“So you gave him the meth as a down payment,” I said, leaning back in the chair across from her. “An eight ball. You drove to the RainTree Inn, picked up more, came back, and handed it to him in the parking lot. ”
Tisha Raines sat in the interview room with her hands folded on the table.
She wouldn’t look at me. She had been caught a few hours earlier, pulled out of a bathroom stall at an auto parts supplier in New Castle, Indiana, where she worked. Her phone was found in the toilet. She had tried to flush it.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “You know exactly what I’m talking about,” I said. “T. You knew him as T.
That’s who you gave the meth to. ”
She pressed her lips together and stared at the table. This case didn’t start with Tisha. It started with a man she never met.
His name was Brandon Burlison. He was a chief petty officer in the United States Navy, an active-duty recruiter stationed in California. He had a big social media presence because his job required it. His pictures were all over the internet.
He had no idea that a woman across the country was about to pay someone to kill him. And he had no idea he was already a victim. I work violent crime matters for the FBI. I had investigated a murder-for-hire case a couple of years earlier that had ended successfully, so when a new one came across my desk in the spring of 2018, my supervisor decided I was the right person to handle it.
The case came to us through a sheriff’s department east of New Castle. A deputy had spoken with an individual who said he knew someone soliciting a hitman for a murder-for-hire. That individual was willing to cooperate. He told us he had text messages from a woman named Tisha Dawn Raines.
She wanted someone killed for five thousand dollars. She was looking for someone who could get it done. I called the cooperating witness first. I confirmed the information over the phone, but I didn’t like taking things that way.
I wanted to meet him face-to-face, sit across from him, get a real sense of who he was and what he was bringing to the table. So I did. He showed me the text messages. Tisha was clear about what she wanted.
She had been scammed out of money by a man she met online, someone she believed she was in a romantic relationship with. The man she thought had stolen from her went by the name Andrew. She wanted him dead. The whole thing was strange.
Romance scams were not something I dealt with every day in violent crime matters. But I had heard of them. The people who perpetrate those scams know exactly how to short-circuit good judgment. They start a relationship online.
They earn trust. They play on feelings and emotions. Then they drop the money bomb. They need money to come see you.
They need money to furnish the house you’re going to buy together. Sometimes these scams go very deep. They’re picking out houses online. None of it is real.
In 2023 alone, there was $1. 14 billion lost to romance scams. That number should tell you how common this is. But most victims don’t respond by trying to hire a killer.
If Tisha Dawn Raines had come to us and said she had been scammed out of money, we might have classified her as a victim. We might have taken an interest in the case. That would have been the end of it. Instead, she decided to take the law into her own hands.
She decided she was going to hire a hitman, pay him five thousand dollars, and have Andrew killed. From a law enforcement perspective, we had three essential elements to prove in a murder-for-hire case. The use of a facility of interstate commerce, meaning a cell phone or something like that. The intent to kill someone.
And an agreement to pay something of pecuniary value for the killing. We had the interstate communications half of the equation from the cooperating witness. Now we needed the other half. We needed the exchange of value.
That’s when we decided to get an undercover agent involved. Being an undercover agent is something you volunteer for in the Bureau. It’s not something the FBI can force you to do. It takes a certain mindset to want to sign up for that kind of work.
We needed someone who looked the part and could talk the talk. With our undercover coordinator, we identified the right agent. He was on board from the very beginning. “Yeah,” he said.
“I can get this done. ”
We arranged for the undercover to meet Tisha in a park in New Castle. They had a face-to-face meeting. Our undercover was posing as a hitman named T.
The cooperating witness introduced them. “Hey Tish, here’s the guy I’ve got to do what you want him to do,” the witness said. “You two need to talk about it and come to an agreement. ”
She was on board right away.
She told T that she wanted this man killed. During their discussion about payment, she said money was a little tight for her right now, but she could get him what she called “go. ” Go was street slang for methamphetamine. They negotiated essentially a down payment on the hit in meth.
“Oh, is this all there is? ” the undercover said. “Well, I can go and get more,” she said. She left the undercover meeting, drove to a local hotel in New Castle, came back, and handed him another baggy of meth.
She was even thinking about flipping the first baggy to make a little extra money before she paid it over. That was who we were dealing with. Someone familiar with how the illegal side of the world works. I have been doing this job long enough to know that people don’t always think rationally.
She had been scammed out of about $1,200. She was willing to pay $5,000 to have someone killed. Monetarily, that makes no sense. But from a vengeance standpoint, from an emotional standpoint, it showed how invested she was.
