Uncover - S30 E3: Stick to the script | Bad Results

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

On the surface, Accu-Metrics was making headlines and growing strong. But two former employees paint a troubling picture of what was going on inside, from staff who don’t seem properly trained to a stream of customers complaining about test results. Plus, the questions they were instructed to ask just didn’t seem right… A legal note: Over the course of this podcast, a number of allegations are made against Viaguard Accu-Metrics and its employees. When asked, company owner Harvey Tenenbaum said he stands by the test, and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Let's just get into this story. George, you've had a feeling for a long time that John Diefenbaker was your true father. Right. And so what's the news today? It's a splashy, salacious political story, at least for Canada. George Dryden is making headlines, claiming he's the secret love child of a former prime minister.

Did former Canadian Prime Minister John Diefenbaker secretly father not one but two sons with two different women? With his bulldog jowls, middle-aged George is a mirror image of the long-dead and long-believed-to-be-childless politician. Well, your mother was a confident and family friend and you believe she had an affair with Mr. Diefenbaker, although she never confirmed it, correct? She was very friendly with Diefenbaker all throughout the 60s. For years, George believed Diefenbaker was his dad. And now a DNA test confirms it. I've proven that I'm a Diefenbaker and a story. Okay, so let me shift the focus now to the actual science because you have someone sitting next to you who has been very patient.

I'm telling you this story because that patient person sitting next to George is the scientist behind this claim. A scientist who works for Viagard Acumetrics. So, you did the test, Kyle? Correct. Kyle. Kyle Sui. The same Kyle Corral would argue with years later about conflicting paternity tests. When this Diefenbaker love child story broke back in 2013, the commercial DNA market was just taking off, with companies like 23andMe making these kinds of tests mainstream. making these kinds of tests mainstream. Kyle was a brand new hire at Acumetrix,

and he was going to help put this company on the map for better or worse. And the testing is 99.99% accurate. 99.99% accurate. This is the promise, the sales pitch, that Acumetrix will use to grow its business, to sell its services around the world, doing everything from dog breed analysis to paternity tests. And while we can't confirm or refute anything about George Dryden's father, former prime minister or otherwise, that's not the point. The point is that George died a few years ago at peace with his identity and believing what Accumetrix told him. And in the years that followed that media splash, countless pregnant women and potential fathers would also believe

Accumetrix. Believe the company sold them not just a prenatal paternity test, but that peace of mind. The truth. I trusted those results. You know, like it's obviously legit. It's a DNA company. Yet behind the promise and the publicity, behind the closed doors at this lab, things were not what they seemed. And the people who work there have a very different version of the truth. I think it's so ridiculous. Like if I walked in there as 35 year old me today, I'll just be like, you've got to be kidding me. This is not a good thing going on here. I'm Rachel Houlihan. This is Bad Results, Chapter 3. Stick to the script. At this point, my co-host Jorge and I are many months into our investigation.

We had so many questions. Who works there? What do they do? What do they know? It had been a frustrating chase. Employees kept flaking on us, not returning calls or saying they want to talk, but can't or won't. What are they so scared of? So it feels like a lucky break

when Samantha Friday actually shows up. I wonder who's in there from, like, people I worked with. We've parked on a residential side street just around the corner from the company's headquarters. Sam hasn't been in this area for a while. It's strange. It's still there. I can't believe it's still there. Does that surprise you? It just looks different. To me, it seems different. One of the things that you said to me when we talked on the phone,

you kind of chuckled to yourself and you said something to me like, I've been wondering when I was going to get a call like this. wondering when I was going to get a call like this. It's funny because when you hear things and you're seeing things and you've dealt with things and then you leave, wondering is that place still standing and finding out, yeah, it's still standing. It's like, wow, that's interesting.

