Nancy said in Scamanda that she started calling the San Jose Police Department and was eventually connected with Financial Fraud Unit Det. Jose Martinez in September 2015.
The now retired detective said in Scamanda that he knew it wasn’t going to be easy proving someone was lying about having cancer, since medical records are private under federal law. And at first, he said, he had to consider the possibility that the tipster was “just an angry family member or somebody who was scorned, just trying to get somebody in trouble.”
A big break came, according to Martinez, when he asked an attorney representing Amanda for a piece of verifiable proof that she did have cancer, with which he could close the case. “Time passed,” he said in the series, and then he received—in an email attachment—a letter purportedly from a doctor at Santa Clara Kaiser Permanente Clinic that referred to Amanda as being a cancer patient.
When he called the hospital to verify the document, Martinez continued, they were “super protective” about patient confidentiality but he was ultimately told that a letter was sent to Amanda, “‘but not for that.’”
“Now I’ve got a fraudulent doctor’s letter,” the retired detective said in Scamanda. “I thought, Wow, we got ourselves a case.”
But needing “bigger reach,” he said, he contacted the IRS’ financial crimes unit.
