Latest / Fake Love Stories / The Shoebox Full of Crossed-Out Faces: How Kent Lost $10,000
Transcript
- 0:03Speaker 1: At 6.40 in the morning on September 11th, a 14-year-old
- 0:08Speaker 1: named Leon Price was cutting through a yard on Dunmore
- 0:12Speaker 1: Terrace when he saw a shoebox on its side in
- 0:15Speaker 1: the recycling bin. The lid had come off. Photographs were
- 0:19Speaker 1: spilling out. Every single one showed the same man's face,
- 0:23Speaker 1: and every single face had been crossed out in red.
- 0:26Speaker 1: Leon did not touch them. He counted them from where
- 0:30Speaker 1: he stood. 41, he told his mother at breakfast. His
- 0:34Speaker 1: mother called the non-emergency line. By nine that morning, the
- 0:39Speaker 1: box was sitting on Detective Kimberly Sanders' desk. Sanders worked
- 0:44Speaker 1: financial crimes for Harwick PD. She had been running a
- 0:48Speaker 1: romance fraud case for nearly two years. When she lifted
- 0:51Speaker 1: the first photograph, she did not yet know whose face
- 0:55Speaker 1: it was, whose hand had drawn the marks, or why
- 0:58Speaker 1: someone had chosen the recycling bin and not the trash.
- 1:02Speaker 1: She counted the X's the way you count something you
- 1:04Speaker 1: already know the answer to, but need to confirm. 41.
- 1:09Speaker 1: She understood immediately that she was looking at the end
- 1:11Speaker 1: of something, not the beginning. What she did not know
- 1:15Speaker 1: yet was how far back that beginning went, or how
- 1:18Speaker 1: many other people were sitting somewhere right now, still in
- 1:21Speaker 1: the middle of it. Kent Baker was 26 years old,
- 1:25Speaker 1: and had lived at 414 Dunmore Terrace for three years.
- 1:29Speaker 1: He worked for his uncle's landscaping company, a job that
- 1:33Speaker 1: suited the way his mind worked. He had near-perfect spatial recall.
- 1:38Speaker 1: He could walk a property once and reconstruct its dimensions
- 1:41Speaker 1: from memory. His uncle called it a gift. Kent called
- 1:46Speaker 1: it just how he saw things. He had grown up,
- 1:49Speaker 1: going to Bev's Corner with his father every Thursday morning.
- 1:52Speaker 1: His father had ordered the same thing every time. Black coffee,
- 1:56Speaker 1: wheat toast, two eggs over easy When his father got sick,
- 2:01Speaker 1: the Thursday visits became irregular. After his father died, Kent
- 2:06Speaker 1: kept going alone. He never explained this to anyone, not
- 2:11Speaker 1: even to himself in any direct way. He simply kept going.
- 2:16Speaker 1: Joyce Pauling, who had worked that same booth for 11 years,
- 2:20Speaker 1: had his order ready before he reached the counter. The
- 2:23Speaker 1: year this story begins, Kent was coming out of a breakup.
- 2:27Speaker 1: He described it later as something they did not hurt
- 2:30Speaker 1: all at once, but in installments. That phrasing was specific
- 2:34Speaker 1: to him. He was the kind of person who found
- 2:37Speaker 1: precise language for things he could not otherwise move through.
- 2:41Speaker 1: He was not isolated. He had Troy Bissell, a friend
- 2:45Speaker 1: and coworker who had known him long enough to notice
- 2:48Speaker 1: when something shifted. He had his routine, his uncle, his
- 2:52Speaker 1: spatial memory, his Thursday mornings, what he did not have
- 2:56Speaker 1: heading into that spring. was anyone who seemed genuinely curious
- 3:00Speaker 1: about how he thought. So, the profile appeared in late April.
- 3:05Speaker 1: It belonged to a man who identified himself as James Young,
- 3:09Speaker 1: licensed architect, deaf since childhood, currently contracted on a restoration
- 3:14Speaker 1: project in Aberdeen, Scotland. The photograph showed a man in
- 3:18Speaker 1: his early 30s, often in a hard hat or standing
- 3:22Speaker 1: near drafting tables. He looked like someone with a quiet,
- 3:26Speaker 1: purposeful life. someone who had learned to build things carefully.
