Radio Host Steals Millions in Retirement Funds

[00:00:01] Bob: This week on The Perfect Scam.  

[00:00:03] Marcia Gray: He would always say, "Your mom has more money than she will ever know what to do with. I'll never put you into anything that I wouldn't put my grandmother in." You trusted him.   

[00:00:12] Charlotte Annas: At some point we went to Roger, and we said, "Can we get this $150,000 back?" And he said, "No." 

[00:00:22] Bob: Did he give an explanation?   

[00:00:25] Charlotte Annas: It was not liquid. You couldn't get it back. We knew something was terribly wrong. 

[00:00:35] Bob: Welcome back to the Perfect Scam. I'm your host, Bob Sullivan. When you give your money to someone and ask for help planning your retirement, you're engaging in a remarkable act of trust. Trust not just at the person or company will help your nest egg grow, but that your cash will be safe. So when that trust is violated, a sacred promise is broken, lives are ruined, and the fabric of trust is ruined for us all. There are plenty of honest financial advisors out there who only want the best for their clients, but it is absolutely critical that you take a keen interest in who is caring for your nest egg. It's okay to ask hard questions, even to be a little cynical. Today's story will help you see why. Let's meet three amazing people from three families who, probably like you, had worked their whole lives just to save up a little money that they planned to enjoy in their later years. They are strangers, but they all live in Virginia, and what else do they have in common? A company named Dominion Investment advisors.  

[00:01:43] I was an American Red Cross Bloodmobile nurse, and I happened to be doing a bloodmobile in the town that we both lived in, in fact, grew up in. And he just happened to come into my little unit one day to donate blood. He was a huge blood donor. In the course of his life he gave 19½ gallons of blood.  

[00:02:10] Bob: That's Charlotte Annas, talking about the love of her life, Pat. They met in the most beautiful of ways. And Pat was devoted to giving life to others in a way that's very special.  

[00:02:23] Charlotte Annas: During the course of drawing his blood and two other gentlemen's blood that were in my unit, I started talking about a Christmas party that I was going to have. He said, "What's this Christmas party you're talking about? It sounds like fun. How can I get an invitation?" And I said, "Well, I'll, I'll make sure you get one." And I looked down because I did have his information in front of me, and realized that he only lived a block from me. And further realized when I got home that day that out my backdoor, I could see his front door. We started dating right after that, and by Christmas, same year, we started dating the first week of December, and by Christmas he proposed -- that year.  

[00:03:09] Bob: Pat took giving blood very seriously.  

[00:03:13] Charlotte Annas: He was like clockwork. Every 56 days for decades he went and donated blood. He had it on his calendar. He didn't miss it. I guess by the time he got into his 50s, he started slowing down a little bit. His goal was to get to 20 gallons, but he never made it quite there. But personally, he was the most prolific person that I knew, personally, to give blood. And it was very important to him, and he actually about a year or so after we married, he had an opportunity to write a little letter in the city of Virginia Beach newsletter that went out to all city employees, and he wrote about how important it was to donate blood. And that he got a benefit out of it that most people didn't do which was, he got a wife.  

[00:04:14] Bob: Pat worked for the Virginia Department of Transportation. Charlotte was a nurse, and later she worked in healthcare as a clinical research associate. And she is very proud of her husband and her hometown.  

[00:04:27] Charlotte Annas: He was my soulmate, and we were together for almost 35½ years before he passed.  

[00:04:35] Bob: Well what town were you in when this happened?  

[00:04:38] Charlotte Annas: Suffolk, Virginia. Which is the home of Planters Peanuts.  

[00:04:42] Bob: Aha! (chuckles) I hope that means you like peanuts.  

[00:04:47] Charlotte Annas: Yes. If you didn't, you were in the wrong town because in the fall all you could smell were roasting peanuts in town.  

[00:04:55] Bob: Now meet Richard Fairchild who lives less than an hour away.  

