A church employee is under arrest in Houston, Texas, after being accused of posing as an ICE agent to extort money from a woman he had booked to give him a massage.
Donald Doolittle, 58, a safety director at the Gateway Community church in Webster, south-east of Houston, has been charged with impersonating a public servant.
According to police, Doolittle booked and received a massage from a woman operating out of a north-west Houston office building. He wanted to pay with a credit card; the woman said she only accepted cash or payment via Zelle, a digital network.
Police said Doolittle then pulled out an ID card labelled “ICE”, identified himself as an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agent, and asked to see the woman’s identification. She showed him her temporary visa but Doolittle allegedly then demanded money.
“He demanded she Zelle him $500 or he would take her away and she would never see her family or children again,” a magistrate said during a court hearing on Saturday.
The victim complied and sent Doolittle the money. Police said he later told her she wouldn’t hear from any other ICE agents because he had marked her case for non-prosecution, and asked her to delete their text message exchange, according to ABC News.
The alleged extortion only came to light after the victim told her story to officers whom she happened to run into the next day at a lunch. When interviewed by investigators, police said Doolittle denied getting a massage or going to the victim’s business, but police said surveillance video proved otherwise.
Earlier this month, a cyber crimes unit with ICE warned of cyber criminals masquerading as ICE agents. Some victims have been directed to download ransomware to their computer, which then freezes and shows a message that they must pay the ICE Cyber Crimes Center $400 within 48 hours to have it unlocked.
Other extortion efforts, according to the Federal Trade Commission, include phone or email scammers pretending to be from ICE claiming you have violated immigration law, that your identity information is wrong or out of date, or that you owe fees or need to pay an immigration bond.
“They’ll threaten to alert the police or to have you deported if you don’t give them the information they want. And they’ll tell you not to talk to anyone else about it,” the agency says on its website.
