One hundred and forty-five bank accounts, and a phone call that said "your money isn't safe"

The phone rang at 2:14 PM on a Tuesday. Marjorie was at the kitchen table working a crossword in pen, the way she had done since 1974. She was seventy-eight years old. She had been a school librarian for forty-one years before she retired. She still kept a checkbook in the second drawer down, next to a pair of coupon scissors and a flashlight that no longer worked.

The man on the line said her name. Her first name. He said he was calling from the fraud department at her credit union. He said someone had tried to access her account from a computer in Florida.

Marjorie did not know anyone in Florida.

The man's voice was calm. He had a case number. He read it slowly so she could write it down. She wrote it on the legal pad she kept by the phone, the same pad where she wrote down doctor's appointments and the names of her grandson's friends.

He told her not to hang up. He told her the next call she would receive would be from a federal agent. He said the words "your money is not safe where it is."

That sentence is the door. Every version of this scheme walks through it.

II. THE LAUNDROMAT

What Marjorie did not know, what she could not have known sitting at her kitchen table with a pen in her hand, was that the voice on the phone was allegedly one node in a machine that federal prosecutors would later describe as a sophisticated money laundering operation run out of the Los Angeles suburbs.

According to the criminal complaint filed February 27, 2025, in the Central District of California, two men, Sylas Nyuydzene Verdzekov of Chino Hills, 38, and Lovert Che of Lomita, 44, were arrested and charged with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. A third defendant, Mustapha Nkachiwouo Selly Yamie, 29, of Inglewood, was being sought.

The numbers, even before you know what they did, are the story.

One hundred and forty-five bank accounts.

Thirty-six shell companies.

At least thirty-two private mailboxes scattered across Southern California.

More than one hundred victims, many of them elderly, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Over ten million dollars in losses.

Picture it. A spin cycle. Money goes in dirty at one end, comes out the other side as rent payments and cash withdrawals. The machine needs accounts the way a laundromat needs washers. So they built one hundred and forty-five of them. They used fake passports and fake driver's licenses, prosecutors allege, to open the accounts in the names of companies that did not exist for any purpose other than this. Thirty-six shells. Thirty-two mailboxes. A small constellation of paperwork designed to make a wire transfer look like a business expense.

Acting U.S. Attorney Joseph T. McNally put it this way in the announcement of the arrests: "These defendants built a sophisticated fraud and money laundering scheme that targeted and preyed on our most vulnerable citizens. They not only stole the victims' money, but robbed them of their security and trust."

That is the official language. Here is the plain version. The machine had two intake valves.

The first was the call to Marjorie. Pose as a bank, pose as a cop, tell the victim her money is in danger, tell her the only way to save it is to move it. To an account you control. Held by a company she has never heard of.

The second was the real estate scam. Impersonate a property owner. Convince a buyer they are wiring closing funds to escrow. They are not. They are wiring it to a mailbox in a strip mall.

Both valves fed the same drum.

III. THE WIRE

Back to Marjorie's kitchen.

The second call came forty minutes after the first, the way the script said it would. The man on the second call said he was with a federal agency. He had a badge number. He told Marjorie that the only way to protect her money was to move it, that day, to a secure government account he would help her set up.

She drove to her credit union. She is a careful woman. She brought her ID. The teller asked her if she was sure. Marjorie said yes, because the man on the phone had told her the teller might ask, and that this was because the criminals had compromised the bank's own staff.

The script anticipates the question. The script always anticipates the question.

The wire went out at 2:47 PM. Forty-three thousand dollars. The receipt is still on her refrigerator under a magnet that says World's Best Grandma.

By the time she got home, the second man was on the phone again, telling her to expect a follow-up call the next day with the new account number for her safe funds.

The next day there was no call. The day after that there was no call. The number she had written on the legal pad did not work. The case number was not a case number.

She told her grandson three weeks later. She was embarrassed. That is the part nobody writes about in the press release. The embarrassment is the second theft. The first theft takes the money. The second theft takes the willingness to say what happened out loud.

IV. WHAT THE PAPERWORK LOOKS LIKE

I have spent fifteen years reading the kind of paperwork that holds this machine together. The shell company filings. The bank account opening documents. The wire instructions. I want to tell you what they look like, because the protection is in recognizing them.

