The writer said he was an
identity thief
— a ringleader on the dark web, with a network of “worms” placed throughout the US. In an email to NYT, he said his ring preyed on the dead, the unsuspecting and the elderly, using birth certificates and other documents.
“We figure out how to steal,” he said. Recently, the writer suggested, the group had turned its attention to a major target: the estate of
Lisa Marie Presley
, which last week faced a threat that
Graceland
was about to be foreclosed on and sold by a mysterious company, Naussany Investments & Private Lending LLC.
Media outlets often recei ve unsolicited emails from people who make outlandish claims. But this email arrived Friday in response to one sent by NYT to an email address that Naussany listed in a legal filing.
In its email, NYT referred to the company’s claim that Presley had borrowed $3.8 million from it, using Graceland as collateral. In the responses, which came from the email address NYT had written to, the writer described the
foreclosure
effort not as a legitimate attempt to collect on a debt, but as a scam. “I had fun figuring this one out and it didn’t succeed very well,” the email writer said. He said he was based in Nigeria, and his email was written in Luganda, a Bantu language spoken in Uganda. But the filing with the email address was faxed from a number to serve North America.
Since the news broke last week that a company was trying to sell Graceland —
Elvis Presley
’s former home and a beloved tourist attraction — the Naussany company has been a persistent puzzle. It is difficult to find any public records that prove that the company exists. In Sept, eight months after Lisa Marie Presley’s death, Naussany said it would agree to settle what it described as the debt for a discounted $2.85 million. But the family trust, now led by Lisa.
Marie’s daughter, actress Riley Keough, did not view the debt as legitimate. That led Keough to court last week, declaring in a legal filing that the loan was a fiction, the company “a false entity” and the bid to sell Graceland a fraud. At a hearing Wednesday, the judge blocked any immediate foreclosure on Graceland, saying he needed to review more evidence. No one representing the Naussany company attended the hearing.
When NYT sought clarification on the issue, the email writer wrote, “You don’t have to understand.” The writer was only keen on taking credit. “I am the one who creates trouble.”
English (US) ·