The lowest scam

Josh Mankiewicz Correspondent • Profile

SEATTLE, WASH. - Eric Drew seemed to have all the luck in the world. He was energetic, successful, with a great family and a beautiful girlfriend. Drew was a software consultant and part-time model who had grown up in Northern California and worked around the world.

Josh Mankiewicz, Dateline Correspondent: It sounds like an enviable life.

Eric Drew: Ah, I envy it now. Ha.

Eric also wanted to give something back. That was always a part of him, says his adoptive mother Cindy Drew.

Cindy Drew, Eric’s mother: We got him when he was five weeks old and he was big for his age and has always been big in spirit, heart and stature.

Nearly every month for about eight years, Eric donated to the Red Cross – not money, or blood, exactly, but the part of blood called platelets which are essential in the treatment of many illnesses, including cancer.

Mankiewicz: You felt it was your duty to help out other people?

Drew: I just found doing any kind of a volunteer work very rewarding.  You know a lot more rewarding than—than doing just—work for pay basically.

But in a way he couldn’t have planned, at 35 years old, those donations to others would end up saving his own life.

Drew: I went in to give my platelets and they your red cell count is actually a little bit on the low side.  Which means “You’re slightly anemic.”  And you know, “You look a little bit pale, maybe you should go see a doctor.”

It felt like the flu, but it wasn’t. Eric’s doctor was as puzzled as his patient, and sent him to a specialist.

Drew: Within that week of going from going to the Red Cross to donate, to having these doctors evaluate my condition – during that week I got more and more sick.  Every day, I was twice as sick as the day before.  And it happened very fast.

A frightening diagnosis
It couldn’t have been more frightening: a rare and deadly form of the blood cancer leukemia — and it was rapidly shutting down his body.

Drew: That doctor said, “You’ve got about five days left to live without treatment.”

Mankiewicz: Five days left.

Drew: At the most.

Cindy Drew: It was a direct hit to your heart, to your solar plexus, to your way of life. My baby was dying.

Maybe it was a karmic refund for all his blood donations that Eric found out in literally the nick of time giving him a chance to survive.  The news would be the start of a two year painful ordeal of chemo, radiation and, untried treatments.   He’d find himself fighting not only for his life, but in an odd twist — for his good name as well.

By the end of January 2003, Eric was hanging on, but so was his cancer. For the next year, he’d find himself in three cities calling a series of hospital beds home. His early warning had given him time to slow his illness, but despite that, he still had the disease that was threatening to kill him.

Eric began to look for a bone marrow donor, perhaps his only chance for survival.  As an adoptee, his parents and siblings didn’t match up genetically.  But in that desperate search, Eric also found an opportunity to do some good for other leukemia victims.

It turns out one thing chemo and radiation can’t kill is a Type A personality.

Drew: The only way that’s gonna save my life is to find a bone marrow donor.  There are hundreds and thousands of people out there looking for bone marrow matches themselves, why don’t I, you know, use my resources, which I had a lot of—to put together a bone marrow drive. 

Mankiewicz: This is a rhetorical question, which is why not do that?  I’m guessing there were people, doctors maybe, maybe members of your family who thought that you should not be knocking yourself out to do something so public spirited at a time when you were gravely ill.

Drew: Well, but keeping myself busy was a mental salvation, I think, that I found.

Eric raised nearly a quarter of a million dollars and signed up some 700 marrow donors for other leukemia victims. But for Eric, no luck. There was no bone marrow match for him.

He had no choice, but to try an experimental treatment offered by doctors at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.  There he’d get a  bone marrow transplant, using bone marrow that only matched up genetically with his own by half.

Eric was told there was only a small chance he would even live. But he again went through painful radiation and chemo to prepare his body for this risky treatment.

And then something strange happened: Eric began to receive some unexpected attention.

Drew: About a week to ten days after I moved to Seattle, that I started getting calls from credit card companies, banks, creditors, saying, “Thank you very much for your application. Can you please verify this information.”

Eric didn’t know what they were talking about. Before he’d moved to Seattle, he had pared down his finances and closed a number of credit card accounts. Now, suddenly there were new accounts. It made no sense.

Drew: I immediately responded back to them and said, “I had never sent an application in here,” and “This is a mistake. Please nullify this application.” And then I hung up and moved on.

But moving on wouldn’t be so easy.

After treatment, collection notices
January 2004: Months after arriving in Seattle for treatment, months after Eric’s phone calls to the credit card companies, Eric was just barely well enough to sit up in bed and look at the mail that had been piling up.

Drew: When I finally came out of what I call my "transplant coma," I had piles of collection notices that had come in from saying I owed this money, I was default on this account, this and that.

It turns out most of the credit card companies had not cancelled those applications for new accounts that Eric didn’t know anything about. And there were now even more fraudulent accounts.

Drew: And I lost it. I was literally throwing glasses and breaking ‘em and swearing and, you know, just very, very upset. I couldn’t believe that I was struggling for my life, you know, and that people were attacking me and violating me.

It wasn’t an accident. It was identity theft, committed against a man who was already at his weakest and most vulnerable. As Eric’s life seemed to be slipping away — someone somewhere out there was stealing what little he had left.... and by then had rung up more than $10,000 in fraudulent charges.

Even though the companies had contacted Eric to confirm the new accounts, most wouldn’t cancel the cards without a signed document proving that the real Eric Drew was really Eric Drew. It was something the fake Eric Drew never had to do.

Mankiewicz: Normally, the way out of that is to provide a lot of documentation to the credit card companies. Which is kind of a pain, I’ve had to do it, I think a lot of people of had to do it. You were not really in a position to do that.

Drew: No, I was, like you said, I was on my back, full chemo, in a hospital.

Now, out of his so-called "transplant coma," Eric sent in those forms. He also called every law enforcement agency he could think of: the police, the FBI, even the Federal Trade Commission.

Eric says law enforcement told him his case was too small to chase down. And it’s true, with some $52 billion in identity theft each year in this country, one person who has been hit for $10,000 can’t be a priority.

But for this Type A cancer patient, what angered him was that what little he did have was being stolen. As he started feeling better, Eric decided that he didn’t just want to stop the credit cards — he wanted to stop the bad guy.

Drew: I thought to myself, “The only way I can stop this mess from getting any bigger is to actually go after this guy and catch him.”

Going after the culprit wouldn’t be easy, especially from his hospital bed. And as it turned out, what Eric would eventually find at the end of a long trail of clues would enrage him.

Drew: This guy obviously took a look at me, looked at my disease, and said, “He’s probably gonna be dead within the next couple of months.”

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