- 3:31Speaker 1: The first message James Young sent to Kent Baker was
- 3:35Speaker 1: not romantic. It was a technical question about soil remediation
- 3:39Speaker 1: under concrete foundations. Kent had posted something about a drainage
- 3:43Speaker 1: problem on a landscaping forum. Young's question was specific and
- 3:48Speaker 1: showed genuine understanding of the problem. Kent answered it because
- 3:51Speaker 1: it was a good question. That was the door. It
- 3:55Speaker 1: opened inward. From Kent's side, toward something that felt like
- 3:59Speaker 1: being seen. What Kent could not have known was that
- 4:03Speaker 1: the photographs were not of James Young at all. They
- 4:06Speaker 1: belonged to Doug Haas, an architect from Portland, Oregon, who
- 4:10Speaker 1: had never been to Scotland and who had no idea
- 4:13Speaker 1: his face was being used. Haas maintained a professional website
- 4:18Speaker 1: and a LinkedIn profile. His images were publicly accessible. Someone
- 4:22Speaker 1: had studied them carefully and built an entire identity around them.
- 4:26Speaker 1: By the time spring turned to summer, Kent and the
- 4:30Speaker 1: man using those photographs had exchanged thousands of messages. Kent
- 4:34Speaker 1: described the relationship as real. Troy read some of the
- 4:38Speaker 1: messages and said later that they did not look like
- 4:41Speaker 1: a scam. They looked like someone paying close attention. That
- 4:45Speaker 1: was the thing. That was exactly the thing. The attention
- 4:49Speaker 1: was not accidental. And that, folks, is the first thing
- 4:52Speaker 1: to understand about how this worked. By midsummer, Kent Baker
- 4:57Speaker 1: and the man using Doug Haas's photographs had built what felt,
- 5:01Speaker 1: from Kent's side, like genuine intimacy. The conversations had moved
- 5:06Speaker 1: from soil drainage to his father's illness, to the particular
- 5:10Speaker 1: loneliness of continuing a Thursday morning routine after someone is gone.
- 5:15Speaker 1: The profile had an explanation for everything that might have
- 5:18Speaker 1: raised doubt. James Young was deaf from childhood. That detail
- 5:23Speaker 1: did the heaviest lifting of the entire scheme. No video
- 5:26Speaker 1: calls because the technology was unreliable for someone who relied
- 5:30Speaker 1: on lip reading and typed communication. No phone calls for
- 5:34Speaker 1: the same reason. And if anyone pushed back or expressed suspicion,
- 5:39Speaker 1: the profile had an invisible weapon built in. Skepticism looked cruel.
- 5:44Speaker 1: To question a deaf man's inability to appear on camera
- 5:48Speaker 1: was to question his disability. The design was not incidental.
- 5:52Speaker 1: It was load-bearing. But here's the kicker about that design.
- 5:56Speaker 1: It did not start with Kent, 11 months before Kent
- 5:59Speaker 1: Baker ever encountered that profile. NCARE entowned that profile. A
- 6:04Speaker 1: woman named Evelyn Trask sat across from Detective Kimberly Sanders
- 6:09Speaker 1: at Harwick PD and described losing $ 11, 000 to a man
- 6:14Speaker 1: she had never met in person. Sanders had been in
- 6:18Speaker 1: financial crimes long enough to recognize the architecture of the
- 6:21Speaker 1: case immediately. but the trail went cold at the edge
- 6:25Speaker 1: of Harwick's jurisdiction. The account the money entered dissolved within days.
