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Lisa Bromley has done a lot during her 30 years as a police officer in suburban Maryland. Undercover drug buys. Armed robbery investigations. Working car crashes.
But it wasn't until last week that she found herself disguised in a wig and a coronavirus mask, playing the role of a scam victim in her 60s who police say had already been bilked out of about $789,000 worth of gold bars. Her hope: Their target would soon pull into a parking lot in Montgomery County's sprawling Leisure World community looking for more gold.
The plan worked, law enforcement officials said in a news release Friday announcing the arrest of Wenhui Sun, 34, of Lake Arbor, Calif. Local and federal authorities say his scam was part of a growing trend by swindlers. Often posing as federal investigators, they persuade their targets to buy gold bars - and turn them over for safekeeping - while purported investigators try to identify thieves who might otherwise have raided the target's bank accounts.
"They're doing anything they can to get to these people," said Bromley, who has spent the past decade as a financial crimes investigator and worked a similar case last year in which the victim lost more than $1 million. "It breaks your heart."
The scammers project both concern and subtle force, suggesting that if their targets don't act quickly, they'll not only lose their savings, but they'll also miss out on a chance to help the government take down dangerous identity thieves. "Once the victim is on the hook, the scammer will keep going," said FBI Supervisory Special Agent Keith Custer, who works such cases out of the bureau's Baltimore field office.
Victims of the gold bar and related scams can be otherwise perfectly smart, Custer said. "Doctors, lawyers, executives. I've seen pretty much any victim."
Sun is being held without bond in the Montgomery County jail and is charged with theft over $100,000 and attempted theft over $100,000, according to court records. Sun's attorney could not be reached.
For Bromley and her colleagues in the Montgomery County police financial crimes section, the case began on March 10, when a woman called to report that she thought she had been swindled. The woman, whom police identified as Victim 1 in court filings to protect her privacy, said that in February, she received a phone call from a man who identified himself as "Mark Cooper" from "the Office of the Inspector General, Federal Trade Commission," detectives wrote in a court affidavit.
The purported Mark Cooper told the woman she had been the victim of identity theft that had led to a federal drug and money laundering probe. The man then put the woman in contact with someone who identified himself as "Officer David Freeman," who said he could provide her with a new Social Security number and witness protection, but only at the conclusion of his investigation, after she had fully cooperated, according to the affidavit.
"To ensure her cooperation and secure her assets, Victim 1 was directed to purchase gold bars," detectives wrote, "which were to be turned over to FBI agents who would get the bars and place them into the U.S. Department of Treasury."
Evoking the protection of an asset like gold is key to such schemes, said Custer, the FBI agent: "They like to conjure up Federal Reserve banks, images of stacks of gold at Fort Knox."
And there is another reason they want their targets to order gold bars - usually done through wire transfers to legitimate sellers who then ship the gold via guaranteed parcel. Once the gold arrives, Custer said, the swindlers need only to persuade their targets to hand it over - a strategy that avoids the victim having to physically go into a bank to withdraw money, which can raise the suspicions of alert tellers and bankers.
In the Montgomery County case, the victim wired her first payment of $331,817.54 to a gold dealer on Feb. 21. Two weeks later, as she stayed in touch with the scammers with screenshots of her order status, the gold bars arrived via UPS, according to court records.
The scammers then told her to meet a "courier" near a parking lot outside Leisure World. She did so, placing the boxed-up gold in the back of the courier's car, which then drove away.
Police say the scammers struck again the next day, persuading the woman to wire $457,410.34 to a gold dealer for more gold bars. On March 8, she again met the courier, this time at a nearby but different parking lot, and handed over the second package. The driver, behind the wheel of a Dodge Ram truck bearing New York license plates, drove away.
Two days later, realizing she had been scammed, the woman called police.
Video surveillance near the parking lot, detectives wrote, revealed the truck's license plate, which they traced to a rental car company in New York and then to Sun, according to detectives. Automated license plate readers, they added, also tracked the truck driving from New York to Maryland on the day of the second gold bar pickup.
Investigators had the woman continue to communicate with the scammers, telling them she had more gold bars, to lure them back, even as police worried the scammers might sniff out the ruse. "I was extremely nervous," said Detective Sean Petty. "This is their job. They have perfected this."
But it worked, they wrote in court papers, saying the fraudsters indicated they would return for a new shipment.
This time, they were waiting - a team of financial crimes detectives and undercover officers including Bromley, wearing her mask and brunette wig, which she had had overnighted from Amazon. Just past 7 p.m. on Monday, a black Jeep Wagoneer - driven by Sun - arrived at the Leisure World guard booth and was let through, according to detectives.
He stopped at the meeting spot, according to detectives, at which point Bromley placed a brown box - valueless - on the back seat. The Wagoneer drove away, but not for long - undercover officers swarmed it a short time later.
Sun spoke to investigators, according to court records, saying a friend in China had directed him to drive to Maryland to pick up a package. He said he had also picked up the package on March 8 but didn't know what was in it.
"Sun admitted that he had traveled to Tennessee, Montana, New York and Maryland, but advised the only place he's picked up packages is Maryland," investigators wrote.
They also revealed in court filings something they found in Sun's Wagoneer: a plane ticket for that day to California. Sun said that he had postponed the trip to get the package but that he would be leaving for California the next day. Instead, according to court records, he was placed in jail.
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