A Madisonville woman was arrested for impersonating a federal agent at a Waffle House in Tennessee.
Woman nabbed for impersonating a federal agent
60-year-old Kimberly Michelle Gonzalez reportedly showed up at a Waffle House location and attempted to close down the restaurant.
According to local news outlet WSBTV, Gonzalez entered the restaurant at around 8 a.m. Feb. 11, and told employees that she was shutting down the location ahead of the Sunday breakfast rush, because she believed that drugs were being sold out of the back.
When an employee asked to see her identification, the woman held up a brown notebook with Tennessee state badge on the cover.
When the Waffle House staffer asked to see valid FBI credentials, Gonzalez claimed that she wasn’t required to show them.
Madisonville Police Officer Andy Cline pulled up at the restaurant shortly after. He met an employee in the parking lot, who told him what Gonzalez had claimed about a fictional drug operation.
When he went into the breakfast establishment, Gonzalez repeated her story and identified herself as a federal agent.
Cline didn’t have to do any digging to figure out Gonzalez’s identity, as he had previously encountered the same woman trying to pass herself off as someone she was not on a separate occasion.
After another witness told Cline that the woman had misrepresented herself as an FBI agent, he took her into custody.
Gonzalez was charged with criminal impersonation and booked into Monroe County Jail.
She was arraigned the next day and her bail was set at $1,000. WSBTV reported that she is no longer in custody.
Man receives five years in prison for impersonating a federal agent
It’s unclear how much time Gonzalez with receive if convicted, but another person convicted of impersonating a federal agent received five years in federal prison for a similar crime.
Granted, Ivan Isho, who fleeced an entire community in California, was also convicted of wire fraud and stalking when a federal jury found him guilty in March 2022.
According to a Justice Department press release, Isho falsely represented that he was and FBI Special Agent to a community of Assyrians in Ceres, California between 2016 and 2017.
Isho claimed that he could help them obtain visas for their foreign family members and was paid thousands of dollars for his criminal efforts.
He also used his fake badge to stalk a female victim and her husband, who he repeatedly harassed with threatening phone calls and voicemails from 2017 to 2018.
During his testimony, Isho revealed that his FBI credentials were a part of a Halloween costume, and admitted to stalking the unnamed woman.
