A Florida man has been arrested following an attempt to impersonate Nickelback drummer Daniel Adair so he could order $25,000 in musical equipment via email. The 45-year-old, Lee Howard Koenig, was arrested Tuesday (Feb. 28) on two fraud-related charges.
Koenig was hoping to purchase drum parts and microphones. He would have gotten away with it, too, had the vendor in Austria not contacted Nickelback to confirm the order.
The perpetrator “identified himself as Daniel Adair with Nickelback and said that he was looking for some microphones and tried to place an order via an email,” Detective Paul Griffith said of the alleged fraud. “He says he’s Daniel Adair from Nickelback.”
“Essentially, when he placed the order in Austria, I guess at this level of band … you have a lot of people that work for you,” Griffith added. “One of the people in his group thought it was out of the ordinary when they were getting contacted as to confirming the order.”
The detective said that both Adair and Nickelback’s security specialist looked into the matter and concluded it wasn’t his purchase. It took little work on the part of investigators to determine that the email address used to order the equipment also didn’t belong to Adair.
The culprit was released on bail – a $18,750 mistake. That could have bought a whole lot of drum parts!