She wanted that man dead. As soon as the meeting was over and the undercover left, we debriefed him. We took the two baggies of meth that had been given as a down payment and sent them off for testing. They came back positive for methamphetamine.
At that point, as far as I was concerned, the three elements had been met. We had the use of a cell phone. We had the intent to kill. We had the payment or promise to pay something of value.
We could have arrested her relatively quickly after that. But we had a bigger concern. We had information that T might not be the only person she was talking to. We wanted to make sure that if she was soliciting someone else to kill Brandon Burlison, we cut that off.
The worst possible case was a real hitman out there, someone who wasn’t an undercover FBI agent, who would actually get the job done. So we had to track down Brandon Burlison and warn him. I confirmed he was active-duty military. I confirmed his duty station.
Then I placed a call to Brandon Burlison. “My name is Agent Secor,” I said. “I’m with the FBI. ”
Oftentimes people get calls from people saying they’re with the FBI.
I always tell people to confirm that the person calling you is who they say they are. I gave him our main contact number and asked him to call back to verify. He did. Then I let him know what was going on.
“Here’s what’s happening,” I said. “I’d like to send a couple of agents out to talk with you and get more information directly. ”
He was surprised. He told the agents who interviewed him in California, “Look, this happens to me all the time.
It’s like hundreds of times my image has been used in scams. ”
His photos were everywhere on social media. He was a recruiter. He had to maintain a presence online.
His name, his likeness, his Navy uniform with his name on the lapel had been stolen and posted on fake dating profiles and fake Facebook pages. Scammers used his image to con women out of money. He had received about a hundred emails from women who were furious that he took their money. He had no idea who any of them were.
He had never talked to any of them. None of them looked familiar. He only found out about all of this when he learned there was a hit on his life. That was scary.
This wasn’t just someone saying “you stole my money. ” This was someone saying “I’m going to kill you. ” And he had nothing to do with it. He was a victim of identity theft.
The person Tisha believed had scammed her was not the person who scammed her. The man in the pictures, Brandon Burlison, was a real person. He was a chief petty officer in the Navy. But the person who had been talking to Tisha online was someone else entirely, someone using Brandon’s photos.
That person conned her into sending $1,500, maybe more, and then disappeared. Tisha had sent a significant amount of money to a person she thought she was going to have a romantic relationship with. She thought she met the man of her dreams. He was overseas.
He was going to be deployed. They were going to be happy. That’s not what happened. Andrew, as she knew him, asked her for money.
She didn’t have a lot. When she gave him the $1,500, she really thought it was going to bring her love. As soon as she gave him the money, he stopped talking to her. She knew she had been scammed.
The emotional damage from that kind of betrayal is hard to measure. When you’re so emotionally invested in something and then you’re triggered by hurt and pain, some people cannot control how they react. Most people don’t respond by seeking revenge. But Tisha did.
She had murder on the brain. I cut a lead out to our Los Angeles field office to have Brandon Burlison interviewed face-to-face by a couple of FBI agents. Because he was considered a victim in the case, we also had a victim specialist reach out to him. He was cooperative even though he was shocked that someone was soliciting a hit on him.
He had nothing to do with the scam. He had never met Tisha. He had never talked to her. But because of his stolen identity, a woman he never met wanted him dead.
I spoke to him on the phone. He said his photos had been used by scammers to scam women out of money. He called those scams “soft heart scams. ” We call them romance scams.
He was surprised, more than scared. He didn’t shy away from a fight. But I don’t think anyone is prepared for the news that someone has been trying to have you killed. While the agents talked to Brandon, we continued to work the case against Tisha.
We wanted to control the situation. Our undercover agent texted her. About a week before he had told her that he had, quote, “found the package” and that it was going to get done. We wanted to make it look like Brandon Burlison had already been murdered.
That way, if she was soliciting other people to kill him, she would call it off. No one else would be out there looking for him. Mr. Burlison agreed to cooperate and help us stage photos.
We made it look like he had indeed been murdered. Our undercover agent texted those pictures to Tisha. She responded, “I don’t know who that is. ”
That was the last substantive contact our undercover had with her.
That statement was an attempt to hide her complicity in what she believed was the death of a human being. She thought the hit had happened. She thought someone was dead. And her only response was to say she didn’t know who the victim was.
From the undercover’s perspective, it was a strange thing to be part of. He had to put on makeup to look like he had been shot, lay on the ground, and pose for the photos. It was not a normal day at the office. We had everything we needed.