- 6:30Speaker 1: Sanders kept the file open. She kept waiting for the error,
- 6:34Speaker 1: the one thing a disciplined operation eventually produces. The error
- 6:38Speaker 1: came in a different shape than she expected. Somewhere in
- 6:42Speaker 1: the middle of the operation, a three-second fragment of audio
- 6:46Speaker 1: was sent by mistake to a woman in Indianapolis named
- 6:50Speaker 1: Phyllis Odom. It was not meant for her, It arrived
- 6:53Speaker 1: attached to the wrong message thread. Three seconds. Was that
- 6:58Speaker 1: almost nothing? But a forensic audio analyst found enough in
- 7:02Speaker 1: those three seconds to characterize the acoustic environment. A large room,
- 7:07Speaker 1: hard floors, low ceiling, and the unmistakable wash of simultaneous
- 7:12Speaker 1: conversations happening in the background. Not an apartment. Not a
- 7:17Speaker 1: home office. A call center. That fragment sat in the
- 7:20Speaker 1: investigative file for weeks. before its full weight became clear. Meanwhile,
- 7:26Speaker 1: Sanders had been tracking financial transfers. The money Kent sent
- 7:31Speaker 1: in August, $ 3, 800, wired during what he was told was
- 7:36Speaker 1: a contracting emergency, moved through an account registered to a
- 7:41Speaker 1: logistics company that did not appear to exist in any
- 7:44Speaker 1: meaningful sense. The registered address was a commercial space above
- 7:49Speaker 1: a tire distribution warehouse in Dunmore, Georgia. Kent lived on
- 7:55Speaker 1: Dunmore Terrace. Sanders noted the coincidence in her file and
- 7:59Speaker 1: moved on. It had no legal relevance. But she wrote
- 8:03Speaker 1: it down anyway. The way investigators write down things that
- 8:07Speaker 1: feel like they mean something even when they cannot yet
- 8:10Speaker 1: say what. By September, the acoustic signature from Phyllis Odom's
- 8:15Speaker 1: audio fragment had been matched to the type of environment
- 8:19Speaker 1: consistent with the Dunmore address. Not matched conclusively, not yet,
- 8:24Speaker 1: but close enough that Sanders had a direction. The second
- 8:28Speaker 1: transfer sealed it. $ 6, 200, sent by Kent in early September,
- 8:34Speaker 1: during what he was told, was a permit dispute, threatening
- 8:38Speaker 1: the Aberdeen project. This transfer followed the same routing pattern,
- 8:43Speaker 1: same account structure, same Dunmore address. One step removed, $ 10, 000 total.
- 8:48Speaker 1: The second withdrawal. emptied a savings account Kent's grandmother had
- 8:54Speaker 1: opened for him when he was 12 years old. He
- 8:57Speaker 1: told Troy about it. Troy said the same thing he
- 9:01Speaker 1: had said in August, that something was wrong, that this
- 9:04Speaker 1: was the pattern. Kent heard him and did not stop.
- 9:08Speaker 1: There is a specific kind of resistance that is not
- 9:10Speaker 1: about stupidity and not about naivety. It is about what
- 9:15Speaker 1: verification would cost. For four months, Kent Baker had not
- 9:20Speaker 1: run a reverse image search on the photographs of James Young.
- 9:24Speaker 1: He knew how. He worked in a field that required
- 9:27Speaker 1: him to identify plants and conditions from photographs. The tool
- 9:31Speaker 1: was not mysterious to him. He had simply not used it.
- 9:35Speaker 1: When asked about this later, he said that doing it
- 9:38Speaker 1: had felt during those months like a betrayal, not of himself,
- 9:43Speaker 1: of the other person. That framing matters. It tells you
- 9:47Speaker 1: something about how thoroughly the system had worked. On the
- 9:50Speaker 1: 9th of September, he ran the search. The results came
- 9:54Speaker 1: back in under three seconds. The photographs of James Young, 40,
- 10:00Speaker 1: one of them accumulated over months of conversation, belonged to
- 10:04Speaker 1: Doug Haas, a licensed architect based in Portland, Oregon, who
- 10:09Speaker 1: had never been to Scotland and whose professional website had
- 10:13Speaker 1: been publicly accessible the entire time. Three seconds later, Kent
- 10:18Speaker 1: printed all 41 photographs. He went through them one by
- 10:23Speaker 1: one and drew a red X across each face. Then
- 10:26Speaker 1: he put all 41 photographs in a shoebox, set the
- 10:30Speaker 1: lid on top, and carried the box to the recycling
- 10:34Speaker 1: bin at the edge of his property at 414 Dunmore Terrace.
- 10:39Speaker 1: Not the trash. The recycling. He could not explain why.