When Sam first started working at Acumetrix back in 2018, she was pretty desperate. Well, honestly, I was dealing with my own struggles. I really did need a job. I was sleeping in my car at the time. She was trying to get her life back on track, return to school to finish her business management degree, when she found the Acumetrix job listing on Kijiji. And I just called the number. I spoke to the doctor who asked me to just come in and speak with him the following day, which I did. The so-called doctor. That's the company's owner, Harvey Tenenbaum. And then he asked me to start the following Monday.

Most days, she worked the phones with a few others. I have worked in call centers before, and there's usually a process. And it doesn't take long for her to pick up on a kind of subtle chaos in the office. take long for her to pick up on a kind of subtle chaos in the office. There wasn't a proper process and I wasn't sure, am I just taking calls? Am I taking payments? How do I use the processing of payments? What's going on? How do we? There was just a lot that I had to figure out along the way and in the process of learning, I just realized that I wasn't in a typical office situation. It was just very strange to me. Like the people just seemed not qualified to do what I'd assume you'd be doing in a medical field.

But she doesn't want to ask a lot of questions. Remember, she's living in her car. She needs this job. So she focuses her attention on the phones. We all fielded calls with regards to, you know, pet DNA or immigration. However, I dealt with the paternity. Paternity tests were in demand with calls from potential customers from all over the world, the UK, Australia, the US. Sam estimates during a nine-hour shift, she would personally answer between 50 and 100 calls. A lot of people would be, you know, they found us online and wanting

to know, to verify the cost of the kits because it was quite low compared to the rest of the market. And then verify the process of going about getting the paternity test done. So it would just be a lot of answering those kinds of questions. Sam answers the questions, tries to make the sale, and fills out the paperwork. All of it under Harvey's watchful eye. Always there. Always there. I mean, six days a eye. Always there. Always there. I mean, six days a week, always there. From open to close.

Stubborn. Micromanager. 100%. Everything went through. All the forms that we filled out would go to the doctor for approval of some kind. And then those forms would go to the mailroom to have the kit shipped. Harvey signs off on everything, approving every prenatal paternity kit that goes out.

This sounds horrible to say, but it was kind of like, just get me my money. That was it. Just kind of get me that money. Hi, my name is Harvey Tenenbaum, director of laboratory operations for Viagard Acumetrics, a leading DNA firm.

At this point, we're still trying to learn more about Harvey and Acumetrics. We glean a few clues from the promotional videos he's posted on the company YouTube channel, most of which aren't about paternity tests. Now, if you want to do this test, kits are sent out at no cost. In this video from 2013, Harvey sits at a desk covered in papers. Behind him, there's a background. It's some sort of room divider and on it there's a scene in gold and black of people riding horses and there's maybe a

palace or a temple. It's hard to tell. Payment, $395 is made. Harvey has been busy this year carving out his niche in the growing DNA home testing landscape. The reason we're a leading company is that the service we provide is Carving out his niche in the growing DNA home testing landscape.

The reason we're a leading company is that the service we provide is personal, expedited, and economical. He's giving public talks. Harvey Tenenbaum is here from Viaguard Acumetrics. He has a PhD in pharmacology. Invited to speak to the Law Society of Ontario. Urine sampling is valuable for short-term analysis of drug use. Standing at the podium, in his oversized blazer with his poorly knotted tie, he talks about his company's drug and alcohol testing services. Hair testing. Harvey is around 80 years old in most of these videos, all recorded about a decade ago. At an age when most people are well into retirement, Harvey is adding service after

service and test after test to his business. So that's why the Alzheimer's test is important. At-home tests for sexually transmitted diseases. He's now offering services through dozens of websites, selling everything from infidelity tests to dog DNA testing. What breeds are actually in this dog? Just swab your dog's mouth, mail it in, and you learn about your dog's background, all for $59. So you're satisfying your curiosity about the breeds. And if the doggy DNA test reveals some surprises, say that your golden doodle isn't so golden, it's no big deal. This in no way impacts on the love a person has for their dog. In 2014, Acumetrix gets a coveted gold star of approval from the Standards Council of Canada. This means the company meets international standards

to do DNA tests for federal immigration cases. There are several laboratories approved in Canada for that type of testing. And our company is one of the few on the list. The Children's Aid Society is now using the company for drug and alcohol testing. And the RCMP puts Accumetrix on its approved list too to take fingerprints used in things like criminal background checks and adoptions.