Now we needed to arrest her. We tried to arrest Tisha at her house first. She wasn’t there. We figured she might be at work.
She worked at an auto parts supplier in New Castle. The arrest team moved to her place of employment and found her. The interview is recorded on audio. She sat down across from us, and I started asking questions.
“Where’s your phone? ” I asked. “It’s waterlogged,” she said. “I threw it away last night.
It wouldn’t turn on. It wouldn’t do nothing. I even stuck it in rice and everything. ”
“So you didn’t throw it away last night?
”
“Well, I did this morning. ”
People often react this way when you confront them with inconsistencies. The story keeps changing. She tried telling us she had told T no.
She said she was emphatic about it. She didn’t want it done. “T says, ‘I can take care of that for you,’” I said. “What did you understand that to mean?
”
“Well, I thought it was just pretty much a joke,” she said. “But when you said no, what did you think you were saying no to? ”
“Hurt me,” she said. “Hurt him in some way.
”
“Okay. And you said no, that does not need to happen. ”
“Yes. ”
“Tisha,” I said.
“I think your phone is here somewhere. I think you don’t want to tell us your phone is here. I think you dumped it in the toilet in the bathroom that they found you in. I think you were hiding in there.
Did your mom or your son call you and say we were looking for you? ”
She hesitated. “Yes. ”
“Okay, where is your phone?
”
“Here. It’s in there. ”
“Why’d you lie to me? ”
“Cuz I’m freaking out.
”
We had someone go in and pull the phone out. Then I continued the interview. “So tell me about T. After T says ‘Hey, I can take care of that for you,’ and you say ‘No, hell no,’ did you have any discussions with T about it after that?
”
“Yeah. He sent me a picture. ”
“What kind of picture? ”
“Of somebody’s head blown off.
”
“And whose head was blown off? ”
“I don’t know. ”
“Tisha, I know that you gave T something. I know that you got out of T’s car, got into your car, which was a white Toyota, drove to the RainTree Inn, and brought something else back for T.
Does this sound familiar? ”
She didn’t answer. “What did you give T? ”
“I got him meth.
”
“How much? ”
“It was like an eight ball. ”
An eighth of an ounce. Depending on the area, that runs anywhere from a hundred to two hundred dollars.
For the sake of the interview, I showed her the staged photo of Brandon Burlison, the one that made it look like he had been murdered. “What’s this? ” I asked. “I don’t know what that is.
I don’t know who it is. I got that sent to me. ”
“By whom? ”
“By T.
”
“Why did T send you this picture? ”
“And I don’t know. And I said ‘I don’t know who that is. ’ That’s exactly what I said to him.
Please, I freaked out when I seen it. ”
“Why’d you freak out? ”
“Because I thought it was Andrew. And I looked at it and I sent it to him.
”
“So you thought it was Andrew? ”
“Yes. ”
She thought it was him. She thought Andrew had been killed.
And her first instinct was to say she didn’t know who that was. At the end of the interview, I told her that T was an undercover FBI agent. She deflated. Physically, you could see it.
She knew the game was over. The case resolved itself fairly quickly for a federal case. We charged Tisha with the violation of the murder-for-hire statute and with the distribution of methamphetamine. As part of the plea agreement, the United States agreed to dismiss the meth counts if she would plead guilty to the murder-for-hire.
She did. She was sentenced to almost ten years in federal prison. Here’s the thing about this entire story. Tisha Dawn Raines was a victim.
She was a victim of a romance scam. She was victimized by someone who stole a Navy chief petty officer’s identity, someone who lied to her, charmed her, made her believe she had found love. She sent that person $1,500 and got nothing in return but heartbreak. But she didn’t report it.
She didn’t file a complaint. She decided she would pay $5,000 to have the man killed. She tried to pay for it with methamphetamine she sold. She gave a down payment on a hit.
She negotiated like she had done this before. And because of her reaction to being scammed, another victim was created. Brandon Burlison, the real person in the photographs, nearly became the victim of a murder-for-hire plot. He had never scammed anyone.
He had never met Tisha. He was just a man whose picture was stolen and used by a criminal. His life was in danger because of a con artist’s lie. Tisha’s entire life, according to people who knew her history, was a series of poor decisions.
She didn’t know how to do the right thing. Her criminal history was limited to things like drunk driving until she was arrested for dealing narcotic medications in Henry County. She was in and out of the jail system. Methamphetamine was the drug of choice throughout the Southern District of Indiana, especially in rural counties.
It’s horrible, and it makes people do horrible things. She got out of jail, hopped online, and met Andrew. He charmed her. She was just looking for love like everyone else.
