Chapter 8 - The Honeypot Snaps
At three in the morning on the wedding day, Ryan Vance couldn't resist his own greed.
In his room at the St. Regis, the surveillance software I had planted on his phone detected rapid activity. Ryan had logged into the fraudulent offshore portal using Marcus’s encrypted authorization keys.
Through the keylogger running on my laptop, I watched his keystrokes in real time.
He was trying to execute an early test siphon: five hundred thousand dollars from my secondary corporate holding account, routed through a shell LLC in the Cayman Islands, destined for a private account in Cyprus.
*Pinging routing server: Zurich.*
*Authentication: APPROVED.*
*Transfer status: PENDING INCOMING CLEARANCE.*
Ryan’s face, captured via his front-facing smartphone camera, grinned in the dark room. He took a screenshot of the pending wire transfer and texted Marcus Vance:
**Ryan:** *The pipeline works. The dummy account took the authorization without flagging Daniel's security team. We can pull the full forty million by two o'clock tomorrow.*
**Marcus:** *You idiot. I told you not to touch the system until the marriage license is signed by the officiant. If his risk-detection software trips, the entire sting falls apart.*
**Ryan:** *Relax, old man. Daniel is asleep in his suite dreaming of wedding bells. The guy has no idea he’s about to be stripped clean.*
I sat at my desk, watching the exchange unfold. I pressed a single key on my keyboard: *EXECUTE TRACE.*
The five-hundred-thousand-dollar test transfer was instantly rerouted into a controlled federal escrow account managed by Special Agent Miller. The transaction logs, IP footprints, and MAC addresses of Ryan's devices were permanently cataloged into the DOJ's evidence locker.
They had just officially crossed the statutory threshold for wire fraud exceeding one million dollars in intended loss, carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of twenty years in federal prison.
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I closed my laptop and stood by the window, watching the sunrise paint the Manhattan skyline in shades of crimson and gold.
The church bells of St. Patrick’s Cathedral would ring at eleven.
