Stacey Whitaker

Hi, I am Stacey Whitaker.

I am now a retired FBI agent.

In 2007, I was a pretty new FBI agent, had only been in for a year and was still learning kind of my job.

But yes, so I had been contacted very early on by one of the initial victims of the Bay Rob group.

She had reached out, I was working in the Cleveland division at the time, and so she reached out to the Cleveland FBI office to report that she had been victimized on eBay.

And so I had simply answered her phone call when she called the office and talked to her about what had happened to her.

And she explained to me that she had tried to purchase this vehicle on eBay and that she had supposedly won the auction.

She had paid for the vehicle approximately $8,600.

And then she never received the car.

It was supposed to be transported to her and she never received it.

And on the initial phone call, that was pretty much all that she knew.

And so I had asked her, as we typically do in the FBI, to report this information to IC3.

IC3.gov is a website that we use to collect information from victims of all different types of crime related to the internet primarily.

And so she did.

She went to IC3 and she reported it.

And at the time I thought that was the end of that conversation because of course for $8,600, the FBI typically is not going to open a case.

But she actually called me back about two or three days later and told me that it was explaining to me that she had figured out on her own that her computer was infected with a virus and it was related to this eBay fraud.

And it took a little bit of convincing to convince me that she actually was correct.

She sent me Liam's report

on Bayrub.