By her account, she did so at least at one point: > As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government

By her account, she did so at least at one point: > As I walked back to my apartment, something jolted me out of my trance, and I became furious. No government agency would establish this as “protocol.” It was preposterous. Unfortunately, the doubts apparently didn't win. I guess there's a sort of Anna Karenina principle of scams: A successful scam takes a long list of things going exactly right for the scammers, and the unsuccessful ones are much less likely to be widely publicized.