A Maryland man who has portrayed himself as a terrorism and human-trafficking expert and claimed to be the inspiration for the Liam Neeson film “Taken” has been charged with fraud.
Federal prosecutors allege that William G. Hillar, of Millersville, has been teaching, giving speeches, leading workshops and conducting training under fraudulent pretenses for the past 10 years.
Authorities say public and private institutions, including the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, have paid Hillar a total of more than $100,000 for his work.
Hillar had not hired an attorney as of Tuesday evening and has declined to have a court-appointed lawyer. A federal judge in Baltimore ordered him detained pending further proceedings because he could not meet release conditions.
Hillar, 66, ran a business called Bill Hillar Training and purported on his Web site and in other materials to be a retired Army colonel who served overseas and had received a doctorate from the University of Oregon. He also boasted in his appearances that he was the inspiration for the 2008 action movie “Taken,” in which a former CIA operative’s daughter is kidnapped by men who want to enslave her.
But students at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California, where he has been a part-time instructor since 2005, became suspicious of Hillar’s credentials and claims, and federal authorities started an investigation. The institute, a graduate school of the Vermont-based Middlebury College, said in a statement in November that Hillar had misrepresented his experience.
According to the criminal complaint, Hillar was an enlisted sailor in the Coast Guard and was never deployed to the locations he claimed. He also never received specialized training in counterterrorism, psychological warfare and other fields in which he purported to be a specialist.
A search warrant affidavit says that over the past year, the FBI, the California Fire Chiefs Association, the Illinois State Police and various cities and colleges paid Hillar for teaching and speaking.
“This investigation is an example of the difficulty the public faces in trying to verify the accuracy of information on the Internet,” Richard McFeely, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Baltimore office, said in a statement.
The complaint against Hillar was filed Friday and unsealed after he was arrested Tuesday. He was charged with mail fraud for allegedly requesting payment from the Monterey Institute for work based on false claims.
Hillar could face up to 20 years in prison.
