Lawsuit tells story of fraud woman says lured her into Texas hotel room with hidden camera
A hotel in Southlake is being sued by an Oregon woman who says she came to Texas for a job interview and found a video camera hidden in her room after two men she didn’t know came into the room uninvited, according to the lawsuit.
The whole episode has left the woman, who was not named in the lawsuit, traumatized, she said. And her attorney, Ed Blizzard, says it’s one of the most complex cases he’s seen.
The suit says that the woman, a recent college graduate, came to Texas for what she believed was a legitimate job interview with an IT service provider but instead found herself being recorded in a hotel room booked for her by the man claiming to be the potential employer’s CEO and intruded on by two unidentified men while in the room.
The woman is suing the hotel, the Hilton Dallas/Southlake Town Square; its management company, Driftwood Hospitality; and the man who she said brought her to Texas for what she thought would be an interview. Local management of the hotel declined to comment on the lawsuit. The Hilton corporate office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
According to the lawsuit, the man who brought the plaintiff to town for an interview identified himself as the CEO of a software consulting company based in North Texas. But the name he gave wasn’t his real name and the company doesn’t appear to exist despite having a convincing website and social media presence, according to the suit.
Leading up to the events in the hotel room, the woman told the Star-Telegram, the man picked her up from the airport in an exotic car. He took her to the hotel, where he gave her the keys to her room and the keys to a rental car in the parking lot. The drive to the hotel was awkward and she found it difficult to carry on a conversation with him, she said.
After months of communication and two previous interviews, one over Zoom and another in person while she was visiting family in Dallas, things didn’t seem right, the woman said. But, not yet knowing that the man wasn’t actually the CEO of a tech consulting company, she thought all of it might just be related to the eccentricities of a rich tech company owner, she said.
But the man is actually a financial systems manager for a restaurant chain, according to the lawsuit.
The woman said in the suit that the man booked the room for the night and he checked in before her arrival. She suspects that’s when he put a video camera disguised as a clock in the room. Hotel staff later told her they don’t have digital alarm clocks in the hotel, she said.
When she walked into the hotel lobby with her suitcase, the woman asked a staff member where the elevators were but did not ask to check in because she already had her keys, according to the suit. The front desk staff member did not ask her if she was checking in or ask to see her identification, she said.
After she was in the room and had started getting undressed to get ready for the interview later that day, she said, two men walked into the room unannounced.
The men told her they thought the room was vacant and left almost immediately, but wouldn’t tell the woman why they were there, she said. Alarm bells started ringing in her mind.
“There was just a gut instinct that something wasn’t right,” she told the Star-Telegram. “I just knew I was being watched.”
According to the suit, after looking around the room, the woman noticed the digital alarm clock had a quarter-sized camera in the face. She unplugged it and took the back off and minutes later got a call from the purported CEO, asking her if everything was OK, she said.
The woman called her mother, who told her to report the incident to hotel staff. The phone in her room wasn’t working, so she went down to the front desk, where she was provided a new room. Hotel staff moved her belongings into the new room and the woman called police, she said.
She didn’t hear from the man again and said when police tried that same day calling the number he’d given her, it had been disconnected.
The woman is suing the man for intruding on her privacy and causing “months of mental anguish,” according to the lawsuit. The hotel and its management company are also named in the lawsuit for alleged negligence in allowing all the events to transpire on the property.
She’s seeking damages for medical expenses, mental distress, loss of earning capacity and exemplary damages, according to the suit filed in Dallas County District Court.
Southlake police are investigating the report she filed about the man who arranged the interview but no criminal charges have been filed against him, according to her lawyers.
