One day in October 1997, several police stations across the US received phone calls from a youth center in Spain. The caller identified himself as the director of the facility and stated that a teenage boy from America was there asking for help. The police in the US put the caller in touch with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The caller from Spain went on to give a brief physical description of the boy and asked if there were any missing teenagers matching their records. The agent checked the database and provided the caller with the name of a teenage boy who had been reported missing several years earlier. The descriptions were similar enough to be a possible match, so the case details were sent over right away. Not long after the file arrived, the center for missing children received a follow-up call from the person claiming to be the director of the youth facility. He told the agent that the missing boy in the file and the scared boy standing in his office were in fact the same. When the call ended, the man calling himself the director studied the missing boy’s file carefully. It wouldn’t be long before he would have to convince the world that he was the missing teenager.

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