Catch Me If You Can

Bryan Small, a union electrician in Chicago, bought an Intel Pentium motherboard in May 2001 from an eBay seller called Biggerthanu. It was for a computer that Small was putting together. He paid $188.50 via PayPal but never got the merchandise. "I felt rather p.o.'ed," Small says. "I decided to do what I could." So, like Higgins, Small started to email other buyers who'd been burned by Nelson, asking for information.

Why did Small make the effort? "If you go and rip people off, you make the whole system look bad," he says. "And once the system looks like it's not trustworthy, then no one wants to be affiliated with it." Small forwarded all of the information that he had collected to Higgins.

Contained within Small's cache of emails was the case's first big break. One of the emails Small had received was from someone who hadn't bought anything from Nelson but had sold him a digital camera. Luckily for Higgins, that seller had kept a meticulous database of every transaction, and he supplied the shipping address where the camera had been delivered. It had been sent to "John Nelson" at a Howard Johnson Express Inn & Suites in Orlando, Florida.

A postal inspector from Orlando went to the Howard Johnson's and showed the manager a photo of Nelson. The manager recognized him but said that he wasn't staying there anymore. Yet Higgins was encouraged. He now had a rough sense of where Nelson was -- or at least where he'd been recently.

Then he made what seemed like a huge mistake. In talking about the case to a reporter for MSNBC.com, Higgins mentioned that he thought that Nelson was in Florida. He intended to indicate that that information was off the record. But it ran in the MSNBC.com article on June 7, 2001.

"We were concerned that the MSNBC story had blown everything," Gunnison says. "Why wouldn't Nelson be Googling his own name [to see what was being said about him]? We were convinced that he'd leave Orlando."

Spread-eagled on the sidewalk

Nelson wasn't planning to leave Orlando, but he was laying the groundwork for creating a new identity in the real world, just as he'd been able to churn out new identities online. In libraries and on the Web, he researched how to obtain a fake set of ID documents. He didn't have a bank account in Orlando, so he had to be inventive about how he pulled money from his PayPal account. Proceeds from his auctions went into the account, and Nelson used that credit to buy other things on eBay, such as gold coins, CD burners, and other electronics.

Often, his purchases weren't mailed to him at hotels where he was currently staying. Instead, he'd have things sent to neighboring hotels. When he went to pick up the packages, he would tell the desk clerk that he was staying nearby and had made a mistake with the mailing address. Nelson took the electronics to pawn shops, where he sold them for cash; the coins went to a stamp-and-coin shop in Kissimmee, adjacent to Orlando.

One day at Disney World, Nelson met a Disney employee. She eventually moved into his motel room. He told her that his wife had been killed in a car accident and that he was a special agent with the Department of Justice. Nelson said that because of the types of cases he was working on, the agency had had to move him out of New Hampshire for his own safety -- and that she shouldn't tell anyone that they were living together.

In Boston, Higgins thought that the MSNBC.com article had surely tipped Nelson off. Instead, it wound up being the key to finding him. An AM talk-radio station in Orlando, WDBO, broadcast a piece about Nelson, mentioning that the notorious scammer was thought to be in Florida. One person who happened to be listening to the show that day was Ann Fettig, the owner of A&R Stamp and Coin in Kissimmee. The name Jay Nelson rang a bell with her.

Fettig, 60, looked through the records in her shop and found a copy of Nelson's New Hampshire driver's license. (Fettig's policy is to photocopy the license of anyone she buys from.) "He came in about 12 times over a period of six weeks," Fettig says. "He'd have one or two gold coins at a time. He was very chatty, and he seemed to have plausible reasons for having the coins and selling them."

Nelson told the judge that he was very sorry. "His comments needed to be taken with a cargo container full of salt," says assistant U.S. attorney Michael Gunnison.

In her spare time, over the next two weeks, Fettig scouted for information about Nelson on the Internet and eventually found his wanted poster on the Postal Inspection Service's Web site. "I wanted him to stop so that he wouldn't keep scamming people," she says, although she doesn't buy or sell through online auctions herself. "After I found the photo, I realized it definitely was him." She contacted Higgins.