Never Saw Me Coming: How I Outsmarted the FBI and the Entire Banking System―and Pocketed $40 Million

In the vein of the hugely popular Catch Me If You Can, and soon to be a movie and documentary on Netflix, comes the riveting story of an unlikely white collar criminal who manipulates the federal banking system to the tune of $40 million--and the price she paid, losing what was most valuable to her that money couldn't buy.



In Never Saw Me Coming, Tanya Smith shares the remarkable story of how she went from a computer-savvy middle class Black girl from Minneapolis to what the FBI dubbed "one of the single biggest threats to the entire United States banking system." What starts as a keen interest in computers and innocently acquiring phone numbers and addresses of Michael Jackson and other celebrities leads to using the telephone to get more information she's not supposed to have access to. When Smith, at 15 successfully steals and deposits $5,000 into her grandmother's bank account without a hitch, her game gets bigger. Combining her talent for getting information and love of computers, Tanya Smith would go on to steal $40 million from the federal banking system.



Painfully naive to the risks of her crimes, Tanya surrounds herself with people were more than happy to "help" until it all came crashing down--leading to her eventual capture, conviction, and the longest prison sentence given to any white-collar criminal in U.S. history. But this just describes Tanya's first act. The story becomes more extraordinary from there-- including how an FBI investigator informing her she could NOT be the one committing these crimes because "Black people don't hack into computers" only prodded her to continue out of spite, how she lost of control of her enterprise to a man who claimed to love her but viciously turned on her when she escaped Federal prison by holding her hostage, and ultimately how she was released from prison and found a way to forgive herself.