call on another line and find out about that while I'm on the phone or say, you know, I'm sorry, I can't continue to call right now, whatever, make something up and say, can we make a new appointment very soon. Call me then if there is nothing given, ask for it if they are an official of whatever agency they should have it and to also take, take a deep breath or if you know when that first whatever horrible thing they're telling you hits to say, oh, you know, just I need a moment or I'm going to be back to the phone in a couple of minutes or call me back in five. I need a break. Something. Not a problem. Right. They want something from you. Take a break. No. And put your thinking cap on and say, okay, what just happened? Is this plausible or not? Right. And if it is someone who is legit, they wouldn't have a problem to call back. If you say, okay, call me back.

At this time, in my opinion, I think that's fantastic. Let me share a few thoughts on this. Number one is I'm personally a fan of having the credit agencies have your accounts frozen at all times. You just, they're just frozen. And then when you need to apply for something, once you set it up with a login, it's very easy. It's literally a few clicks and you can unfreeze it. And you can usually unfreeze it for a day. You can unfreeze it for a period of time until that transaction is done. On I think it's free credit report.com you can type free credit report. Be very careful when you go to these that it's a legitimate one. But I would look at your credit report periodically to see what new accounts are created. On your credit report. You could pay for a credit monitoring service. There's many out there. There's LifeLock and others as well. There are plenty of websites to go and report it. So the Federal Trade Commission has an identitytheft.gov and there's a phone number you can call there. I think that's also a great idea. And then I am a big believer in regularly changing your passwords. Now, password management these days is a whole subject in itself. We have a million passwords now, I mean all over the place passwords. And very commonly we use the same password across all of them. If you get a little bit more sophisticated, you have two or three passwords, one for a certain tier of websites like banking, one for social media sites, one for others. But remember, those out there trying to obtain your information, they're not always going for a slam dunk, which is you giving routing and account numbers and social securities and dates of birth. They might just be trying to get a login to your Facebook account and that goes on your, I'll call it your black market profile, which gets traded about. And then people are always trying to weave together, tether together information to create this profile of who you are, favorite passwords, maybe answers to security questions. And the more they know about you, the more they can either access your information digitally or they can approach you with a much more valid story of why they're trying to obtain information from you in whatever format that they are acting as an imposter. I personally use something called LastPass and LastPass is you have one master password. You make it a very difficult password if you write it down, you write it down and put it in a lock. You can buy on Amazon a safe for about 50 to 60 bucks. Put that in your, in your house, put it in a safe hidden place and it had this LastPass password in there. And then LastPass is uses banking level encryption to store your passwords for a website. So when you create a website where you create a login, it will ask you to create a password. As you know, for a certain website. LastPass will generate a very complicated, robust password that's 20 digits, very unrecognizable, and would be very difficult to crack. And then it will save it in your LastPass password. Then you set up the configuration of your LastPass so that every time you log out, every time you close your computer, the LastPass automatically logs out. Now, you gotta be very mindful to use LastPass in a very careful way, but it is a way to manage, there's a practical side to managing all of these passwords and having that security. Now, some people are uncomfortable having all of the passwords stored in a database like LastPass, in which case you just have to come up with whatever system you're going to have to manage all your passwords. In dental offices, I've seen other ways that fraud occurs. Front desk team members are often contacted by somebody acting as a, I don't know, they're acting in a law enforcement position, they're acting as a vendor position, and they're trying to gather more information. So I think it's good to periodically have an education with your staff about how to avoid fraud occurring in the practice because you have an incredible amount of personally identifiable information on your patients as well.

So those are some initial thoughts on how to protect yourself from identity theft. And Ursula, I just want to thank you for sharing your story, for being vulnerable and willing to share that story. I believe this could help many others be aware of incidents that may come across their practice and in their life that they can protect themselves against.

I want to add something based on what you were saying here in terms of how you can protect yourself or if someone had something like, for example, what happened is my daughter's college years ago, so she's graduated many years ago, but we were notified that there was a, a hacking event about a year ago and that our files had been exposed. So this institution made a contract with whatever the company IDX or something, something like that, where they would be paying for that account for one full year to monitor the credit reports. So I can say nothing had popped up where if they were searching and looking in my credit reports or whatever they were doing, I did not get notified of any problems at all. So they were either very careful or I'm sure they had access. But subsequent to the event with me, there was an attempt to hack into my digital bank through Germany and they were blocked. They did not get in. So now we have an IP address on that person which the FBI, to hopefully to their detriment that they tried that that was boarded. But the service that should have been given some indicators of people attempting to crack passwords or getting in there did not.

I want to name one more very sophisticated, at least it has become more sophisticated as of late is phishing. Now, phishing, generally you see it and it's fairly obvious, but it's getting more sophisticated. Team members of mine will get an email that says from Wesread in the from and it will have my digital signature that sort of. They do a screenshot and paste it in there. Somehow they're making, they're making one up so it looks fairly valid. And they will go on my website, they'll look up team members, they'll somehow dig and find email addresses and then they will ask my team members to provide information to supposedly me. And I've had people ask for client information. I've had people ask for to transfer money or wire money to a given account. I've had a number of these. And you have to click on the name to show the actual email. And then the actual email. I've seen it where they have it just like mine, but one letter off, so you almost wouldn't even notice. That's a human being getting very involved in my business and structuring an attempt at fraud that is hard to identify sometimes. The other thing is I often get emails asking to change a password to say, a Microsoft account. And it looks very real and you click on it, it comes up a different website and you're supposed to put in, in this case, my Microsoft Office 365 email and password. And I've come to realize that when I look at these, you look at the URL and sometimes the icon is slightly blurry. And so it becomes evident to me. But I will never change my password unless it takes me to that website where the URL where I can literally Google the same thing and go to that company's website to change the password. I don't ever just change it directly from a link in an email unless I just got done submitting for a password change request on the website. And I knew it was coming into my email box. I don't do random click on random emails asking me to change my password to some account, so that's another one I've seen a lot lately. All right, Ursula, I think with that, we can adjourn this podcast. I want to thank you so much for being on the show. Show?

Yeah. You bet. My pleasure.