How a Dallas couple found themselves on a fake billboard in Facebook crypto scam

One day in late January, Kelly Denise Mitchell posted to Facebook. “Are you tired of working a 9-5? Do you want to retire wealthy?” The post was on the long side, but the part that stole attention was the picture: a massive billboard of Mitchell and her husband, Sean Garman, lording over a highway at dusk. “Trade with Kelly Denise Mitchell,” the billboard read, beside a photo of the couple looking like they’d just won the lottery.

Kelly Mitchell and Sean Garman are what you might call tastemakers. Successful, connected, ambitious. Married since 2006, they run an architecture firm in Dallas that has shaped the look of many popular spots in Dallas, including the Italian restaurant Nonna and the French-inspired Boulevardier (recently departed, much mourned). They’ve designed eye-catching modernist homes, chic cabanas for the Omni Las Colinas Hotel, and a bookish gift store for Plano’s Legacy West shopping center with the Instagram-friendly name, Read Between the Lines.

At 58, Kelly is the kind of go-getter whose designs have graced many a photo spread. She’s been name-checked by Texas Monthly and D Magazine. Back in 2010, she spoke to Architect magazine about sustainable homes, sharing tips about recycled terrazzo surfaces and how eco-friendly can still be affordable. In 2020, when the Dallas chapter of the American Institutes of Architecture named the couple’s company, Mitchell Garman Architects, firm of the year, the announcement featured a darling photo of Kelly and Sean, holding hands and smiling at the camera. Kelly wears knee-high black boots with a green knit dress that could be vintage or designer; she just looks cool.

Dallas architect Kelly Mitchell poses for a portrait with her husband Sean Garman, on Friday, July 26, 2024, at their office. The couple runs a design firm together. Earlier this year, Kelly’s Facebook page was taken over by a hacker who began promoting crypto currency.(Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer)

So the idea of Kelly and Sean on a Dallas billboard wasn’t insane. Our highways are dotted with oversized images of local success stories: Real-estate guru Rogers Healy, sports broadcaster Mike Rhyner, Mint Dentistry’s Field Harrison, looking like James Bond in a white tux while assuring us he makes sexy teeth. Why not Kelly and Sean?

“If anyone can make crypto work, it’s those two,” thought a friend who had stumbled onto the post one morning. Kelly and Sean were forward thinkers, the kind of power duo who clink glasses at mixers for architectural and design forums and fell in love with Marfa long before The New York Times made it hip.

Another friend also found the billboard plausible. We’ll use her initials, J.K. She was retired, but the idea of being wealthy in retirement did appeal, because why not? The billboard is what struck her. “Wow, that’s really cool,” she thought. “I don’t drive through Dallas a lot, but I’d like to see that.”

J.K. didn’t want to use her full name for this story, by the way; to publicly claim you’ve fallen for a scam adds embarrassment to an already embarrassing encounter. Earlier this year, when a New York magazine writer confessed to losing $50,000 in an Amazon scheme, she became the target of such rabid scorn on Twitter, you’d think she was the person behind the scam, not the hapless victim.

J.K. wasn’t super-close with Kelly, who was connected to about 1,200 people on Facebook. The two of them weren’t technically friends, in other words, but they knew each other through Sean’s mother.

“I may be interested,” J.K. wrote to Kelly through Facebook Messenger one afternoon. “What is the ROI?”

She had several exchanges through the blue rectangle bubbles of Facebook Messenger, making the reasonable assumption that the person responding to her was Kelly. That person explained the ROI, or return on investment, was quite spectacular. 525% profit within two weeks.

A screen capture in January of 2024 of Dallas architect Kelly Denise Mitchell’s Facebook feed after a crypto scammer took it over. The photo was actually from Kelly and Sean’s wedding at the Sons of Hermann Hall.(Christopher Wynn )

How reality got confusing

Crypto is cryptic: What it is, how it works, why it matters. I fall into the vast category of folks who politely turn away when the subject turns to crypto, which happened a lot during the early years of the pandemic. I spoke with Business reporter Irving Mejia-Hilario, who has covered cryptocurrency for The Dallas Morning News (often attached to the likes of Mark Cuban). Mejia-Hilario described an often volatile and largely unregulated market whose nonphysical currency operates outside traditional banking institutions. “Transactions are all completed online through what’s called ‘the blockchain,’” he said, going on to explain that thousands of cryptocurrencies trade across more than a thousand individual blockchains, all of which sounded like chaos to my liberal-arts brain.

What’s apparent to even those of us who don’t understand cryptocurrency is we live in a world of transition: Old ways are disappearing, new modes swiftly rising to shape how we live. Consider Facebook, which began in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room as a “hot or not” game and was now the primary way J.K. connected to the world: her son, her son’s friends, her running group, where members posted plans to a chat each day. Meet at the lake at 6am, that kind of thing.