And Harvey's got that new employee, Kyle Suey. Kyle has just finished his PhD in pharmaceutical science at the University of Toronto. Business, it seems, is booming. But all the while, the core of the company is its paternity tests, and prenatal paternity tests in particular. They've now got a prenatal site targeting Americans, and advertise a New York office and another website aimed at the Brits with a London office and a site for Australians too. Acumetrix claims it is a world leader in this type of test and that the results are definitive.

You can have confidence in the results and in the protocols and procedures we use. He makes it sound pretty easy. It's just clinical, laboratory work, and you're receiving the definitive answer on the question of the paternity of the fetus. And all of it is run out of the company headquarters in Toronto, which, from the outside, looks like any small storefront in any nondescript grey two-storey building in pretty much any city in the world.

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news. So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. It's actually quite a farce. I find the whole thing quite farcical. Sika Reshot started at Acumetrix the same year as Sam. I think it's so ridiculous. Like if I walked in there as 35 year old me today, I'll just be like, you've got to be kidding me. We're sitting in Sika's basically empty apartment. She's a steadfast minimalist, which is really at odds with her appearance. Sika's almost six feet

tall and wears gigantic cat eye glasses. That be, because there was something like, oh, sorry about that. She waves her hand, with its long, bright red sparkly fingernails, dismissively. It's your nails, they're very long. In 2018, Sika found herself living in Toronto after a very short marriage to a Canadian fell apart. She didn't know a soul here. She urgently needed a place to live and money.

Quick money, yeah. She finds the Acumetrix job posting on Craigslist. And the first time she meets Harvey, she's brought straight into his office. Yeah, I really liked him. We got on very well. Extremely friendly. Humble, even. Yeah. Like Sam, Sika is hired on the spot to work

the phones. She's trained by the main secretary, who tells her Harvey will be watching and listening to everything she does. There are two rules at the office. The first, always answer the phones. The phone wasn't allowed to ring more than twice because in his head, that's money. That's money running out the door. I think that's even the analogy that he used. That's money running out the door when we're not picking up the phone. Sika works nights and the company kept careful count of how many prenatal kits she'd sell each shift. The test is among the most expensive the company sells, at around $800 each.

The second rule, once you're on the phone, stick to the script. So the secretary tells Sika... I'm going to write you a script, and she wrote it in her Sharpie, and she said, you have to say this, and I said, do I have to say word for word? And she's like, he's going to listen, Harvey's going to listen. So make sure you do a good job because I've seen him yell at people when they don't get the script right. So then a call came in and then he's like, next call you have to get, you have to answer and I want to hear how you do the script. So I did.

And yeah, and I felt very nervous and I did a terrible job. And he didn't yell at me, but he wasn't impressed at all. He was really cross. And everyone else around me seemed to be panicking about that. It takes a few goes, but Sika does well. Harvey never yells at her, even when she goes off script trying to be kind to nervous callers with questions about paternity tests. The women, a lot of the time, they'll be like very shy, they'll be very embarrassed because you're basically, like I guess your sexuality is up for,

you know, like you can look promiscuous or whatever. And, you know, I was really cautious not to be judgmental about that. Like I would have young women, you know, calling and being like, oh, I don't even know where to start. Sika's been coached on where to start, though, by gathering some personal details. And part of the script was to say, oh, can you tell me the date of your last period?

