The Texas Department of Health & Human Services spent $35 billion to WorkQuest for “pens/erasable markers” this year. This was in addition to a purchase order for $32 billion for “printers and printer supplies” to the same company in October of 2023.
(Note: I discovered this on Thursday, September 26th and did this livestream on Saturday, September 28th. By Tuesday, October 1st, after I outed this live, the purchase orders had been edited to more reasonable amounts. However, in my mind, two purchase orders totaling $67 billion raises questions about financial oversight and auditing in the State of Texas. I wasn’t looking for those particular purchase orders, they just stood out because all those numbers were wrapping in the column for contact amount. Money is math. How did a reconciliation not catch those grossly out-of-balance amounts? What is the review process, both on the part of the State of Texas and WorkQuest, that no one noticed purchase orders for such crazy amounts? Or is it, as one friend pointed out, a Men-in-Black inspired cooking of the books to cover unapproved projects … or straight out money-laundering? As another friend pointed out, $32 billion, the amount of the purchase order issued on October 4, 2023, is the amount of the Texas budget surplus in the last legislative session that Greg Abbott is withholding from Texas schools.)
00:00- Overview
Late last year, I ID’d activities of sock puppet networks online. I realize that there are many marketing/social media agencies that just do business this way. Personally, I think that it is extremely deceptive. Beyond being misleading to clients, the stock puppets steal words, ideas, and stories from actual people and claim them as their own and the client’s account will end up getting burned for any natural and organic engagement.
However, the activities I saw these sock puppet networks engaged in went far beyond being unethical, there were many, many clearly illegal things going on. It was a criminal syndicate. I started calling the sock puppets out, I began getting hacked. (I also wrote a letter to the Humble ISD school board against chaplains in public schools and sent it to all 150 representatives in the Texas legislature at the end of December.)
The hacking, attempts to locate me, and harassment on social media by floating targeted posts across my feed (see my first video in the hacked series for a description) continued, but I didn’t think I had anything concrete that I could go to authorities about. In April, I had definite evidence of hacking of my laptop. I called the FBI, they told me to call the local police and file a report. I called the police, they told me it sounded like a virus (it very obviously wasn’t), dismissed it, and told me to call GeekSquad.
After I made the call to the FBI, the attacks intensified when the criminals realized authorities weren’t going to do anything.
A month later, in May, we discovered evidence of a bootleg listing of the Dostoevsky issue of An Unexpected Journal (I have since resigned from the board and withdrawn my association). The thieves were not using an Amazon ISBN. It seemed to me that it would be a simple thing to track down who the ISBN was issued to at Bowker and whose financial information was on the account at Amazon.
Again, I called the FBI. In addition to the cyberstalking, online harassment, and hacking, there was now a clear cut instance of intellectual property theft. The agent told me to file a report on IC3. I also went into the local police department and reported the IP theft and fraud to an officer. I wanted him to see what was happening in person. He advised me to get the listing removed to “stop the bleed” and then pursue whatever remedies were available afterward.
As someone had told me that the FBI won’t bother with hacking and online fraud that involve low dollar amounts, I spent the next two months documenting all of the fraudulent activities I had seen the sock puppet networks engage in as well as outlining different ways the mass of sock puppet accounts manipulating the algorithm could be used to target, defraud and exploit people. I knew that attacking me was not the only thing the people behind the hacking were doing.
The report ended up being 30,000 words and 198 pages including 100 pages of exhibits with screenshots illustrating what I was seeing. I submitted it to tips.fbi.gov and Ic3.org. I also submitted a complaint to the Department of Justice as I was certain that the continual dismissal of my complaint in spite of flagrant and obvious offense was because I am a woman with a Hispanic last name.
I submitted the report on July 28, 2024.
As of today, I have yet to receive a single response or even acknowledgement from the FBI. The only response I received was a form letter saying they were dismissing the complaint without any investigation. The same thing happened after the July submission that happened in April, once the criminals knew that authorities weren’t going to do anything, the attacks got exponentially worse.
The next day, July 29th, began the next level of discovery.
I came across a major Christian platform that had multiple devotional series that looked like they were spun versions of my devotional published in 2019, #NoFear. They had reflections that used the exact words of my prayer in my live Bible studies. Recognizing sock puppet activity in a Facebook group for Christian book reviews, I came across a site they were promoting that looked like they were attempting to clone An Unexpected Journal and take over the name recognition of a long-running site of someone I knew that had let the site go because it had continually been hacked in the last year they were running it (sabotage is a continual theme in all of this). On this doppleganger site, I recognized the plagiarized work of people I knew.