A shell company in this kind of case is usually a limited liability company registered in California or Wyoming or Delaware. The registration costs about a hundred dollars. The address on the filing is often a private mailbox, the kind you rent at a UPS Store or a small mail-receiving business. The mailbox has a number. The mailbox number is written on the filing as a suite number. Suite 215. Suite 408. It looks like an office. It is a slot in a wall.

The bank account is opened with an EIN, which is an employer identification number, which is the number the IRS uses to identify a business for tax purposes. You can get one online in about twenty minutes. The account is opened in the name of the LLC. The person opening it is identified by a driver's license. According to the federal complaint, the driver's licenses in this case were allegedly forged.

The accounts do not need to do much. They need to be able to receive a wire. They need to be able to send a wire. They need to be able to permit a cash withdrawal at the counter. That is the entire job.

One hundred and forty-five accounts. Most of them, if this case looks like the others I have seen, sat mostly empty most of the time. Money would arrive, money would move, the account would go quiet. The next victim's money would flow through a different account in a different shell company. The diversification is the camouflage.

V. THE GAP

There is a question I am asked often, by people whose mother or father or aunt has just lost money to a call like the one Marjorie received. Why did the bank let this happen.

The answer is hard, and it is part of why this machine keeps running.

Banks are required to perform what is called Know Your Customer due diligence on new accounts. They check identification. They check the company filing. They sometimes ask for a business address. If the ID looks real, and the filing is real (and an LLC filing is real even if the LLC is a fiction), the account gets opened. The shell company is a real legal entity. Its purpose is not something the bank can see from the paperwork.

Once the account is open, the wire from Marjorie arrives looking like any other wire. It comes from a credit union in Torrance. It goes to an LLC account in Los Angeles County. There is no flashing light that says ELDERLY VICTIM. The transaction looks like a small business receiving payment.

This is the gap the alleged operation lived inside. Not a hole in the law. A space between the rules where a machine can run.

VI. THE ARRESTS

On February 27, 2025, federal agents from Homeland Security Investigations' Document Benefit Fraud Task Force, the FBI's Honolulu Field Office, the U.S. Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service, and the United States Postal Inspection Service took Verdzekov and Che into custody. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California filed the conspiracy charge. The third defendant remained at large as of the public announcement.

The source headline circulating in June 2026 says "sentenced." I want to be careful here, because I have not been able to confirm that a sentencing has occurred in the public record available to me. What is confirmed is the charge, the arrest, and the U.S. Attorney's description of the scheme. Allegations remain allegations until a court says otherwise.

What is not in question is the structure. The complaint lays it out. One hundred and forty-five accounts. Thirty-six companies. Thirty-two mailboxes. A method described by prosecutors as targeting elderly victims through impersonation of banks and law enforcement.

VII. WHAT MARJORIE KEEPS

Marjorie does not answer her phone anymore. Not from numbers she does not recognize. Not from numbers she does recognize. Sometimes not even from her grandson, because she is afraid that someone has cloned his number, which is a thing she read about on a website her grandson sent her after he found out.

The wire receipt is still on the refrigerator. She has not taken it down. I do not know why. I have known a lot of victims and they each keep one object. One woman in Albuquerque kept the brochure. A man in Las Cruces kept the business card. The object is not a souvenir. It is a piece of evidence the victim is holding against the day she will need to prove to herself that she was not stupid.

She was not stupid. That part may be the saddest. The script was written by people who, prosecutors allege, had run it hundreds of times. The voice on the phone had said her name. The case number had been written down. The bank teller had been warned about, in advance, by a man who knew exactly which question she would ask.

The machine was built to defeat a careful person. Marjorie is a careful person. That is why the machine worked.

VIII. THE NEXT VERSION

The thing about a laundromat is that when you shut one down, the washers can be moved. The accounts get frozen. The mailboxes get closed. The shell companies dissolve. But the script does not die. The script gets copied. The script gets passed to someone else who will rent thirty-two mailboxes in a different county next year, open one hundred and fifty bank accounts in a different bank, and call a different woman at her kitchen table.

If you are reading this because someone you love just got a phone call, here is what I can tell you. The real bank will never ask you to move your money to keep it safe. The real federal agent will never call you first. The real escrow company will not change its wire instructions by email at the last minute.

If someone tells you your money is not safe where it is, that sentence is the door. Do not walk through it. Hang up. Drive to the branch. Stand in front of a person.

Marjorie did stand in front of a person. The script had already told her what the person would say.

That is the part the next pass of legislation has to fix. Until it does, the laundromat is open.