What Getting Sued, Scammed, and Arrested Taught Me About Resilience

The moment that kicked off one of the most stressful 48 hours of my life began with a simple question over the phone.

“This is the Financial Crimes Division of the FBI. Are you aware you owe back taxes?” 

It was March of 2017. I was working at Etsy, and the company had flown me and a coworker to California for a workshop hosted by Dan Ariely, a psychology professor at Duke. It was one of those early flights where you get off the plane and it’s still mid-day. The sun was shining and it felt a little surreal, like, “Why is it still so bright out?” I was tired, time-warped, 3,000 miles from where I’d been that morning in San Francisco, and waiting for a train when I got this strange call.

The Financial Crimes Division? I told myself this had to be fake. I’m just a regular guy! The caller seemed to anticipate my skepticism and instructed me to Google the number he was calling from. Sure enough, the search result for the number said “FBI.” 

My heart dropped. I still held the lease to the address they mentioned, so maybe something had been sent there from the government that I’d missed. It felt totally plausible.

The voice on the phone said they had the ability to reach local law enforcement to arrest me if I didn’t cooperate, and even pulled the Caller ID trick on me a second time with the SFPD’s number to “prove it.” They said I needed to pay off my back taxes immediately. After the flight and in my dazed state, the last thing I wanted was for the police to show up at this workshop and arrest me. I was alone, I was scared, and I panicked. My brain shut down and I went into solution mode—just do as they say and this will all be over. That’s exactly what they told me. 

For the next two days they continued to call me, a couple of guys from the same number. I could hear background noise on the calls; one speaker sounded East Asian, the other South Asian. They would vacillate between encouragement and threat. “You’re doing great, just keep doing what we say and you’ll be fine, this will be over soon.” Then they’d turn aggressive: “Do you want to be arrested? Is that what you want?”