[00:05:00] Richard Fairchild: I live in Virginia Beach, and, and I work on a very small Navy base called Naval Support Activity on Norfolk. And that's where the NATO headquarters is located.  

[00:05:10] Bob: He's worked as a civilian with the military for decades. At one point, part of his job at Lockheed Martin was training Apache helicopter pilots.  

[00:05:20] Richard Fairchild: Yeah, so back during my Lockheed days and uh still with Leidos, what I actually did when I, when I first went to work for Lockheed Martin, I worked in their electronic warfare, their ESM, which is Electronic Systems Measures projects. And this would be radar systems. So I had actually helped design classes with the engineers on a particular type of radar for the Apache Attack Helicopter. So if you look at a picture of what's called the long bow, it has a big bubble on top, all right, and that's actually the fire control radar.  

[00:05:54] Bob: Now meet Marcia Gray. She lost her mom just last year. Her father died almost 20 years ago. He was also a civilian who worked with military.  

[00:06:05] Bob: Well what was your dad's name?  

[00:06:06] Marcia Gray: Henry. Henry Gray.  

[00:06:09] Bob: Henry. Henry. And your mom? 

[00:06:11] Marcia Gray: Mildred Gray.  

[00:06:13] Bob: Mildred... Henry, Henry and Mildred. Um, and what did your dad do? 

[00:06:18] Marcia Gray: My dad was a civil officer at Fort Monroe.  

[00:06:21] Bob: The family worked hard to build a small nest egg that was supposed to make Mom's final years fun and comfortable. Starting with a small bonus he received at retirement, the family had built up to nearly one million dollars in savings at one point.  

[00:06:37] Marcia Gray: When he retired, he had a bonus of $10,000, and they turned that into over a million dollars because my parents didn't touch that money. They lived frugally. They only lived off of their pension. They started investing $25 a month when we were a twinkle in Daddy's eye, 'cause they were going to make sure we went to college. Actually, my mom went to college. My dad didn't. He had to drop out of school when he was in 8th grade 'cause his father had died. So he had to get his equivalency and all that, and he was the highest ranking civilian officer at, when he retired at Fort Monroe.  

[00:07:08] Bob: Like everyone during the 2008/2009 recession, all three of these families saw their retirement savings take a big hit. And in the years that followed, investments were kind of running in place, and that started to make Charlotte and Pat a little nervous. So when a friend invites them to a free meal with a financial advisor, they figure, why not? There, they meet a man named Roger.  

[00:07:32] Charlotte Annas: Well, in the fall of 2011, by that time I had been approved for long-term disability and Social Security disability. So we were doing okay, but still, you know, I, we were both on retirement funds at that point and had quite a bit of retirement funds that we could invest. We had a friend in our neighborhood who invited us to one of those dinners, you know, retirement dinners. Come and eat, you know, at a nice restaurant, and we're going to talk to you about some investment opportunities. So we did that. About two months went by, and my husband and I talked about it a little bit. He handled the finances. I handled all the indoor finances like, you know, paying utility bills and that type of thing. And he handled like car payments, mortgages, investments, uh and it had worked, that system had worked well for us for 30 plus years. So we uh, talked about it and he said, "I think I'm going to go with Roger." Roger being Roger Hudspeth who worked at Dominion, an investment group.  

[00:08:52] Bob: Marcia's parents find their way to Dominion another way. They'd been working with a man named Daryl Banks at a large investment brokerage for many years. They liked Daryl. So when he goes independent and later moves to Florida, Daryl convinces Mildred and Henry to move their money to his new firm.  

[00:09:11] Marcia Gray: And Daryl was so good that he knew, you know, what we were doing, and he'd ask about us and the grandchildren, and he just made himself so personable. We lost my dad in 2002, but between 1998 and 2002, Dad was on the phone with Daryl all the time looking at their investments on the internet, moving stuff around and they did exceptionally well.  

[00:09:35] Bob: But what really solidifies their relationship was the way Daryl treated Marcia's mom after her dad passed away.  