She had a troubled past and she wanted a better life. But the man she thought she loved didn’t exist. And the man whose face attracted her didn’t even know she was alive. There’s a lesson here that goes beyond Tisha.
Identity theft is a pervasive issue. When your personal information is stolen, you’re at risk. Someone could be using your name, your face, your image to defraud people. And those victims might blame you.
Not the criminal. You. Brandon had been contacted by hundreds of women who thought he had scammed them. He had to explain, over and over, that it wasn’t him.
That someone had cut and pasted his pictures off the internet and used them in fake dating profiles. He had to defend himself against people he had never met. And then he had to learn that one of those women had tried to have him killed. When people find out their identity has been stolen, their reactions vary.
Some are terrified. Some brush it off. Most fall in the middle. They’re empathetic.
They don’t like hearing that their images have been used to hurt other people. They notify friends and family. They change their practices. But the risk is real.
The scam artists know how to play on emotions. They use soldiers and Navy personnel because they’re deployed, because it’s harder to verify them. They’re away. They can’t talk all the time.
They’re serving their country, so people want to believe them. And eventually they have to come home. So the scammers have a reason they need money. They send documentation.
They send IDs. Those IDs belong to everyday people, stolen off the web. There are thousands of fake websites with fake teams. Some images are stock photos.
Many are stolen. In some cases, the level of deception goes even deeper. Criminals steal an image of a real lawyer or a real professional and put it on a fake website with identical credentials but a different name. The victim of that identity theft might not find out for years.
How dangerous is it for people whose IDs are stolen? It’s across the spectrum. There are made-for-TV movie cases where someone is actually stalked, found, and killed. Those cases are incredibly rare, thankfully, and they’re horrible.
Then there’s the opposite end of the spectrum, where people say, “Well, thank you very much. There’s nothing to do about it. I’m not worried about it. It’s not my fault.
It’s not my problem. ”
Most people land in the middle. The digital world is inescapable. We use it for everything.
Financial accounts, credit card accounts, bank accounts, emails, social media, apps, phones. If your personal information is stolen, most of those things are at risk. And so are you, because somebody is going to think you’re the fraud. For law enforcement, these cases matter.
They matter to the victims of the crimes. They should matter to everyone who uses a computer, social media, or the internet. We do our best to fight it. But the best defense starts with the person in the mirror.
Be sensible about what you put out there. You control how much presence you have on social media. You can put yourself all over the internet. You can share all kinds of facts about yourself.
That doesn’t make you responsible for being scammed, but it does make you more open to having your identity stolen. And when someone contacts you asking for money, pay attention. Someone who loves you won’t constantly ask for money. They won’t need money for a plane ticket, a house, a deployment problem.
Scammers rely on you wanting to believe. They rely on you hoping it’s real. Tisha Raines wanted it to be real. She wanted it so badly that she paid $1,500 to a man who didn’t exist.
And when she realized she had been deceived, she didn’t accept the loss. She didn’t ask for help. She sought vengeance. She hired an undercover FBI agent to kill a victim of identity theft.
The hitman she paid was the law. The man she wanted dead was innocent. And in the end, she was the one who went to prison, still believing she had done nothing wrong about being scammed. The only person Andrew ever was, the scammer she thought she loved, is probably still out there defrauding other women.
He sits somewhere with untraceable accounts and stolen photos. He takes women’s money and watches them fall. One of those women, Tisha, tried to have him killed. Another might do the same.
Or she might take her own life. Or she might just lose everything and never recover. People react in different ways when they’re severely traumatized. Many of those reactions are almost impossible to control.
When you start messing with people’s feelings and emotions, you’re in a whole other lane. Money is one thing. Once someone makes an emotional connection with you, once they think you love them, once you’re saying the right things, the damage goes deeper than money. Tisha’s trauma turned into a murder plot.
She had murder on the brain. She pleaded guilty. She was sentenced. The case was closed.
But Brandon Burlison will never forget the day he learned his face was used to scam a woman who then tried to have him executed. And I will never forget the way Tisha’s voice changed when she realized T was an FBI agent. The interview room went quiet. She didn’t have anything left to say.
The story she had been telling herself, about being jilted by Andrew, about finding someone who would take care of the problem, about paying with drugs she sold, all of it came apart. She sat there, slumped, knowing the game was over. The meth was tested. The evidence was preserved.
The plea was entered. The sentence was handed down. Almost ten years.
For a romance scam that started with a stolen photograph of a Navy man she never met.