- 10:43Speaker 1: He said he still could not explain it cleanly when asked.
- 10:47Speaker 1: but the shoebox went into the recycling bin, and that
- 10:51Speaker 1: night he did not call the police. Two mornings later,
- 10:54Speaker 1: at 6.40 in the morning, a 14-year-old named Leon Price
- 10:59Speaker 1: was cutting through the block when he noticed the box
- 11:02Speaker 1: had tipped over on the grass. The lid was off.
- 11:05Speaker 1: He could see the photographs from where he stood. He
- 11:08Speaker 1: did not touch them. He went home and told his
- 11:11Speaker 1: mother over breakfast. His mother called the non-emergency line. By
- 11:16Speaker 1: that afternoon, Detective Kimberly Sanders was sitting at her desk,
- 11:21Speaker 1: counting the red marks on 41 photographs of a man
- 11:24Speaker 1: named Doug Haas. She counted all of them. 41. And
- 11:29Speaker 1: she understood. In that moment, that she was not looking
- 11:33Speaker 1: at the beginning of something. She was looking at its end.
- 11:36Speaker 1: Picture the commercial space above the tire warehouse in Dunmore, Georgia,
- 11:40Speaker 1: on the morning of September 22nd. Not as a crime
- 11:44Speaker 1: scene yet. As a workspace, if you build the scene
- 11:48Speaker 1: from what the audio fragment suggested, large room, hard floors,
- 11:53Speaker 1: simultaneous conversations, then what federal agents and Harwick detectives found
- 11:59Speaker 1: when they executed the warrant was entirely consistent. Servers' disposable phones,
- 12:05Speaker 1: printed scripts organized by victim category, and James Young, 31
- 12:10Speaker 1: years old, from Macon, Georgia. seated at a workstation with
- 12:14Speaker 1: seven active chat windows open. Seven. At the same time,
- 12:19Speaker 1: he did not speak when agents entered. He did not
- 12:22Speaker 1: speak during the pre-trial period. His attorney offered nothing. The
- 12:26Speaker 1: silence held through every procedural stage until it no longer
- 12:31Speaker 1: needed to hold. One version of what happened here is
- 12:35Speaker 1: the simplest one. A man built a fraudulent identity, targeted
- 12:40Speaker 1: vulnerable people, and extracted money through manufactured emotional debt. That
- 12:46Speaker 1: version is supported by the evidence, confirmed by the conviction,
- 12:50Speaker 1: and sufficient as a legal account. 14 counts of wire fraud,
- 12:55Speaker 1: two counts of identity theft. The jury deliberated for less
- 12:59Speaker 1: than eight hours, but the record holds more than that
- 13:02Speaker 1: version contains. The mirror system, the detail that every victim
- 13:07Speaker 1: received a version of James Young calibrated to their own life,
- 13:11Speaker 1: was not the work of improvisation. A nurse received a
- 13:14Speaker 1: profile whose mother was a nurse. Kent, whose father had
- 13:18Speaker 1: grown ill and lost much of his hearing in his
- 13:21Speaker 1: final years, received a profile whose father had lost his
- 13:24Speaker 1: hearing first before the son did. These were not lucky guesses.
- 13:29Speaker 1: They were constructed parallels, built from information gathered before the
- 13:33Speaker 1: first message was ever sent. Someone had studied each person carefully.
- 13:38Speaker 1: The question of How many people were involved in that
- 13:41Speaker 1: study was never fully answered at trial. The acoustic evidence
- 13:45Speaker 1: pointed to a coordinated operation. The printed scripts pointed to standardization.
