Page 92 of Own the Eights
“We can shed a little light on that,” Hector said, emerging from the murmuring crowd with Bobby by his side.
“Are the Dannies in some kind of trouble?” she asked.
“Yeah, it’s not every day that you see the police and the FBI chasing people through a charity 10K,” Jordan added.
“We’ve been keeping an eye on the Dannies and the DannyLyfe blog for some time,” Hector began.
Bobby nodded excitedly and pushed up his glasses. “Their numbers were jumping at an insane rate.”
“And Bobby and I were quietly looking into this when the FBI contacted us. They’d been watching the Dannies, too,” Hector added.
Georgie shared a surprised look with Jordan.
“It turns out, the Dannies were using click farms and bots to boost their followers. And they were stealing posts from smaller blogs and photoshopping themselves into pictures,” Bobby continued.
Georgie turned to Jordan. “Do you remember when we saw them at the park? They said they’d been working with handicapped children.”
“And there was barely a kid in sight,” Jordan finished.
Georgie shook her head. “This is all crazy, but why would the FBI care about the Dannies?”
Hector shared a knowing look with his partner. “A couple of little things called fraud and tax evasion.”
“The supplements,” Jordan supplied.
“Bingo! They weren’t reporting their income,” Bobby answered.
Hector nodded. “And that’s because they’d struck up a deal with Russian mobsters. They’d taken a bunch of their money to pay for all those click farms and bots that were supposed to boost the profile of the DannyLyfe brand. And that’s not all. From what we know, it looks like they also spent some of it on lavish trips and lots of plastic surgery. They were selling the supplements, but they’d spent the money to do it right on themselves and ended up going with a sketchy supplement maker with a terrible track record. Those DannyLyfe energy supplements were nothing but baking powder and sawdust.”
“That’s awful!” Georgie exclaimed.
“But why did you invite them to participate in the Battle of the Blogs contest if you were already suspicious of them?” Jordan asked.
“This is where we got to go undercover,” Hector said.
Bobby raised an eyebrow at his partner’s words.
“Okay, not undercover, but we did get to help with the sting operation,” Hector added, amending his statement.
“Here’s how it went down,” Bobby began. “We agreed to help the FBI and buy them some time to collect more evidence against the Dannies, while we did our own in-house investigation on the Dannies’ online dealings. The plan was to lure the siblings into participating in the contest in hopes of winning the prize money. The FBI said the Dannies didn’t have much liquid cash and needed to make a payment to the gangsters supporting their lifestyle. They knew their time was running out and hoped to win this contest and collect the prize money today to hand over to the mobsters tonight to try and get an extension on paying back all that they owed.”
“Wow!” Georgie replied, stunned by the news, then gasped. “So, this contest was some elaborate scheme to catch a couple of crooks?”
“Kind of,” Hector answered.
“Kind of?” Georgie and Jordan echoed back.
“We never wanted one winner,” Bobby replied.
“What did you want?” Jordan asked.
Bobby fiddled with his glasses. “Isn’t it obvious?”
She shared awhat the helllook with Jordan.
“No,” they answered in unison.
Bobby chuckled. “We wanted both of you.”
