Annette Haynes, Freelancer Scam, Part 2

This post picks up the story of Annette Haynes, a pseudonym for an overseas group of scammers. If you haven’t read Part 1, take a look at The Copywriting Con: How I Almost Fell for a Freelancer Scam.

Since publishing Part 1, I’ve had 17 people write me to say they’d found my article about Annette and had therefore not been scammed. Score one for the good guys!

Of those 17 savvy copywriters who wrote me, a few included copies of the emails they’d received. And some of those emails included a sponsor’s name (April, Angel or Angela) and a Tennessee address that Annette had given them for sending a refund check.

While some of the information in the emails varied, the address for the refund was always the same, leading me to think it was a legit address of the scammer or, more likely, someone working for the scammer. A little research revealed the address was for a house in Afton, Tennessee. I quickly figured out which police had jurisdiction over the address in Afton and gave them a call.

I spoke with a Detective John Davide (I’ve changed his name to avoid identifying him for our purposes) of Greene County, Tennessee, no connection to me even though Greene is my last name. Detective Davide and his partner offered to visit the scammer at the Afton address within the next few days.

He did as promised and then called me. He said he stopped by the home of our scammer friend April/Angel/Angela. I’ll use “Angel” for our purposes as Detective Davide didn’t want to disclose her exact name, even though he confirmed it was “something like that.”

Angel is 57-years-old. She’s in a wheelchair. She answered an ad seeking someone to do “invoicing” from home, which was a job she could do even though she was disabled. She was hired. The salary was to be about $1,500 a month.

Checks began coming to Angel’s house. She was told to deposit them, keep a percentage for herself, and then write checks for the balance to various accounts (checking, PayPal and Bitcoin) owned by someone she didn’t know. She assumed the accounts belonged to the person or company that had hired her, but they likely did not.

Detective Davide said the account holder was more likely just another person in a long, complex, chain that would make it hard for anyone to trace the money trail. The chain almost certainly ended in bank or Western Union money transfers overseas to someone in a West African country such as Nigeria or Ghana, making it nearly impossible to catch and prosecute the scammer.

As it turns out, not only was Angel potentially receiving checks related to the freelancer scam, she was also receiving money from other scams. After a while (Detective Davide didn’t have a timeframe), some of those checks she deposited began bouncing.

The bank contacted Angel and said, “We’re shutting down your accounts. We think you’re being scammed. Regardless, you owe us $_____ for your fraudulent payments.” Detective Davide didn’t tell me the amount, but it was clearly more than this unemployed woman in a wheelchair had at her disposal.

He added that Angel then could not make her car payments so her vehicle has now been repossessed. She has had to take out a loan to pay for her living expenses. I’m not sure whether all of her financial woes were related to the scam or whether the fraud just added to her problems.

Detective Davide said Angel now knows it was all a scam. He said it was sad talking with her. She was crying. He added, “I think she was also a little struck by the person she was talking to.” I wasn’t sure what being “struck” meant in Tennessee talk, but he then went on to describe what was essentially an online romance.

Detective Davide had Angel send him copies of the scammer’s emails, which is how he knew there was romance involved. He said he didn’t want to talk badly about her, but in his opinion, she should have caught on long before she got in as deeply as she did.

I asked if Angel said whether she’d ever spoken to the scammer by phone. She had.

I asked if the scammer was foreign. Detective Davide said only when he pushed Angel did she admit her “employer contact” had an accent, but she didn’t know what kind. She said she thought all along he was American as he spoke good English.

Detective Davide said more than likely the scammer was foreign as 95% of these scams start overseas, which again is what makes following the money nearly impossible. He said Angel has zero chance of getting her money back.

I asked Detective Davide if Angel was surprised when he and his partner showed up at her door. He said, “No, she knew right away what it was about,” probably because her bank had already told her she’d been unwittingly participating in a scam.

He said several times that he was telling me more than he should. He clearly felt bad for her and said she was a victim. I got the impression too, that he was telling me that I should back off and leave her be, which I will, of course. I don’t need to add to the poor woman’s misery. I was just curious as to what was going on. Now I know.

I wish the bad guy(s) had ended up in handcuffs but that wasn’t in the cards. Detective Davide said that most of the Americans they find participating in these types of scams are victims and not the masterminds. At least we now know how the scam works.

I recently saw a CBS news story about these types of scammers and then did a little research on my own. Here’s what I learned.

Overseas these scammers are called “Yahoo boys,” a term that originated in the early 2000s to describe young Nigerians who used Yahoo.com email addresses to conduct phishing scams.

Most of today’s Yahoo boys (also called Sakawa boys) are located in Ghana, Nigeria or other West African nations. They are groups of cybercriminals who use online romance scams to defraud victims. 

The most common situation is young Yahoo/Sakawa boys who pose as single women or men on dating sites. They operate in underground boiler rooms like the one above. Most have been coached or have taken “training classes” to learn how to run their scams and maximize their profits. They trick their victims into falling in love and then swindle them out of money. 

As for the Annette scam, I thought it  had run its course as far as my involvement. But a week after I’d spoken with Detective Davide, I heard from Annette Haynes again. Turns out he is a dude. And by this time he’d found my online post about our interactions, which was scaring away his potential victims. He was angry that I “used him to create content for my blog.” LOL. I guess now I’m the villain in this story.

We ended up going back-and-forth via email, and I did learn a few things. Not surprisingly, he is located in Ghana, a country that he said made him “geographically disadvantaged.”  Annette, of course, is a fake name and he who pretty much admits to being a Yahoo boy.

I said, “Look, you obviously have decent English skills and you’re smart enough to run a scam. You should put those talents into a legit job or business. As for my blog, I have now helped save 17 people from being scammed by you, and I’ve helped Angel get out of your clutches. I’ve also posted about the scam on LinkedIn. It’s getting tons of interest. Sorry to put you out of business, but what you’re doing is wrong, and it’s harming good people. Your mom would be sad to know that’s how you’re making money. Didn’t she raise you better than that?”

He replied, “Yes, my parents taught me well, and I am not proud of this, but when you live in the jungle, it’s survival of the fittest. As you rightly observed, I am educated and this is not what I want to do with my education. Like I said, a lot of us need help to get proper jobs and exposure to the kind of opportunities that you guys enjoy over there. My ultimate goal is to come to the U.S. and settle.”

So ends the Annette Haynes scam story from my perspective. I can only hope that Annette and his merry coworkers have difficulty finding another Angel in the U.S. to deposit their scam checks and forward the money to their “offices” in Ghana. 

If you’ve been contacted by Annette, I’d love to hear your story. Write me at floridacopywriter@gmail.com. And when interacting with new clients, remember the adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”