[00:09:42] Marcia Gray: Daryl promised me in 2002 that he would take care of my mom. And he would always say, "Your mom has more money than she will ever know what to do with." And he also would say, "I'll never put you into anything that I wouldn't put my grandmother in." You know, you trusted him.  

[00:09:57] Bob: Richard came across Dominion still another way, by listening to the radio.  

[00:10:02] Richard Fairchild: So what wound up happening is, we had money in New York, uh, investment money. And then so that would be 2009, we moved out of state, and that money was doing nothing. So fast-forward to 2013 or 20--, 2013. End of 2013, this goes along with me hearing a radio broadcast called Daryl and the Bulls with Dominion Investments. So here I'm listening to these AM radio broadcasts by this guy, and I'm like, you know, I've got all this money sitting in New York with Merrill Lynch. The guy who originally set us up with the accounts and everything that we had trusted, had since left to go out on his own, so the money's sitting there doing nothing, costing us, it's going down every year because of the fees, and it wasn't invested very wisely. I think it was just in a money market at the time. They had moved it out of, all our investments, I think. I'll have to check the paperwork, but in combination of the money sitting there not earning us money, and then being down here, hearing that, that radio broadcast, so it was like an hour on a Saturday, every Saturday, I said, you know, I, I've got to bring it down here. I want to bring it to local people so that I can sit down with people and that's the connection.  

[00:11:19] Bob: Daryl and the Bulls with occasional guest, Roger Hudspeth, gave out a lot of advice on Saturday morning radio shows, including advice about avoiding scams. After all, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme was still fresh on people's minds. Here's Daryl with another guest.  

(SFX - Changing radio stations) 

[00:11:38] Daryl: That's right, that's right, and so we, we see these things all of the time, and I've got to tell ya, I'm always amazed at the sophistication whether it's the old Ponzi scheme or, or, or, or just, you know, ridiculous rates of returns without really being able to understand the investment, et cetera. It's just amazing. So it doesn't mean that there aren't some great opportunities out there, but like anything, you've got to go into it with eyes wide open, because again, it's so easy for some of these people to get set up. Don't get me wrong. The government's doing a good job of cracking down on a lot of these, but I get alerted almost on a daily basis of some other investment scam or scheme being shut down somewhere in the country. 

[00:12:12] Radio Host: It's hard to imagine with all the publicity that Madoff got and, you know, some of the other biggies, ironically, all here in South Florida, uh, that uh, you know, that these guys keep going. 

[00:12:28] Daryl: Yes. And they keep cropping up. It, it, new ones, even when ones are gone, new ones are, new ones are cropping up.  

[00:12:34] Radio Host: Yeah, but the stories are all very similar, you know, in how you can make X amount of dollars and make it relatively quickly and... 

[00:12:43] Daryl: I don't want to call it even just ridiculous returns, because in all honesty, Madoff didn't give ridiculous returns. He gave consistent returns, but they were never ridiculous.  

[00:12:53] Bob: After months of listening to the radio show, Richard decides he can trust Daryl and the Bulls, the brains behind Dominion Investments, with part of the family's retirement funds. So he calls their office and sets up a meeting.  

[00:13:09] Bob: Did you meet personally with Roger right away?  

[00:13:11] Richard Fairchild: Oh yes, yes, yes. So our, our first meeting we, we met with Roger, my wife and I, and I can still picture the basic setup of the office, you know, coming in, meeting the, the secretary in, in front, and seeing the office manager. And then to the right was where his office was, his office, he would be facing us. And you know we sat down in front of him and talked for a while.  

[00:13:37] Bob: So when you walk in, um, he shakes your hand and says hello. Does the voice sound familiar because you've heard it before?  