- 13:51Speaker 1: The seven simultaneous chat windows on the day of the
- 13:54Speaker 1: arrest pointed to scale. Whether James Young built and ran
- 13:58Speaker 1: that system alone or whether the Dunmore location was one
- 14:03Speaker 1: node in something larger is a question the conviction addressed
- 14:07Speaker 1: at the level of his individual conduct and did not
- 14:10Speaker 1: pursue further in the public record. What the record does
- 14:13Speaker 1: contain is Young's own account, delivered in a letter to
- 14:16Speaker 1: a journalist six weeks after his appeal failed. He described
- 14:21Speaker 1: the mirror system in precise terms. He described the deliberate
- 14:25Speaker 1: selection of people in grief or transition, and he explained
- 14:28Speaker 1: the deafness as a structural choice. It removed every form
- 14:33Speaker 1: of real-time verification, and it made doubt feel like an
- 14:37Speaker 1: act of cruelty. against a disabled person. He also wrote
- 14:41Speaker 1: that he had chosen the name James Young because it
- 14:44Speaker 1: was the most forgettable name he could imagine, the kind
- 14:47Speaker 1: of name, he wrote, that no one holds onto. He
- 14:51Speaker 1: was right about that, and in the end, it did
- 14:54Speaker 1: not help him at all. The jury deliberated for less
- 14:57Speaker 1: than eight hours, 14 counts of wire fraud, two counts
- 15:02Speaker 1: of identity theft. James Young stood convicted on all 16,
- 15:07Speaker 1: The sentence was nine years in federal prison. His attorney
- 15:11Speaker 1: offered no statement after the verdict. Young himself said nothing,
- 15:16Speaker 1: as he had said nothing throughout the pretrial period and
- 15:19Speaker 1: every day of the trial itself. Nine of the 16
- 15:23Speaker 1: documented victims testified. Each one described a version of James
- 15:27Speaker 1: Young that had been built specifically for them. The nurse,
- 15:31Speaker 1: whose profile included a mother who was also a nurse,
- 15:35Speaker 1: the man whose loneliness after a divorce had been met,
- 15:39Speaker 1: within days by someone who seemed to understand it precisely.
- 15:42Speaker 1: Kent Baker did not testify. His name and his losses
- 15:47Speaker 1: are part of the public record, but he was not
- 15:49Speaker 1: among the nine who took the stand. Doug Haas did testify.
- 15:55Speaker 1: He described discovering his photographs in fraudulent profiles. He described
- 15:59Speaker 1: two years of reporting those profiles to platforms and receiving
- 16:03Speaker 1: no response. He answered questions about the photographs calmly, the
- 16:09Speaker 1: way someone answers questions about something that happened to them
- 16:12Speaker 1: without their consent and without remedy. After the trial, he
- 16:17Speaker 1: sent a single email to Detective Kimberly Sanders asking how
- 16:21Speaker 1: the case had ended. She responded in one line. She
- 16:25Speaker 1: wrote that she hoped people could stop seeing his face now.
- 16:29Speaker 1: They could not. The photographs were retained as evidence. They
- 16:33Speaker 1: never returned to Kent. They never returned to Doug Haas.
- 16:37Speaker 1: They are still in the record. Young appealed. His argument
- 16:41Speaker 1: was that the three-second audio fragment had been admitted incorrectly,
- 16:46Speaker 1: and that its acoustic analysis constituted expert testimony without proper foundation.
- 16:51Speaker 1: The appeal failed. The conviction stood. Six weeks after the
- 16:56Speaker 1: appeal failed, Young sent a letter to a journalist. He
- 16:59Speaker 1: described the mirror system in precise terms. He confirmed, the
- 17:03Speaker 1: deliberate selection of people in grief or transition. He explained
- 17:08Speaker 1: that the deafness was a structural choice, not an improvisation.
- 17:13Speaker 1: Remove the possibility of video. Make skepticism feel like cruelty
- 17:18Speaker 1: against a disabled person. He described the rotation of victims
- 17:22Speaker 1: and the use of scripts. He wrote that the operation
- 17:25Speaker 1: had run for at least three years before Evelyn Trask's
- 17:29Speaker 1: complaint reached Harwick P.D., and started the chain that ended
- 17:32Speaker 1: in Dunmore, Georgia. He wrote that he had chosen the
- 17:36Speaker 1: name James Young because it was the most forgettable name
- 17:40Speaker 1: he could imagine, the kind of name no one holds onto.
