“Recruit C” - An alleged Chinese spy operation and vigilance for independent journalists

If the website is supremely sketchy and the money really good, you probably ought flag it to the FBI

Jun 23, 2026

One way to spot a foreign intelligence recruiting operation is to scroll all the way to bottom of a website and check for any oddities. (Screenshots of archived Rightinfoconsult.com via The Internet Archive, right. Screenshots of DOJ affidavit, left. Tom LoBianco/24sight News.)

The FBI just dismantled a ring of websites it says was run by Chinese intelligence to recruit federal workers with security clearances and at least one American journalist: Me.

Back in the middle of the 2024 race for the White House, I submitted a tip to the FBI about a supremely sketchy website and online recruiter who, best I could tell, wanted me to write agitprop for them for between $1,500 and $2,500 per propaganda piece.

I couldn’t tell if they were Russian or Chinese, but it sure wasn’t legit.

Thanks to extensive work by the FBI’s Washington field office, Norfolk field office and cybersecurity, espionage and counterintelligence teams, it now looks all but certain they were Chinese.

The Justice Department and FBI seized and shuttered 13 websites claiming to be companies with names like “Centrik Global Consluting” and “Rightinfo Consulting”, and revealed key details from their investigation in a June 10 press release and accompanying affidavit.

In its write-up on this, NextGov/FCW noted the operatives relied on fake names, stolen identities and AI-generated photos to create the veneer of credibility. And The Associated Press noted recent concerns raised among the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance of China’s heightened efforts to collect intelligence through fake consulting companies (something the AP reported Chinese officials vociferously denied.)

“Anyone approached online with offers of easy income for vague ‘consulting’ work should treat those overtures with extreme caution and remain vigilant for warning signs of malicious targeting,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg said in a statement.

Reading through the release and affidavit, I had flashbacks to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s landmark indictment filed against the Russian trolls and operatives who formed the (decidedly more intensive and sophisticated) breach of the 2016 elections via the Internet Research Agency.

Foreign intelligence mucking about in U.S. affairs, fishing for intelligence, actively (and secretly) recruiting Americans is all par for the course in Washington, regardless who’s in the White House or which party holds Congress, and is as old as the nation itself.

And there are plenty of cautionary tales where professional journalists or media types who have messed up. Among the traditional crowd, former longtime Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent Jay Solomon was fired after hacked emails showed him wanting to take a 10 percent cut in a company created by an Iranian operative and erstwhile arms dealer (Solomon denied he ever engaged in the business, but acknowledged his fault nonetheless in crossing a clear ethical line). In the partisan world, Tim Pool, Benny Johnson and others, called themselves victims of a Russian operation during the 2024 race in which Russians allegedly funneled more than $10 million to influencers as part of a propaganda campaign.

Spotting a foreign intelligence recruiter is not meant to be easy by design, at least for the lay person.

As someone who covered Trump-Russia, the White House and more with plenty of crossover between the intelligence and politics worlds, I’m probably more attuned to potential ratf*ckery and ultimately criminal dangers than others. And the pervasiveness of recruiting efforts online coupled with the ham-handedness of this alleged operation did make it somewhat easy to pick out.

But it also requires a good deal of both vigilance and slowing down to take a breath and assess, especially as things move faster and faster.

In the moment two years ago, one big tipoff for me came as I scrolled through an off-the-shelf Wix style website and the stock photos turned into agitprop. A story popped up in the newsfeed at the bottom of the page proclaiming that feminists were responsible for a bombing in Moscow. (The switch from auto-generated office casual to alleged pernicious punk violence was quite a tell, even if the scrolling was seamless.)

I reached out to an old source from the intelligence world and asked, “What do I do with this?” My source suggested I ping the FBI. So I called the press line with a bit of a twist, instead of asking the flack for information, I had something for them. Then I sent in the tip via the online portal and not long after and was called into the D.C. field office in for an interview.

The investigators asked me to keep the interview confidential, which I gladly did.

Two years later I got a call from the FBI press office asking if I’d like to talk about it, and I gladly am.

If you flip to pages 48 - 50 of the affidavit filed June 10, you can spot me in there as “Recruit C”.

Beyond the agitprop, the other big tell as noted in the affidavit, was that was a good bit more money than usual for freelance work.

The “offer of $1,500 to $2,000 per piece was the most glaring indicator this likely was not a legitimate freelance request.”

As I told a number of friends a few weeks ago, this one is going up on the wall, right next to tangled strings of old press passes, some highlighted Mike Pence coverage and my Sagamore of the Press Corps from Indiana (among other career highlights.)

Back-patting aside, I’m writing this in part to help other independent journalists with a sense of what to do in case likely foreign intelligence comes knocking.

We live in a new media era where an endless stream of talented reporters and journalists have been canned or pushed out of shrinking traditional media outlets and an increasing number of journalists are choosing this path on their own. Whether it’s folks with national brands like Chris Cillizza, Tara Palmeri or Jim Acosta, or local news entrepreneurs like Brandon Jarvis of Virginia Scope and Indiana’s own Dave Bangert, we spend more time on the business of news with fewer guardrails and protections of traditional newsrooms.

First off, as evidenced here, spies don’t open by saying “I’m a spy and would like to pay you to dime out your country.” (A good rule of thumb I heard from an old source in the international community was that unlike in journalism where you need to be 100 percent certain before publishing, in the murkier world of spycraft if you’re 80 percent certain, you’re 100 percent certain.)

In my case, my spidey-sense went off after checking out the website. From there, do what we do best, report, run it by a trusted source in the field.

If you’re unsure and want someone to bounce it off of, you can always ping me. I’m happy to offer my guidance and experience and help with a gutcheck — is this a foreign intelligence operative or a standard sh*tposting troll?

And if you think you’ve got something, drop a note at tips.fbi.gov

*** Friends, tune into the Julie Mason Show on SiriusXM 124 today (June 23) at 5p ET. I’ll be discussing this story, as well as the latest in my “Jesus, Sex and Politics” investigation out of Indiana. ***