[00:13:44] Richard Fairchild: Especially when he says, "Hi, my name is Roger Hudspeth." And I said, "Ah, okay." I'm, I'm, now I'm at least making a connection, whether it's an actual oh, I remember the voice, or I remember just the audio connection to the, to the radio broadcast. Absolutely, while and it was actually a series of meetings. The first one where he was ask--, he was asking about our finances, where our money is, what are our goals. All, all the logical things of number one, setting us at ease, you know, he had a picture of his daughter, you know, some personal items in there. So he was, he was the human face of the transaction, but I do remember the initial meeting was just getting to know us. And then he was like, "Okay, well, let's set up something for..." whether it was the next week or, or two weeks... "and I'll be able to present you something based on your needs. I'll be able to run all your finances and, and show you where you'll be at your current rate, and then compare it to what we can do." So that was the initial meeting and then his setup to bring us into pitch us on his investments.  

[00:14:50] Bob: Richard likes what he hears. He agrees to move one of his two retirement accounts into Dominion.  

[00:14:56] Richard Fairchild: And this, this is actually kind of interesting, is we, we went into two different investments; the investment offering for the first one was called Spectrum 100. And what that was, was they were going to buy radio Spectrum at a certain frequency and then resell it or lease it to the sell companies. Because supposedly all these rules and the FCC made changes and, and they had this guy who's done some really neat things in the cellular world before that made people a lot of money, blah, blah, blah. You know we should be able to get you returns of 10 or 12 percent. It wasn't like we're going to make you, you know, a bazillion dollars, because one of the things I told them, I said, look, I'm not looking to get rich quick or anything like that. I want good, secure investments. The second investment, I'm trying to pull it up, oh, is called Wemonitor, and Wemonitor, let's see, I put $25,000 in Spectrum 100, then the remaining amount, call it $20,000, is another part of the story, we went into Wemonitor which is basically a device that you would put into your electrical outlets, and it would be able to detect how much electricity is being used, it'll be able to turn things on and off. So this was kind of the predecessor of what is an internet of things. So this was the, the bleeding edge of internet of things, where we have that now. You know, I could sit in my office right now and, you know. turn on lights, turn off lights, turn on devices, what's the temperature, all those different things, well this was the predecessor to that.  

[00:16:36] Bob: So these sounded like reasonable and interesting investments.  

[00:16:38] Richard Fairchild: Oh absolutely. Yeah, and, and again, me being somebody who was in radio, I was, I was running the computers and everything for 15 years, and also, you know, I've been involved in computers for, oh gosh, since I was 17 years old, so since 1976 or '77, when I worked for Raytheon Data Systems as a, a technical illustrator. And that was at 17 years old. So I've been involved one way or another with technology. So yeah, I was very comfortable with it.  

[00:17:10] Bob: Charlotte and Pat have big dreams for their investment in Dominion. They're hoping they can turn their nest egg into enough for a life of exciting retirement travel.  

[00:17:19] Bob: You were saving this money because you and Pat were supposed to travel the country, right?  

[00:17:25] Charlotte Annas: Yes. Not only the country, we traveled internationally too. We have been on some wonderful trips in our lifetime. We've been to Tahiti, we've been to Hawaii, we've been to Alaska. We've been to Greece. We've been to Turkey. We've been on a European uh riverboat cruise from, we started out in Paris, of course there wasn't a river there that we were on, but we started out in Paris and then left Paris and went to Luxembourg, got on a boat and ended up, we went all through Germany, Austria, and ended up in Hungary. So we've had some wonderful trips during our working life and since retiring, and we were planning to continue that.  

[00:18:10] Bob: Better returns on their sluggish investments sure would help them follow their dreams. So a couple of months after that dinner with Roger, the couple decides they'll go with him. And they put their money in a franchise venture called Dental Support Plus.  

[00:18:26] Bob: So it's 2011, and you decide to, to go with Dominion. How did you jump in both feet? Did you start small?  

[00:18:36] Charlotte Annas: No, we jumped in with both feet. We went, I was, even though my name was never on any of the documents, I was present at every meeting. I was present on every phone call that was ever had with any of the Dominion people. And so we went in, and we talked to Roger, and he presented this Dental Support Plus. That was the newest and biggest thing that they had going, and he said that we could get 14 to 16 percent interest per year, and that it was, even though it was being sold as a franchise, that it was hands-off, we didn’t have to do anything to make it happen, and just painted a real, you know, rosy picture, and each unit was $25,000. We originally bought four units. And then a couple of months later they came back and said that the units were going to be going up, but if we wanted to buy some more, now was the time. And we bought two more units. So then we're in it for $150,000.  