Facebook has been rebranded as Meta, but good luck finding someone who calls it that. When I asked J.K. how often she went to the site, she laughed. “A better question would be when do I not use Facebook,” she said. At 78, she is one of 3 billion people globally who have joined the platform, and among the 65+ demographic, the users are often quite devoted. It’s not accurate to say “Facebook is for old people,” but according to the AP, 60% percent of seniors log in at least once a day.

Facebook scams are so commonplace, investigative journalism has mostly given up covering them. Yes, there are bad actors out there, much like emails often arrive with rogue links to websites that can consume your data: Why? How? Who? Unclear. The Internet age we’ve been living inside for more than two decades never came with an instruction manual, and our virtual space has a billion little rabbit holes, digging into one of them rarely makes sense.

J.K. knew the experience of getting friend requests from people she’d already friended, or random messages from a long-lost relative who, after 10 years, pops up to say “hi.” Someone in J.K.’s friend circle sends her Facebook reels every day, and she can’t figure out if it’s a bug, or the guy was hacked, or he has vastly overestimated her interest in viral videos.

So she was growing suspicious as she went back and forth. “Formidable profit” was the stilted phrase this version of Kelly kept repeating. J.K. asked a question the actual Kelly Mitchell would know. What was the name of her mother-in-law? And that’s when the ruse came to an end.

The answer, as J.K. describes it, was “Gobbledygook.”

She never lost money. She lost trust.

“Have You Been Hacked?”

The real Kelly Mitchell had no idea this was happening. She hadn’t been to Facebook since June 2023, when she tried to log in one day and could not. She was more of an Instagram user, but she used Facebook from time to time to stay connected. Was she invited to any parties? Any interesting events coming up?

The lock-out was annoying. She tried a few days later, but same problem. She couldn’t change her password, which was weird. Eventually she reached out to friends to find out what they could see, and the bizarre part is how her page seemed to have disappeared. She’d been untagged from photos. She didn’t show up in friend lists. “It’s like I never existed at all,” she said.

Dallas architect Kelly Mitchell poses for a portrait, on Friday, July 26, 2024, at her office in Dallas. She runs a design firm with her husband Sean Garman. Earlier this year, her Facebook page was taken over by a hacker who began promoting crypto currency.(Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer)

This was clearly a problem, but also a headache to figure out. “I’m not the most technically minded person,” Kelly explained, and so she did what many of us do when confronted with any of the million micro-confusions of a digital age. She ignored it. “I’ll deal with this later,” she told herself, but she never did — until January when her phone started blowing up. One message, five messages, the same message.

“Have you been hacked?”

Well, yes, she had, but a long time ago. What she came to understand, however, is this particular morning her Facebook page had been seized to promote crypto currency. A friend sent her a screenshot of the billboard, and she recognized the picture: A wedding photo, she and Sean smiling in that radiant way that cannot be manufactured.

I asked Kelly what she knew about crypto. “Nothing,” she said with a laugh.

She told all this to Sean, who was equally befuddled. Sean had a Facebook page, but he hadn’t been to the site in more than 15 years. The account was attached to a former work email, which he needed to change the password, so he let the page lay fallow.

The billboard was clearly Photoshopped. The sloppy cut around the image, the cheap sans-serif font, the corny B in the shape of a dollar sign. Kelly and Sean are the kind of aesthetes who labor over tiny details in an architectural design, could anyone possibly believe this was real? The highway in the billboard photo had palm trees — what Dallas highway was that? — but Facebook courts our attention at half-mast, and people did believe it.

Dallas is an image-based town. The status cars that clog Central Expressway, the manicured lawns in coveted neighborhoods, the logos on purses and shirts seen at shopping malls all betray a city with more than a stab of insecurity about wealth and status. Kelly wasn’t that embarrassed, though, because the ordeal was unfolding in a virtual space she couldn’t access, which sort of felt like it wasn’t happening at all.

But the fake Kelly kept hawking opportunity on her timeline. “Are you investing in Crypto? Send a dm to know more on how you can start earning,” read a post next to a picture of a certificate of completion from The Academy of Financial Trading (one out of five stars on the Better Business Bureau website). Another featured a hand reaching into a cloudy sky with words across the image: “Faith is your positive response to what God has already done.”

Texts and messages coming to the real Kelly were growing more urgent. This had gone from something that happened to her to something she needed to do something about. People could fall for this scam. Fix this, people told her. But how?

Facebook does not have a phone number, in case you’re one of the many frustrated users who have tried to find one. Customer service for 3 billion could not be easy, but the levers on the machine are quite disorienting. This page, that button — was anyone even on the other side?

