Jorge Barrera
speaker
197 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Jorge Barrera’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But what about Harvey and Acumetrix's responsibility for the indigenous ancestry testing? When I approach them, the company refuses interview requests. They send a statement in an email. It basically says these indigenous ancestry tests have no legal value anyway. And they blame the messed up results on the customers, who they say probably contaminated the samples.
It's Acumetrix's go-to explanation. They stop offering the indigenous DNA testing, but they're still in the dog DNA testing business. And dogs keep tripping Acumetrix up.
CBC's Consumer Affairs Show Marketplace is testing dog breed DNA companies. It's now March 2023, and one of the four companies tested is Viagard Acumetrix. Marketplace sends in DNA samples from three dogs for testing, but it also sends a sample from a human. The show's host, Travis Danraj, pretending it's from a dog.
The Danrej sample should come back as a failed test. But the Acumetrix result?
Acumetrix tripped up by a dog again. The Marketplace investigation exposes clear issues with the company's DNA testing services. You see, Acumetrix also asks CBC for either a picture of the dog or its suspected breed. So CBC says, shepherd. Marketplace asked Acumetrix about Travis' result.
But these issues, they'd been noticed by people who worked inside the company.
People like Samantha Friday, who worked at Acumetrix, she told my colleague Rachel that she had suspicions about this particular type of test.
So what Sam is suggesting here is that Accumetrix uses customer information, not actual DNA, to come up with its results. But if we want to confirm this, to get direct answers about what is happening inside the lab, we need to get to Harvey. Yet every time we feel like we're getting closer to him, closer to the truth, he slips away.
That's as close as I get to him. A voice in the background. So Rachel and I come up with a plan.
A legal note here. Over the course of this podcast, you're going to hear a number of allegations made against Vygarde Acumetrix and its employees. When asked, company owner Harvey Tenenbaum said he stands by the tests and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection. Bad Results is written and reported by Rachel Houlihan and me, Jorge Barrera. Mixing and producing by AC Rowe.
Jessica Lindsay is our showrunner. And Carla Hilton is our executive producer. Special thanks to the folks at CBC Podcasts for their support. Karen Burgess is managing editor for CBC News Podcasts.
It's September 17th, 2024, and I've just arrived at the U.S. Federal Courthouse in White Plains, New York. I'm here for a sentencing hearing, and I can't be late, because the guy being sentenced is someone we've been wanting to talk to since this investigation began. Kyle Suey.
Rachel and I have heard a lot about Kyle through our investigation. He's the voice on the other end as Kodal and her mom try to get answers over the telephone from Acumetrix.
From 2013 until at least 2020, Kyle was the technical manager at Acumetrix, overseeing sample collection.
And the testing is 99.99% accurate. And it turns out he also had a side hustle, AllergyTestingCompany.com. It offered hair analysis testing for over 800 potential food and environmental sensitivities, everything from egg yolk to swine urine protein to formaldehyde. Thing is, it wasn't exactly on the up and up, and it caught the attention of United States Postal Inspection Service agents.
Kyle was arrested while on vacation in Madrid in 2023 and charged with one count of wire fraud and one count of frauds and swindles. And when he was extradited to the U.S., he pleaded guilty and provided all the details of his crimes to the court. Here's an actor reading from that transcript.
Customers sent their hair samples to a rented mailbox in a town just north of New York City. Over the course of several months, Kyle took in about $6 million from more than 88,000 people.
There was no test. He simply tossed the samples in the garbage.
After his plea, Kyle went back to jail to await sentencing. And that's why I'm here at this courthouse. Today will mean justice for victims of Kyle's hair testing scam. But for Corral and John and all the other people we met in this investigation, today's sentencing might also be another piece in the puzzle. Another way to get the answers they still need about Vargard Acumetrics.
And the man with those answers? The company's owner?
Showing 121–140 of 197 · page 7 of 10
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