[00:19:52] Bob: Roger tells them they'll start seeing returns from their investments in as few as a few months. But before they have time to really think about the investment, they get some terrible news.  

[00:20:03] Charlotte Annas: This was in February. The end of May, May 29th of 2012, my husband was diagnosed with colon cancer at first. He had surgery the next month. They thought at first that they were going to be able to get everything with the surgery and that he would not need radiation or chemotherapy. When they did the surgery, it was a little bit more severe than they thought, and they said, “You’re going to have to have both chemo and radiation.” So we started on that. So, of course, our emphasis was more on his health than it was what was going on with this money that we had invested, ‘cause he was fighting cancer in stage 3 at that point. And so for the next year, we would get in touch with Roger when we could, but those talks or visits were very few and far between because there were so many doctor’s appointments, chemo, IV infusions, just, you know, a plethora of, of issues surrounding his cancer.  

[00:21:11] Bob: Everything, including concerns about their retirement accounts, takes a backseat.  

[00:21:17] Charlotte Annas: By that point, we had purchased a little park model in a RV park in Florida, and we were down here in a 5th wheel, that’s how he originally arrived down here, to camp for the, you know, the season, the winter season, and ended up purchasing this park model. And we made a fairly quick decision on it because at that point supposedly Pat was in remission. It turned out he wasn’t, but we did not know that at the time. So we bought this place and we’re in the middle of trying to kind of rehab it because it’s an older model, and we get a letter from the State Corporation Commission, the Virginia State Corporation Commission. And they’re saying that Dominion Investment Group is being investigated, and they had some questions for us.  

[00:22:12] Bob: Dominion Investment Group is being investigated? Charlotte doesn't really have time to digest what that means, but she's also pretty distracted.  

[00:22:21] Charlotte Annas: And I don’t remember what the questions were now, there were probably about 8 or 10 questions, and I answered them, and I sent the letter back in, and kind of left it at that, because there again we were busy with, you know, trying to rehab a house. 

[00:22:34] Bob: At about the same time, Richard Fairchild gets a disturbing phone call from the Securities & Exchange Commission.  

[00:22:40] Richard Fairchild: I got contacted by the SEC, and the SEC basically said, "Hey, we're investigating blah, blah, blah," and that's when I started doing the follow up. 

[00:22:50] Bob: Okay, so you think everything's fine, and you get a call from the Securities & Exchange Commission.  

[00:22:53] Richard Fairchild: Yes.  

[00:22:54] Bob: What was that like?  

[00:22:56] Richard Fairchild: Uh, (laugh) like getting slapped in the face, honestly, I mean it was, it, you're, you're numb. 

[00:23:06] Bob: That's just about how Marcia Gray feels too when her mom gets a call from the FBI.  

[00:23:12] Marcia Gray: Oh, they called my mother and said that they were coming to talk to Mom, and she called and asked me if I could meet her after school, 'cause I taught 40 minutes away. And Jennifer, the FBI agent was already there, and she'd already explained stuff to my mom, and my mom looked shell-shocked. So when she started talking to me, I'm like, you’re kidding me. She asked if I'd heard of these different entities, and I said, "Yes." And she asked me if I knew about them, and I could recite some of the information that I'd heard about, and she said, "They're, you know, we think they're fraudulent." And I went, "You mean she has no money?" She said, "Well, with the LLC, she probably doesn't have any money."  

[00:23:47] Bob: How surprised were you when this happened?  

[00:23:50] Marcia Gray: Oh, we were blown away. I, 'cause see, Daryl promised he would take care of my mom.  