The advent of Facebook account takeovers

If you search Facebook for the business name featured on the crypto billboard, you find similar posts.

“Check out this incredible success story!” reads a post from September 2023 by a father in Georgia. “One of my students just scored an amazing $258,927 profit using my trading platform.”

A pastor’s wife named Tonya posted a billboard similar to Kelly and Sean’s, an official-looking photo of her next to a big-money brag. “Can I get your autograph?” reads one comment. “You’re famous now.” (The page has since been removed.)

In Canada, a woman named Lisa Lowery watched as her Facebook page was hijacked by someone selling goods that purported to be from the real Lisa, according to a May 2024 story from CBC News that referred to these scams as “Facebook account takeovers.” The fake post featured photos of a truck, a golf cart, and an ATV along with a caption that began, “Hey all, we are clearing out items from my Dad’s house (he got moved to aged care).” Lisa’s friends were swindled out of $2,500 trying to buy items that never existed, as the real Lisa reached out to Facebook to no avail.

Amazon and Tesla have also been victims of fake crypto scams. “You can participate in the birth of Amazon Token and be one of the first buyers,” read an ad with a picture of Mark Zuckerberg. An article in The Markup suspected the account takeovers actually stemmed from strict rules put in place for cryptocurrency ads in 2022. With so many barriers to advertising, the best way to sell a questionable product became spreading it from friend to friend.

Related:Crypto scams are becoming more common on social media. Here’s how you can protect yourself

It’s yet another way social media, with its promise to unite us, has unwittingly turned us against one other. Whom can we trust? What’s even real? “Pig-butchering” is the industry term for these scams, a blunt phrase to describe fattening a pig before slaughter, according to a story in ProPublica. The technique began in China, then blasted across the globe during the pandemic, leaving damage in its wake.

We want to believe. It’s no coincidence that scammers proliferate on Tinder and other dating sites. Money, love, prosperity. We dream of a better future. Hope is what keeps us going, though blind hope can be easily exploited by con artists.

The resilience of Facebook, the reason people return to the platform despite its many pitfalls, is the opportunity to show up for our friends. Our desire to be connected can lead us toward danger, yes, and it can also lead us back to each other.

Kelly’s friend William Baker saw the crypto billboard. Baker also studied architecture, one half of the design firm JonesBaker, and he was close enough to the actual Kelly to spot the fake.

He went to Facebook to alert the others. “Y’all, if you’re friends with Kelly Mitchell, her account has been taken over by nefarious hackers. She is NOT starting a new career in cryptocurrency. She’s still an architect!” The comments quickly filled with relief and gratitude for the clarity. As a mutual friend put it, “I was like wtf??”

I reached out to Facebook’s parent company, Meta, but did not get a response to multiple emails requesting comment.

Kelly got the posts taken down eventually. She found a contact on the site and verified her identity with a scanned copy of her driver’s license. When I asked her to retrace this step-by-step, the process had faded to a bureaucratic blur, a memory she’d rather forget. About a day after she made the report, her Facebook page had been taken down. But not long after that, scam posts started appearing once more (“And she’s baaack!” a friend texted her), and Kelly had to go through the process all over again. The page is currently down; the scam appears to be done. But is it?

“It’s a little creepy that they have access to all my photos and my history on Facebook, which I completely lost, and that’s upsetting,” Kelly told me. Kelly and Sean were married at Sons of Hermann Hall. The photos had been taken in a makeshift booth, a happy memory that now has a darker story attached, the way a house can look different after someone has broken in, a reminder that we are all vulnerable. But unlike a real-life burglary, the data taken from Kelly had an uncertain value, an uncertain future. “Who knows what other information they have …” She began the thought and trailed off, but her husband completed the fear:

“Or what they’re doing with it,” Sean said.

A contemporary residence designed by Kelly D. Mitchell was showcased on the 2009 American Institute of Architects Dallas Home Tour. (Charles Davis Smith / Digital File_UPLOAD)

Kelly and Sean had plenty of other projects to keep them busy. Last October, they completed the design for Renny’s Bar & Grill in Preston Forest Village, an American bistro by Mark Maguire with a groovy speakeasy attached called The Stache. They’re working on two penthouse condos in a Turtle Creek high-rise and the renovation of a motor lodge in Fredericksburg.

Kelly’s off Facebook. She doesn’t really miss it; there are so many other ways to stay in touch with friends. It’s the outer ring, as she calls it, the periphery of people you may not text with but still matter in your life. How are they doing? Is everyone OK?

“I’ve thought about creating a new account for myself,” she said, and then paused. “But I haven’t done that yet.”

Related:Crypto scams are becoming more common on social media. Here’s how you can protect yourself

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