Most people think of the Secret Service as a bunch of saturnine men in dark glasses who are bound by their solemn oaths to take a bullet for the President.
But there’s another side to this federal agency that harks back to its origin pursuing counterfeiters – and which evolved over time to encompass just about every large-scale hustle or fraud that human ingenuity can fathom.
It’s this, less illustrious aspect of the Secret Service that has become well known to Chandler Weger, a detective with the office of Alamance County’s sheriff who has emerged as his agency’s leading light in the battle against fraud.
Alamance County sheriff’s detective Chandler Weger
“The end goal is to get money back for the victim. It’s to make that person whole. We like to make arrests, but that’s not always possible. . .
“The first step [to fighting fraud] is simple: Don’t answer the phone if you don’t know the caller. If it’s important enough, they’ll leave you a message.”
– Alamance County sheriff’s detective chandler weger
For the past year or so, Weger has been part of anti-fraud task force that the Secret Service has assembled in central North Carolina. Weger insists that his role on this task force isn’t a complete departure from his work in criminal investigations.
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“My day to day is still the same,” he conceded in a recent conversation with The Alamance News. “I still investigate the cases that I get. But I now have different ways to identify suspects.”
As a member of the task force, Weger has access to national and international databases that aren’t available to most local investigators. He can avail himself of the vast network of law enforcement professionals that the Secret Service has in its rolodex.
But just how this 28-year-old native of Alamance County wound up working with one of the world’s most storied law enforcement agencies is something that may be worthy of a case study all on its own.
After graduating from Western Carolina University, Weger signed up with the local sheriff’s office, where he was soon promoted to its criminal investigations division. Weger was eventually assigned to work property crimes alongside a more experienced detective who had become the agency’s go-to investigator for fraud.
“The other fraud detective ended up leaving,” Weger recalled, “and I took over those cases.”
A few months after becoming the sheriff’s lead fraud investigator, Weger was invited to join an interagency taskforce that the Secret Service had been operating in Greensboro. Weger admits that the federal agency has maintained a strict separation of duties between its task force officers and the agents it fields in this part of the state.
“The Secret Service will investigate every fraud over $100,000,” he summarizes. “I’ll get a case, and when it crosses a certain threshold, I’ll hand it over to the Secret Service.”
As for the cases he does catch, Weger notes that many are garden variety instances of check fraud, where the perpetrator intercepts a check in the mail, washes the original ink out, and fills in a new name and amount. Weger also sees a fair number of phony sweepstakes swindles that gull victims into thinking they’ve won some sort of contest that requires them to provide personal information or perform a financial transaction to secure their reward.
“Honey pot” frauds, “catfishing,” etc.
Other kinds of criminal fraud involve some variation on the romance, or “honey pot,” scam. In the example case, the fraudster makes a romantic overture to a stranger and establishes a level of intimacy or trust that they can later exploit for financial gain. Known as “catfishing” when conducted online, these deceptions can also take the form of intimate friendships and, in extreme cases called “pig butchering,” they can leave a victim both financially and emotionally destitute.
“‘Pig butchering,’” Weger went on to explain, “is when they try to take everything you own – the whole hog. They start by building that trust – they might even send you some money or help pay your bills. Then, once they’ve fattened you up through this trust, they start hacking away.”
Another commonplace ruse involves the impersonation of some respected institution or figure of authority. Victims of this scam may get a call from someone purporting to represent Medicare, Medicaid, or a legitimate law enforcement agency.
In one common form of this fraud, the perpetrator passes himself off as a sheriff’s deputy and accuses the victim of missing federal jury duty. The caller goes on to demand payment by credit, debit, or gift card and threatens to press charges or arrest the victim who doesn’t comply.
Weger admits that about a couple of weeks ago, his own name began popping up as the nom de guerre of one person who was running this scam. He recalled that other fake deputies have salted their calls with equally authentic touches – although in some cases, they owe their knowledge of law enforcement to a truly unlikely source.
Weger said that some of sham deputies who’ve been making these calls are actually inmates serving life sentences in Georgia’s state prisons. Thanks to the rampant corruption within that state’s prison system, these lifers have been able to order state-of-the-art equipment with the connivance of guards, and placing fraudulent, long-distance calls without any concern that their sentences might be extended.
Weger and his colleagues owe much of what they know about this “Georgia Prison Scam” to a particular suspect who was willing to spill the details about this jailhouse equivalent of dialing for dollars.
“We had him brought in, and he explained all of it to us,” Weger recalled. “He told us how the inmates are using cell phones from inside their cells and having deliveries dropped in by drone.”
In any event, the malefactors behind Georgia Prison Scam have been easy enough for the sheriff’s office to identify. Other con artists have proven a great deal more slippery. In fact, Weger has found that, in many fraud investigations, the best he can hope to achieve is restitution for those who’ve been taken in.
“The end goal is to get money back for the victim,” he said. “It’s to make that person whole. We like to make arrests, but that’s not always possible.”
Weger added that, in cases of check fraud or identity theft, banks are generally willing to eat the losses themselves rather than penalize victims with no prior knowledge that their accounts had been compromised. But bank managers are less forgiving with those who had been snookered into sharing these details.
As a result, one of Weger’s primary objectives has been to educate potential victims on what they can do to avoid being taken in by the perpetrators of fraud. In much the same way that the Secret Service would prefer to foil assassination attempts than have to take bullets, Weger is constantly sharing his insights with area residents in the hope that they’ll be savvier in their interactions with people who are up to no good.
“The first step is simple,” he said. “Don’t answer the phone if you don’t know the caller. If it’s important enough, they’ll leave you a message.”
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