[00:23:55] Bob: The FBI, the SEC, Virginia State Investigators, all asking questions about Dominion, about Roger and Daryl. Richard and Marcia are worried right away, but Charlotte, she has bigger things on her mind. She's trying to take care of her sick husband. Remember, they were rushing to rebuild their home in Florida, but cancer had returned.  

[00:24:16] Charlotte Annas: And we basically just had to leave town and leave the contractor to do what he had to do, and we didn’t know if we’d ever get back down here or not with the way his health was. As it was, we got back to Virginia, we had been gone four months, and when we got to Virginia, within four hours he was in severe pain. He had been in severe pain up the East Coast to get back to Virginia, and at that point, they did a couple of tests and they said he has a tumor that has obstructed at the original site of where he had his first surgery. He also has tumors in his liver, he's now stage 4, and he needs immediate surgery to place a colostomy bag that’s going to be permanent. And all this happened within, like I said, less than 24 hours of us being home.  

[00:25:13] Bob: And that's when the investigators show up.  

[00:25:15] Charlotte Annas: The day that he was going into surgery, I had his phone, and I got a phone call from the State Corporation Commission wanting to set up an interview to come out and talk to him about Dominion In—, Investment Group. I said, “The timing couldn’t be worse.” Explained what was going on. The gentleman, the investigator was very nice, and he said, “I certainly understand. I will not contact you again. Here is my information. If at some point in the future your husband feels like talking to us, please give us a call and we will come down from Richmond, Virginia,” which was, you know, the state capital, “and we will interview you.”  

[00:25:58] Bob: Charlotte protects Pat from the news for a while so he can focus on recovering from surgery. But when he hears the news, he wants to do whatever he can to help.  

[00:26:07] Charlotte Annas: So I guess two or three weeks after the surgery happened and he got home, I told him what was going on, and he said he absolutely wanted to talk to them. So I called and made an appointment, and they came down, and we sat in our kitchen for an hour and a half talking about Dominion Investment Group. And at that point they asked him if it ever came to anything, would he be willing to testify? And he said, "Absolutely. Yes.”  

[00:26:36] Bob: All the while the investigation continues, Dominion still has their money, or at least Pat and Charlotte think so.  

[00:26:44] Charlotte Annas: So I guess that summer we had several in-person and phone calls with Roger Hudspeth. And in fact, one of them was with Daryl Bank, and Pat just flat out told him, he said, “You know you’re being investigated by the State of Virginia,” and they claimed to have no knowledge of that. Everything was, you know, rainbows and sunshine.  

[00:27:12] Bob: Well could, could I stop you there, because I'm just wondering... 

[00:27:14] Charlotte Annas: Sure. 

[00:27:14] Bob: ... what's it like, you know, these people from the, the State Investigator's Office were obviously kind and thorough, right? And so you know they're being investigated. What is it like to be on the phone with someone who has $150,000 of your money who you're pretty, you're pretty sure is, is in deep trouble and lying to you about it. What is that like?  

[00:27:36] Charlotte Annas: Well, it was horrible. And not only that, we had invested more money into other things along the line. So all totaled we were into it at that point for $205,000. 

[00:27:52] Bob: And here he is on the phone saying, "Oh, now, everything's fine." I mean did you just want to leap through the phone and strangle the guy?  

[00:27:59] Charlotte Annas: Oh, of course. And, you know, and they keep saying, "We don't know any about, anything about anybody investigating us." We knew something was terribly wrong, but there wasn't anything we could do about it, because if you've ever been a caregiver, that's all you can do is, you know, is try to get the person to and from their appointments, keep them as well as possible with all the poison that's going into their bodies to kill the cancer. I had my own health issues, so I was dealing with that as well. There were times that we both were getting IV infusions in the same week, and all we could do is just lay in bed and commiserate with each other.  

[00:28:41] Bob: Naturally, they want their money back. But that isn't going to happen.  

[00:28:46] Charlotte Annas: And so at some point we went to Roger, and we said, "Can we get this $150,000 back?" And he said, "No." He said, "No." 

