The next day at work she finished her lunch as quickly as possible so she could rush back to her desk. Last year, while working on filing their taxes, Sara’s husband had given her his banking details. Now she keyed them into the online bank, keeping her fingers crossed that he hadn’t changed any of his passwords. The site loaded and she was greeted with a message welcoming her husband back. She went back a couple of months in the records and started going through all the transactions looking for something that wasn’t supposed to be there. At first she couldn’t find anything, but when she was scrolling through the list a second time she noticed an odd transaction. There were 97.5 dollars going into her husband’s account, seemingly without reason. The amount was small enough to be easily overlooked and the number was such that it looked more like a purchase than a transfer of funds. The sender was a man named Micheal Tuttle and as far as she knew, her husband didn’t have any friends or colleagues with that name. She made a note of it and started looking for other, similar transactions. Sure enough, she found several, always a relatively small amount, and never an even hundred or thousand, just 129, 204, 158 and so on. They were all, at least ostensibly, from people with generic sounding names that her husband had never mentioned. She made notes of the ones she found then went back further in the transaction history to see when they started. The bank only allowed her to go back one year but during that time these odd payments came in regularly every week. Whatever was going on had started at least one year ago, but what was it? Before she could do any further research her lunch break ended and she had to get back to work.

Over the next two days she spent her lunch breaks looking further into the odd transactions she had found. There seemed to be no connection between them other than the pattern of amounts she had noticed; they came from different people – most only had one transaction – different banks, and different parts of the country. She tried searching for the names, both on Google and Facebook, but they were all so common she found several people with the same name. When she tried to narrow the search to the region of the specific bank branch used, she got fewer results but there were still too many. It seemed she had hit a dead end.

She lay awake that evening, pondering how to proceed. She couldn’t come up with any way that she herself could find out who the people behind the transactions were, and asking her husband was out of the question. She needed someone with greater researching skills than herself if she wanted to find out more. The question was, was she really prepared to hire a private investigator? What if it turned out to be nothing? Maybe those people sending him money were her husband’s real acquaintances, just that she had never heard of them.  What if the investigator failed to find anything, what would she do then? No, she was sure there was something strange about those names, and she was certain there were people out there who could find out who they were. When she fell asleep that night it was way past midnight, but she had finally come to a decision.

It took her most of the lunch break the next day to find a researcher, as the person called themself, who promised to take on her case. She uploaded the data she had collected to her Dropbox and shared the link with the researcher, then paid the deposit she had agreed to, hoping she wasn’t doing something foolish.

A week later she got the results. According to the report there was not enough data to ‘identify a unique individual’ matching any of the names. When she read that, Sara’s heart sank. She had been a fool to spend all that money, a not inconsiderable sum, on a private investigator and it had led to nothing. Downcast she read the rest of the report. While the researcher had been unable to find the people linked to the transactions, they had picked up on something interesting: none of the people who had made transactions were registered as living in the same area as their bank branch. This wasn’t entirely unusual, the researcher pointed out, people could move without changing banks, but none of them living in the same area was statistically unlikely. The researcher believed that there was a high probability that some, if not all, of the people making those transactions only existed on paper; if the names sounded generic it was because some unknown entity had simply made them up. The report concluded that if Sara wanted to find out more, the researcher would have to resort to some…’questionable methods’.

Sara decided that she wasn’t yet ready for ‘questionable methods’, whatever that meant. She wrote a quick ‘thank you’ email to the researcher then sat and pondered what to do next. In a kind of last ditch effort she did what she perhaps should have tried before hiring the investigator. She entered all the names, account numbers and bank branches locations into an Excel file. Then, using the skills she had acquired at work, she started making various searches in the dataset to see if she could find any patterns. Nearly all the transactions were from people whose names only showed up once, with one bank branch and one account number tied to each name. There were however three that stood out. A person called Julie Barnes appeared twice but with different account numbers and one of those accounts had also been used by a person called Simon O’Connor. This was clear evidence that the people behind the transactions were fake.

Sara had never thought of such things before, but a bit of googling told her that creating a fake person is very cumbersome as it involves fake birth certificates, social registration numbers, school records and a whole bunch of other paperwork, all of which would require co-conspirators on the inside of various government institutions. She reckoned a far easier way to get a bank account in a fake person’s name must be to register a separate legal entity with that name. According to Wikipedia however, this was something that a human, or so called natural person, couldn’t do; only organizations such as companies or NGOs could do that. If her reasoning was correct, this meant the names she had collected from her husband’s bank account weren’t names of people, they were names of companies, and companies end up in publicly accessible records.

By cross-referencing the names with the bank branch she could find a region. Using that to search the local company register she quickly found what she was looking for. There were two companies called Julie Barnes but in two different locations. One of them had been registered as going bankrupt. Shortly after, a new company called Simon O’Connor had been created in the same area. It was almost as if someone had realized the name Julie Barnes had already been used, and tried to fix their mistake. Looking closer she noticed that Simon O’Connor had been created just a month before making a transfer to her husband. This was all the proof she needed, these companies were created specifically for making payments that would slip by unnoticed. Now all she needed to do was find who was registering the companies.

Digging a bit deeper in the company register she found the answer. Simon O’Connor was owned by a company called Lightfoot Investments Ltd. The same company had also acquired the remaining assets of Julie Barnes when it went bankrupt. She started looking up the other names on the list in the company register and sure enough, they were all there. All of them could be traced back to one of three holding/investment companies, Lightfoot Investment, Minaro Holdings or Investibles Inc.  She was sure these three companies were a front for something bigger, and to find out what, she had to find the connection between them.

During the last week she had spent every minute of her free time on her research and people around her had started to take notice; her colleagues wondered why she was distracted at work, her best friend wanted to know when they could meet up and her husband complained about her acting cold. Once again she had to force herself back into her normal routine in order to avoid raising suspicion. She compensated for that by getting up earlier “to do yoga” as she told her husband. In reality she would sit in front of the computer for 30 minutes while wearing her yoga outfit, but she made sure to always be in some yoga pose when her husband came lumbering out of the bedroom. When people told her she looked tired, she would dismiss it with a comment about early morning yoga, just as long as no one noticed that she wasn’t getting any fitter.

What she found in those early morning hours was that the CEO of Minaro Holdings, a man named David Lewis, was on the board for Investibles.  She also found him working as a ‘special consultant’ for Lightfoot. Clearly he was the connection and she focused all her energy on him.  She found his Facebook page and LinkedIn profile but they only contained basic information, there were no clear leads there. She did however get enough information to confirm that he was a real person who actually existed. Either that or he was an extremely well made fake. She kept digging, half an hour every day, and it was during this research that she first spotted the name The Agency. The way it was written indicated that it couldn’t just be any agency, but that ‘The Agency’ was one very specific one. David Lewis was connected to this agency in some way, and she knew right away that so was her husband.

She shifted focus from David Lewis to this agency, but with such a nondescript name it was extremely hard to find anything. After a lot of digging she managed to find two forum posts talking about it. The first one was from a reddit user claiming that The Agency was the real life Men In Black. There was nothing in the post showing how they got this information so she dismissed it as unreliable. The second one was a post on an old BBS, from the early days of the internet.

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