On the afternoon of December 2, 2024, Jess Chou, a radio-advertising executive in Honolulu, sat at her computer waiting for the livestream of a Los Angeles Police Department press conference. The police were scheduled to give an update on the case of Hannah Kobayashi, a 30-year-old Maui woman who vanished three days after missing her connecting flight from LAX to JFK on November 8. Just before Kobayashi’s phone went dead, she sent friends and family a series of strange texts. She said she’d been “hacked” and “stripped of my identity”; when asked to explain, she said, “I got tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds. For someone I thought I loved. I’ve been on the streets.” The messages, Kobayashi’s family said, didn’t sound like her, and Chou feared that she had been drugged, abducted, trafficked.