Because I think we even had to put it in the form. Harvey showed me the ovulation calendar on Google. It wasn't anything special. showed me the ovulation calendar on Google. It wasn't anything special where it's just like, you put the date that you had sex, the date of your last period, and then it gives you a calculation around about when you got pregnant. And then you'd say something like, it's likely, you tell them who it's likely to be before you've even sent the kid or anything. And like, it's likely to be that person. The last date you had this, that, you know, last day you had your period. Sam is also following the script, but she's starting to have a lot of questions about why they need this

information from their customers. The information we were taking just seemed irrelevant if you're going to be doing a test. I don't need to know the two people that you were involved with or the dates. These to me are things where you're tracking something, where why do we need all that? You're going to just run a test. The test is going to say A or B. But customers, they answered all these questions, even if they didn't quite know why they were being asked. I would get asked these things from people like, why do you need to know that? You know, what's the problem?

Like, why is that important? And I started asking why this was important. And so Sam eventually puts the question to Harvey. And the doctor was just saying, this is how we do the process. You don't understand. And of course I don't understand. So after we fill in that form, because it's a form that we fill in that Harvey had to sign off, he would always make a comment like,

oh, well, it's definitely this one. It's this one. It's this one. It's got to be this one. He would make a comment like that. Sika tells me she assumed the test was done to confirm that guess. But she doesn't really know. Sam also has assumptions. I assumed that there would be a lot of checks and balances, especially dealing with things like paternity.

And it just, to me, didn't seem like we had any checks and balances at all. Sam and Sika both see a lot of things that don't add up, but neither of them feel like they can push back. On one hand, they really need their jobs. Plus, neither know the first thing about DNA testing. Neither ever step foot in the actual lab. They work on the ground floor. The lab's in the basement. Their job is strictly to answer the phones. But the calls they're answering, they start to raise red flags. Then I'm hearing people frustrated because the test result wasn't what they expected, which is something I can't do anything about. However, there were some who were saying, I retested here and it was different.

Did you ever have anyone call like losing their minds? Like this test wasn't right. You've ruined my life. Definitely. Those are the people you put through to the doctor, right? Because the answers that you have are only what you see in the system. So it's 100% or 99, whatever it is, this person, 0% that person. So that's what you can tell them. If they want to go into any more detail, you pass it on to Harvey. Some of the calls are from people in child custody proceedings who've taken new court-ordered paternity tests,

and those results don't match the ones they got from Acumetrix. With those calls, I didn't even hesitate to pass them over to Harvey because I didn't even know where I would begin to explain the test as a different result. So what happened? Then my own brain of just how, how is this done? How are they doing that? Why would you do this? When you have too many questions, something's wrong, I think. And then what about when people would call with complaints? Was there a system for logging those complaints? No. No. No.

The only thing with the complaints is they were dealt with like people had something to hide. Sam and Zika know something's not right. But what? Maybe the test just isn't very accurate. Maybe it's incompetence, poor records management, bad sample collection, or some combination of it all. Over the course of our investigation, Jorge and I try to get answers to these specific questions in a bunch of different ways. We reach out to Harvey's lawyer, who declines to comment. We send emails to Harvey that go unanswered. But I keep thinking that if I talk to enough victims

and hear enough of their stories, the penny will drop. And then it does. So where am I calling? 512, where is that? Austin, Texas. Austin, Texas, all right. Back in 2019, Melissa Benton had a baby on the way and was in a relationship with a partner who has what she calls trust issues.

So I got pregnant by him and he was definitely the only person who it could have been was the craziest part because I did not sleep with anybody else and hadn't for a long time before I even met him. Like it was only him. for a long time before I even met him. Like, it was only him. But he didn't, he said that he believed it, but then he didn't really because he wanted, he's like, I just want the peace of mind. So when I'm holding the baby in the hospital, I just know that this is my baby and I just know.

So even though Melissa is 100% certain who the dad is, there simply is no other man, she starts looking for a company to do a prenatal paternity test. She comes across Prenatal Paternities Inc., not knowing it's a small lab up in Canada that also goes by the name Acumetrix. She picks it because it's the cheapest company she finds. And it was such a waste of money to me anyway, because I already knew. And it was such a waste of money to me anyway, because I already knew. And so I was like, let's just do this stupid thing.

