A friend of mine was recently a witness for the FBI. He was working in a small office in the middle of nowhere and happened to have a very loud argument with the suspect. A few minutes later he left the building and when he was about to start his car, he got a call from an agent asking him if he wanted to be a witness in the case they were working on.
Mine was walking into the client's site. This was many years ago.
They had Novell Server issues, that's how long ago this was.
I walked in, cops everywhere. Man in a suit waves an FBI badge at me and asks why I'm there. I explained the ongoing work and he said, "Not today" and forced me off the premises.
The next day I was called back by the client to "rebuild their network".
When I got there, every single piece of hardware that contained anything remotely like storage had been disassembled and the drives imaged, then just left in pieces. lol
I spent that day rebuilding it all, did get the Novell server working again.
A week later, they were closed forever and I believe the owner and CFO got nailed for healthcare fraud.
I was asked to testify in a deposition. My stuff was pretty basic and mostly what I knew about how they used the tech. What I saw around there and if I saw any big red signs declaring FRAUD COMMITTED HERE!
The suspect was allegedly embezzling covid relief money and the argument was about things like "why are we using company time to go to your house and install the new flat screen TV you just bought?"
The moral of the story is that you should never steal money from the U.S. government because that is one thing that they will not tolerate and I do not know the limits of what they will do in order to catch you.
Also the suspect was convicted (so they probably aren't a suspect anymore) and last I heard was being flown to Washington D.C. for sentencing. That person is probably in some kind of prison now but I haven't been following the story very closely.
