Agent Matt Sluss
speaker
29 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Mar 2025
Agent Matt Sluss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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As Agent Matt Sluss told me, This was not just a, I'm stealing your money case. Often, in a fraud case, pain is only inflicted by, oh, I've lost my life savings. In this case, it was that plus I thought I was going to be able to adopt a baby or now I've been coerced out of my baby.
So they could give us contracts. They could show us exactly how much and when they paid.
In most fraud schemes, you've made the lie, you've taken the money. The communications are often done. In this particular situation, you have a whole pregnancy now where you have somebody on the hook for fraud early on that you have to continue to lie, continue to make misrepresentations, and continued to make something very sensitive feel very real for months.
At the end of those, you know, six to eight months, now Tara has a problem because there's no baby. And she has to lie to them again and in order to end or fail that adoption match.
And then over the next months, as Tara typically would do, she would provide updates about the pregnancy, making the adoption situation feel as real as she could. In this particular situation, Tara failed the match by telling the adoptive parents that Roshanda, the birth mother, had been shot and killed, and the baby died in utero.
Tara then even solicited funds from the adoptive parents to help cover funeral costs.
She's taking adoptive parents to the point that they're remodeling their houses to create nurseries. And people are raising money through church fundraisers. They're cashing out their retirement funds. You have birth mothers that are being coerced, pressured into giving up their babies or dealing with the loss of their children. You have adoptive parents that do have kids.
And, you know, these kids are expecting to be a big brother or a big sister. And now you have to explain to them, you know, why that's not going to happen. You know, Tara would bring people to the point of traveling across the country to Detroit, Michigan, to complete my family. And then that doesn't happen.
It was early October of 2018. There was an individual who was intimately connected with Tara Lee's adoption business that brought information to our FBI Detroit field office.
Okay, what is the exact violation here?
It was a Friday afternoon, and I had returned from a meeting with a prosecutor in a different case.
And I went into our conference room and I took that big rollout paper that's three, four feet wide and tore off like a 10-foot section and put it across the conference table.
And then just literally started drawing, hand-drawing, handwriting a roadmap of every name, who's connected to who, about the parents' names, birth parents' names, match date, how much money was paid, did the match succeed, was it failed, a quick note on how did it fail if it did.
The Binge Cases: What She Buried · Scary Terri | 6. “I need some money, honey.” · 24 Nov 2024
podcast
These shark eyes. Those cold, dark eyes.
She wasn't accustomed to anyone saying no to her.
And they start telling me this story about this Terry Lee Hoffman. And I'm listening to it and I'm going, well, this is interesting. She wanted to avoid those lawsuits, and so allegedly she filed bankruptcy to do that. So I look at that and I go, all right, well, she's getting a lot of insurance policies and been left a lot of stuff in wills.
She's probably got a lot of cash or other things or jewelry and so on. What happened to all those assets?
That's an old tried and true method. It is legal for law enforcement to dig through your trash if you've left it out by the side of the road. And because it's considered abandoned property by the courts.
They had already picked up on the fact that the families of the people who had died were already looking through her trash. So I think what they were probably doing is should burn it or have a follower take it off somewhere.
One of the issues is, and I think this probably happened before, I would definitely think somebody in this situation would do this. They'd take a lot of that and they would hock a lot of it, sell it just for cash, convert it, and then literally maybe even give a shoebox of money to a follower and say, keep this in your closet kind of thing.
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