- 17:44Speaker 1: Sanders kept a photograph of the shoebox in her case files,
- 17:48Speaker 1: not as a trophy. She consulted it when new cases
- 17:51Speaker 1: came in, a reminder of what an ending looked like
- 17:55Speaker 1: from the outside before anyone understood what it was. The
- 17:58Speaker 1: Thursday after the arrest, Kent Baker walked into Bev's corner
- 18:02Speaker 1: at 7.15 in the morning. Joyce Pauling had his order
- 18:06Speaker 1: ready before he reached the counter. He sat in the
- 18:09Speaker 1: same booth he always used, the one with the strip
- 18:12Speaker 1: of mismatched tape along the back cushion where the vinyl
- 18:15Speaker 1: had split. Years ago, he stayed until 7.50. He went
- 18:20Speaker 1: to work. He told Troy Bissell afterward that he could
- 18:23Speaker 1: not find a clean line between what had been fabricated
- 18:27Speaker 1: and what had been real. The four months of conversation.
- 18:31Speaker 1: The question about soil remediation that had started everything. The
- 18:35Speaker 1: specific technical question that had felt like genuine curiosity, and
- 18:39Speaker 1: had been exactly that. In its way, even if the
- 18:42Speaker 1: curiosity belonged to a system and not a person. The attention.
- 18:47Speaker 1: Troy had read the messages and said, It did not
- 18:50Speaker 1: look like a scam. It looked like someone paying attention.
- 18:54Speaker 1: Kent had said that was the point. That was always
- 18:57Speaker 1: the point. The $ 10, 000 did not come back. The first transfer, $ 3, 800,
- 19:03Speaker 1: had moved through a fictitious logistics company and dissolved. The second, $ 6, 200,
- 19:10Speaker 1: had emptied the savings account his grandmother left him when
- 19:14Speaker 1: he was 12 years old. That money was gone. The
- 19:18Speaker 1: account was closed. The balance was zero. There is something
- 19:22Speaker 1: in this case that resists a clean resolution, and it
- 19:25Speaker 1: is not the conviction or the sentence. Those are clear.
- 19:30Speaker 1: It is the question Kent himself could not answer cleanly,
- 19:33Speaker 1: the one he raised without intending to, when he chose
- 19:37Speaker 1: the recycling bin instead of the trash. He said he
- 19:40Speaker 1: did not know why he made that choice. He said
- 19:43Speaker 1: he still did not know. But here is what the
- 19:46Speaker 1: record suggests, without asserting it as fact. A person throws
- 19:51Speaker 1: something in the trash when they want it gone. A
- 19:55Speaker 1: person sets something at the curb when they are not
- 19:58Speaker 1: entirely sure. The 41 photographs, every face crossed in red,
- 20:03Speaker 1: placed in a shoebox, placed in a recycling bin at
- 20:06Speaker 1: 414 Dunmore Terrace. not buried, not destroyed, set out. Leon
- 20:14Speaker 1: Price found them at 6.40 in the morning. Because he
- 20:17Speaker 1: was a 14-year-old who noticed things, his mother made a
- 20:20Speaker 1: phone call. The box reached Sanders. The box reached the case.
- 20:26Speaker 1: The case reached Dunmore, Georgia. Kent Baker's decision, whatever it was,
- 20:31Speaker 1: became the first link in a chain that ended with
- 20:34Speaker 1: seven chat windows open and 16 convictions. He could not
- 20:38Speaker 1: explain the choice. The choice did not require an explanation
- 20:42Speaker 1: to matter. Doug Haas sent one email after the trial
- 20:47Speaker 1: and received one line in return. He had spent two
- 20:50Speaker 1: years reporting his own face to platforms that did not respond.
- 20:54Speaker 1: The trial was the first time any institution acknowledged what
- 20:59Speaker 1: had been done with his photographs. He hoped... He wrote
- 21:03Speaker 1: to Sanders that the people who had seen those images
- 21:05Speaker 1: could eventually see something else when they thought of them.
- 21:09Speaker 1: The name James Young will not stay in anyone's memory
- 21:12Speaker 1: for long. That was the design. But the shoebox on
- 21:15Speaker 1: Dunmore Terrace, the 41 photographs, the 41 red marks, the
- 21:21Speaker 1: 14-year-old who stopped and looked, that part stays. This show
- 21:25Speaker 1: is made by Oba Media.