Deception Read Online Free Page A

as that cited in the company documents (and belonging to the real Mr Sugden of Tunbridge Wells). The Hi 5 profile also had two other notable features: it said that the Zimbabwean Steven Sugden was based in Dublin and listed his languages as English and Russian. 26 What happened next could be seen as a panicky attempt to cover tracks. I identified and contacted (by Twitter, Facebook and email) the ten or so friends listed on the site. Within twenty-four hours, the mysterious Zimbabwean Mr Sugden cancelled his membership of Hi 5 , deleting the profile. al After a few initial responses, none of the friends was prepared to give any details of Mr Sugden’s background or to confirm his identity. Also within twenty-four hours of my enquiries starting, someone deleted an entry for a Steve Sugden based in Dublin on another social networking site, namesdatabase.com, 27 claiming him to be part of the ‘Class of 1992 ’ from Blackrock College, a leading Dublin secondary school. (Blackrock College School says that nobody called Steven Sugden ever studied there.) A request for contact to a Skype address for a Stephen P. Sugden in Zimbabwe went unanswered. A Twitter feed in the name of stephenpsugden has been protected so that outsiders cannot read it. An email then arrived, in lamentable English, reading as follows:
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    My name is Samantha Procter, i am an assistant to Mr Sugden; It is my understanding that you are trying to contact mr Sugden in order to discuss matters related to the book you are currently working on; Mr Sugden is currently away from the office. Please may you forward all relative information to me, which i will bring to the attention of Mr Sugden upon his return;
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    Repeated requests for clear answers to my questions brought belated and inconclusive replies and then a threat of legal action.
    An innocent explanation for this could go as follows. By an unlikely coincidence, two people, both called Steven P. Sugden, share the same date and year of birth and remarkably similar signatures. One of them is from Tunbridge Wells, the other genuinely from Zimbabwe. The latter, who just happens to speak Russian, becomes a director of a London-based company established through questionable means by a relative of his boss. He initially uses the address of a one-bedroom flat rented by his friends the Chapmans, protégés of his boss, and thereafter gives a forwarding address in Dublin. He does so carelessly, misspelling the suburb and even getting the house number wrong until he later corrects it. For prankish reasons he establishes some phoney credentials on the internet purporting to show that he was at school in Dublin. When outsiders start asking questions, he takes fright and clumsily covers his tracks.
    Another more sinister version could be that Ms Chapman, in cahoots with her father, was involved in a front company in London that moves money around either on SVR business or as part of some private scheme involving Russian officials and their foreign funds. One director is an employee of her father’s friend, a Russian masquerading as a Zimbabwean who has bolstered his flimsy invented identity with genuine personal data from a real person of the same name in the UK. He has created phoney internet clues to add authenticity. When Ms Chapman moves on, so does Mr ‘Sugden’, giving a misspelled – and misnumbered – Dublin address. My enquiries arouse first alarm and then attempts to escape scrutiny. Without answers from the Zimbabwean Mr Sugden it is hard to rule out either version.
    Precisely what bits of Russia’s foreign espionage effort may have been involved, or for that matter how much of Zimbabwe’s natural wealth was plundered, can only be a matter of speculation. The operation seems a bit sloppy by the traditionally high standards of Soviet and Russian tradecraft. Why use a living person’s identity? Why give two successive next-door addresses (in each case