(MUSIC SEGUE) 

[00:28:59] Bob: Did he give an explanation? 

[00:29:02] Charlotte Annas: It was not liquid. You couldn't get it back.  

[00:29:08] Bob: Pat and Charlotte trying to comfort each other with their serious health issues, and now feeling like their $150,000 is being held hostage. Marcia gets a similar runaround. "Daryl can talk his way out of anything," she says.  

[00:29:24] Marcia Gray: And I even called him after the FBI agent had been to my mom's house. And he was just so charismatic and so concerned to see what happened to my mom. So, and even then, when I talked to him on the phone, he was so convincing. He could have an answer for everything. He had called my mom the day that the FBI agent came to the house to talk to us with a fabulous opportunity, and she said she would get back with him. When I got there, we could call him together. So I called as soon as Jennifer left, and he had this wonderful story that he could explain the whole thing.  

[00:29:59] Bob: A few months pass, and the heat around Dominion Investments starts to grow, but Daryl and Roger keep telling clients that everything is fine.  

[00:30:08] Charlotte Annas: So if I may, I'll fast-forward to summer of 2015. A big, a big exposé comes out in our local newspaper, front page and two other pages -- three-page article about Dominion Investment Group and Daryl Bank. Our friend, the good financial advisor, he comes over with the newspaper article. We're sitting at our dining room table looking at it and talking, and the phone rings. And it's Roger Hudspeth. And my husband gets up and he walks into the sunroom, and I heard him say, "You're in a lot of trouble, aren't you, buddy?" And I said to our advisor, I said, "That's Roger on the phone." And he said, "No!" And I said, "It has to be." So about 10 minutes later, Pat walks back over to the table, and he's now put it on speaker, and he's got his finger up to his lips, you know, to like, "Don't say a word." And he's saying, "So what's going on?" He said, "Well, it's not as bad as it, it was made out to be in the newspaper, and I'm not the one that they're looking for. I haven't done anything wrong. It, it will all come out later on, but I've not done anything wrong." Well he's trying to do damage control of this three-page exposé that has come out in the paper. And so our friend is sitting there, and he's writing out questions as fast as he can, and so then he'd pass the paper to Pat, and Pat would ask the question, and depending on the answer our friend would motion yes or no, and then more questions would come forward. Roger never knew that we had somebody there that had financial advisor expertise.  

[00:32:14] Bob: Still, they hang up the phone no closer to a resolution than before, but now they have a witness to the things Dominion is telling them. Still, Charlotte and Pat can't travel, they can't access that $150,000, but Charlotte knows Daryl, well, he's doing just fine, thank you very much.  

[00:32:32] Bob: He was traveling, he was living in big houses, right?  

[00:32:35] Charlotte Annas: Yes, he was spending $5,000 a night on suites in Las Vegas, he was buying, you know, $35,000 watches, $350 shoehorns, boats, he had a boat. 

[00:32:51] Bob: So 2015 passes. 2016. Spring and summer of 2017. Life for Marcia and Richard gets harder, and Charlotte, well she's trying to make her husband as comfortable as possible. Meanwhile, Daryl Bank, cloud of investigation and all, is living his best life. He even buys a $25,000 dog until one August day in 2017 arrives and changes Daryl Bank and Roger Hudspeth's lives forever. And it binds together these three strangers: Richard, Charlotte, and Marcia. That's next on The Perfect Scam.  

(MUSIC SEGUE) 

[00:33:34] Bob: If you have been targeted by a scam or fraud, you are not alone. Call the AARP Fraud Watch Network Helpline at 877-908-3360. Their trained fraud specialists can provide you with free support and guidance on what to do next. Thank you to our team of scambusters; Executive Producer, Julie Getz; Researcher, Haley Nelson; Associate Producer, Annalea Embree; and of course, our Audio Engineer, Julio Gonzalez. Be sure to find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For AARP's The Perfect Scam, I'm Bob Sullivan. 

END OF TRANSCRIPT