Yes, but depending on the channels that his money is flowing through, his contributions may be laundered, which is a crime. Granted, he is a victim, but he may also be contributing to other crimes, and unknowingly to both.
Tripler
Call the FBI, or at least the State. They ought to be able to investigate it all.
I doubt the FBI would do a thing. For starters, there needs to be a victim who wants to do something about it, and there simply isn’t in this case. choie, you’ve done all you can, and more than most would do. Fred wants something for nothing, and he’s not going to let anyone stop him.
Sorry again for the egregious bump, but I was cleaning out my closet and found some old files related to this situation – the papers “Fred” printed out related to his expenditures in the case apparently in an attempt to rope in another friend (“Max”) for a loan to participate in this patently fradulant scam. I’d almost forgotten all about this, so it was quite a trip seeing this stuff down in writing.
Anyway, I thought it might be interesting / educational to see just how much this poor bastard was taken for, and how these fees were justified to him. Hopefully Max didn’t buy into this crap.
Anyway, here’s the memo:
It’s really quite astonishing that anyone could be duped by this obvious ploy to drag and drag the process out by adding more and more implausible fund requirements on Fred’s part, not to mention the absurd notion of an attorney selling his car in order to help pay for Fred’s inheritence, and the even more absurd notion that a “Diplomat” would hold on to two trunks with $2.5million in cash in an airport locker. It sounds like a bad Robert Ludlum or Ken Follett novel for chrissakes.
I have no idea what happened to Fred after he moved out, presumably with no or very little money left. Maybe he moved in with his alleged girlfriend, you know, your average Canadian gal studying law in NYC but acting as an attorney in Nigeria. (Presumably “she” was really a Nigerian male, probably also acting as Jonathan Goldring and all the other players in this grubby little scam.)
Meanwhile, Fred’s former live-in (the neighbor I knew better) ran out of funds herself about six months later and was taken to court by my landlord, and unfortunately decided to give up and move back home to Germany. I actually tried to help her by sharing some resources I know about for seniors who are in financial difficulty and can’t pay their rent (my sister’s a case worker who deals with many such agencies), but I think my neighbor was just so soured on NYC altogether, not to mention what happened with Fred, that she preferred to let the Landlord win by default and left for Germany.
Pathetic and sad. Anyway, I’m adding these names and info here because just on the off-chance someone searches for these completely fake bank, attorney and diplomat names, maybe it’ll help. Plus, I admit trainwrecks like this are interesting, though this had real consequences for the victims.
Not an egregious bump at all - I LOVE updates!
This is a very sad story. I hate to see anyone scammed, but especially seniors who are often so vulnerable and don’t have time to rebuild their lives after something like this.
It does sound like you did what you could to try to help him, and it’s a shame that he wouldn’t listen. However I can kind of see how once someone has gotten roped in, they are probably desperate to believe it’s true because it would be hard to face the reality that they’ve wasted the money that was already sent.
Hee, Cat Whisperer – I love updates too, I hate when we get left hanging! This wasn’t much of an update, just some new, more detailed info. Alas, the principal players all vanished. Ended with a whimper, not a bang. (I admit a morbid curiosity and I checked for this guy’s real name with news articles just in case he died. I hope he had some relatives somewhere with whom he could live.)
lavenderviolet, thanks. It really is a massive shame and I’d say until he actually continued asking me to use my computer despite my discomfort in the situation, and especially when he was badtalking the woman with whom he was living and internet-cheating on*, I felt nothing but sympathy toward him. It’s extremely typical for fraudsters to make the victims feel guilty/surreptitious about what they’re doing and so the victims get on the defensive to those trying to help, which is what happened here.
Even years later I still feel guilty for not contacting the police or feds involved with internet crime, at least in order to get advice. If they told me there wasn’t anything they could do without input from the alleged fraud victims, at least I’d’ve known I’d done my duty. So yeah, I think I fell down on the job.
I can see arguments for and against the cheating designation, but in this case, since Fred was also semi-conspiring with this “woman” to get a big payoff and probably run away with her to some paradise on the upper East Side, I do think he was cheating on his live-in lady. And possibly stealing from her, for all I know. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this woman was living in this building at least as long as I’ve been – 20 years now, and she was almost certainly rent stabilized like I am – but once Fred began this ridiculous scam business, she was suddenly falling down on her rent and unable to continue living here. OTOH, she was always a notorious drinker and I think she was hiding that from Fred too (she was always sucking on Lifesavers or cough drops whenever I met her in the hallway, despite obviously being drunk).
Yeesh, what an oddly grubby couple for this upper-East Side doorman building. Then again I also have a bunch of early thirtysomething too-old-to-be-living-like-college-kids guys who get drunk almost every night and even once barged into my sister’s apartment (one floor below 'em) late at night thinking it was their apartment, proceeding to go to the bathroom(!) despite my sister yelling at the guy to get the hell out. So this floor seems to be the Substance Abuse ghetto of the building.
I think you need to show Fred’s girlfriend these documents and explain what is going on in case Fred is siphoning money from her.
She really needs to know.
Yeah I was mulling that over at the time, but decided it might be prudent to just keep my mouth shut lest I end up in the center of some horrible murder-suicide situation.
At any rate, this is kind of a zombie thread (though I was the one to de-necrotize it), so as I mentioned in my update, all the players have since left the stage. Fred moved out in either 2009 or 2010 (don’t remember which), and, um, “Ursula” left my building (and the country, for that matter) last year.
I’d call that an emotional affair. Hopefully I never have to find out, but I suspect I could forgive a cheating partner who ‘just had sex’ more easily than one who went and fell in love with someone else, even if they never actually touched each other. Considering the average 419er’s lack of grammar, punctuation, and general facility with the English language, I’m rather amazed that the romance ploys work as well as they do. I have a hard time imagining a mugu putting on a convincing enough performance to win hearts.
I’m sorry to hear your neighbor had to learn his lesson the hard way. It sounds like you did everything you ethically could, though. Thanks for the update.