This was just the beginning. I continued to find site after site and social media profile after social media profile using plagiarized words of either myself or people I knew. I edited for six years for An Unexpected Journal and I’ve edited a lot of writers. Our work had been stolen by either lazy ghostwriters or used to train an AI model, likely both.
This first week in August was also when I began to realize that the people behind the theft and attacks weren’t just nameless people on the internet, but people I knew.
On August 4th, I did a three hour livestream explaining what was going on and how the sock puppet networks were operating.
On August 5th, my Facebook login was suspended. When I was finally able to log back in, I could tell they had hacked my accounts. I also reformatted my phone. This was a big mistake as I am fairly certain that reinstallation was a corrupted operating system. All of the main Google apps were weird. This is a Google Pixel phone on the T-Mobile network. They were hacking through Google log-ins. Any time I would log in, it would prompt two one-time passwords so the hacker could log in as well.
On August 7th, I went back into the local police department as my phone was completely compromised. I wanted to make a report. I spoke to the same officer that I spoke to in May. His demeanor was completely different, condescending and dismissive. He told me hacking wasn’t a crime; that what I experienced wasn’t reality; and that I needed mental help. He was on crutches. In that report submitted to the FBI, I said he was the only person who had been helpful so far. I think the people targeting me read the report and threatened him. I think that either the FBI submission sites are either completely insecure or there are people on the take in the FBI that gave them the information. That is the only explanation for a police officer to say such a blazingly flagrant lie that hacking isn’t a crime.
The month of August was spent security my accounts and trying to get my laptop to function. I reformatted the laptop, wiping all the data. If it was a software issue, this should have taken care of the problem. It did not. Even without accessing the internet, they were able to hack and crash my laptop, which is why I think they are using my laptop identifier to hack.
It was one thing after another. There are updates in the Hacked saga as I came across new information.
I could
Reporting Computer, Internet-related, Or Intellectual Property Crime
https://www.justice.gov/criminal/criminal-ccips/reporting-computer-internet-related-or-intellectual-property-crime
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
https://www.ic3.gov/
What We Investigate:
https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/cyber
The Cyber Threat
Malicious cyber activity threatens the public’s safety and our national and economic security. The FBI’s cyber strategy is to impose risk and consequences on cyber adversaries. Our goal is to change the behavior of criminals and nation-states who believe they can compromise U.S. networks, steal financial and intellectual property, and put critical infrastructure at risk without facing risk themselves. To do this, we use our unique mix of authorities, capabilities, and partnerships to impose consequences against our cyber adversaries.
The FBI is the lead federal agency for investigating cyber attacks and intrusions. We collect and share intelligence and engage with victims while working to unmask those committing malicious cyber activities, wherever they are.
Learn more about what you can do to protect yourself from cyber criminals, how you can report cyber crime, and the Bureau’s efforts in combating the evolving cyber threat.
If you’ve been hacked, don’t count on the police for help
Even the FBI and your local police can’t agree on who you should contact first.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/when-you-get-hacked-figuring-out-who-to-call-for-help-can-be-a-puzzle/
An email pops up in your inbox and your eyes widen. A stranger claims to have video footage of you watching porn and asks for $1,000.
There’s outrage and embarrassment. You reach for your phone. But then you wonder, “Who do I even call?”
Unfortunately, the answer to that question is complicated.
As it turns out, even law enforcement officials can’t agree. The FBI and your local police both suggest that you should call them. But experts warn that in many cases, neither agency will be able to help, especially if the criminal is asking for so little money.
This dynamic underscores why these kinds of hacks — and yes, the porn scam really happened — are starting to proliferate. There’s no clear answer on who to call. And from law enforcement’s perspective, many of these crimes are too small to be worth prosecuting. It’s no surprise that cyberattacks have run rampant across the web, as thieves online find ways to steal credit card information from millions of people without leaving their homes.
“If the people doing it keep the dollar amounts small enough that no individual police department is going to be motivated enough to prosecute, you can collect a lot of money from a lot of people all around the world,” said Adam Bookbinder, the former chief of the US Attorney’s cybercrime unit in the district of Massachusetts.
https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/when-you-get-hacked-figuring-out-who-to-call-for-help-can-be-a-puzzle/
https://www.txsmartbuy.gov/
https://www.txsmartbuy.gov/browsecontracts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIGP_Code
https://www.periscopeholdings.com/buyer-solutions/nigp#
August 1, 2007: NASA Spent Millions on a Pen Able to Write in Space
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nasa-spent-millions-on-a-pen-able-t/
https://x.com/RaisedtoWalk/status/1788901523118006324
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