She orders the kit online. She fills out a basic form. No leading questions, just her mailing address, that sort of thing. When her kit arrives, it's a fingerprint kit, just like the one Coral did in her bathroom with friends. But Melissa can't get any blood. So Acumetrix sends her a medical tube to take to a local lab for a blood draw. She then swaps the dad's mouth, packages up the samples,

and mails them off to Acumetrix. Well, I was checking my email, like, every day for the results, just to get them to him, so that, you know, I could be like, ha-ha, I told you so, you know? And then when it came in, and I saw the title was like, you know, I could be like, ha ha, I told you so, you know? And then when it came in and I saw the title was like, you know, DNA results or whatever, I was so excited, like, here it is, you know, to open it. And then when I read it, you know, and I was just

automatically pissed and like shocked. The only possible father, the only man Melissa has recently had sex with, the Accumetrix test says he is not the father. A zero percent chance. Melissa immediately calls her partner. He's like, oh, it's okay. It's okay. But he was talking to me like, it's okay that you cheated on me or something, you know? And I was just like, I wanted to be just validated so bad. I was just like, no, it's not okay though. Like, it's definitely not okay because like, there's no possible way. And he was just like, I know, I get it, I get it.

He's like, we don't have to do another one. It's okay. And I'm like, no, we are definitely doing another one. Melissa is furious and fires off an email to Acumetrix. In a follow-up call, she's told that the lab tech who did her test is on vacation, but they believe the preservative in the tube might have skewed the results, or maybe there was cross-contamination. That's an explanation that will come up again in other cases.

The Acumetrix rep then suggests Melissa retry their finger prick method, which she refuses. Melissa wants a refund, but Acumetrix wants proof they named the wrong dad. So Melissa shells out $1,500 for a second prenatal paternity test with a different company. And it confirms what she knew all along. Her partner is the father. Acumetrix concedes they got it wrong, but to get her money back, Melissa's got to sign a document

waiving her right to sue and to keep the whole thing confidential. This was the moment for me when the penny dropped. How many women got wrong test results, pushed for a refund, and then were silenced by this document? How many people got caught up in the promises the company was making? I put this question to Sam and Sika. If you had to take a guess, how many paternity tests do you think they would do in a day, a week, a month. Could you take a guess at that?

So prenatal was a majority of what was happening of the business. We were expected to fill out and tend in anywhere from five to ten prenatal orders per night. Per night. Some quick back-of-the-envelope math tells me this could be around a thousand orders a year that any one employee is filling. And that's lowballing it. It was all paper files.

Yeah. Loads of them. They were all over the place. Those were all over the place. Yeah, a lot of them outside his office. When I was organizing, it was bins and bins and bins. And that was just for two years, because the other ones were filed downstairs. Bins and bins of files, all filled with results that could make a family or break it apart. or break it apart.

At last check, the Facebook group Coral started, the one for people who say they got wrong prenatal paternity test results from Acumetrix. It has about 100 members. But what Sam and Sika are describing is maybe thousands. And Sam, she has advice for all of them. Anyone who has had their DNA done for whatever purposes in the Toronto lab should probably consider redoing them. All those tests, all those calls, all those complaints.

Jorge and I wondered, why did no one try to stop the company? Well, it turns out, someone did. What's going on here? There's something wrong. She doesn't look like the baby you told me I was going to have. When she realized Acumetrix had delivered the wrong results just moments after her baby was born. I want them held accountable and I want them to be punished and to pay. And not necessarily to me, but to pay such a large sum that possibly they go out of business. That's next time on Bad Results.

A legal note here. Over the course of this podcast, you're going to hear a number of allegations made against Viaguard Acumetrix and its employees. When asked, company owner Harvey Tenenbaum said he stands by the test and that any errors were caused by customers during sample collection. Bad Results is written and reported by Jorge Barrera and me, Rachel Houlihan. Mixing and producing by AC Rowe. Jessica Lindsay is our showrunner and Carla Hilton is our executive producer. Special thanks to the folks at CBC Podcasts for their support. Karen Burgess is managing editor for CBC News Podcasts.