She had long consoled herself with the thought that WhatsApp and Proton Mail, the email service she had used for the apps, were encrypted. She used an alias, Carol, on her work phone so clients couldn’t easily give her away. Now the physical evidence was gone, too. (“Sweet illusion,” she wrote to me.) For a couple of weeks after the purge, Barbosa forced herself to stop creating accounts.
She spent New Year’s in Miami Beach, where she posted a photo of herself wearing Gucci sunglasses and holding a frozen mai tai the size of her head. She shared the photo with the mob.
Someone joked back: “Find me, FBI.”
As 2020 approached In 2021, Barbosa continued to do the math, and a buzz of dread invaded his moments of leisure. He began to think of a way out.
Barbosa confided to a mob friend that he was afraid of losing everything. News stories in February didn’t help: A 30-year-old Brazilian named Douglas Goncalves had been arrested for working under a stolen identity at Instacart. It was the first time Barbosa had heard of criminal consequences for a fake profile, and she recognized the suspect’s name: Goncalves, she says, had texted her a couple of weeks earlier to open an account for him. His long-winded answers to her usual investigative questions annoyed her, and she ignored him, she recalls. But the texts could still be on her phone.
Fonseca, Barbosa’s partner at DoorDash, also began to worry. There were too many people selling accounts, licenses and Social Security numbers in their WhatsApp groups. “Everyone knew this bomb would go off one day,” he said. “People are stupid and don’t take care of themselves.”
Barbosa thought about legalizing himself, getting back into the food business and opening a Brazilian steakhouse. He estimated the start-up costs would be about $50,000; he had several times that amount. He Googled to see what kind of permits he would need.
Still, her scams kept escalating. Uber was now rejecting fake ID photos; she bought a printer to create fake physical licenses. She had more than 50 active customer accounts on various platforms, and new people kept texting her, often with sorry stories. To calm her nerves, she told herself that with so many people in the account business, some doing more audacious things than her, why would she? she Getting into trouble? One mob member, he says, ran a crew that faked DoorDash deliveries to offer food that was never actually picked up or delivered.
“I had many opportunities to stop, but I didn’t,” she wrote to me. “It felt like an addiction, you know?”
In April 2021, as Barbosa was cooking dinner, a text message came through on her phone: Her green card had been approved. Barbosa screamed; she called her parents in tears. Then she organized a party for the next night to celebrate. When Fonseca arrived, she pushed her way through the loud, crowded house and grabbed some Brazilian barbecue. Outside on the back porch, she found Barbosa, in shorts and a tank top, drinking overflowing champagne from the bottle.
If you ask Barbosa when she was happiest, she’ll tell you it was right then: “Everything was perfect.” She had a green card, the house, the (real) boyfriend, and the Porsche she wanted. She booked a round-trip, first-class ticket to visit her family in Brazil for two weeks in late May. She bought Versace sneakers, because why not. She was going to open her steakhouse, marry her boyfriend, and eventually move into the house she was building in Florida. Just three years after landing at JFK, she had risen to the top of a Silicon Valley informal economy. She had worked her way up to the American dream.
