Popular Ghanaian Sakawa Man, Asola Jailed for defrauding a British woman £800,000

These days, internet fraud is not surprising in Ghana and people who are arrested in the field are mostly praised as heroes (your guess is as good as ours), but people have made great fortune from the hustle. Over the weekend, this report was filed via Sky News in the UK.

Asola Maurice and the gold plated house

 A conman in Ghana, Maurice Asola Fadola who defrauded British women out of more than £800,000 by romancing them on dating websites has been sentenced to five years in jail. An Accra court also ordered Maurice Asola Fadola to re-pay his victims in full.
His targets were vulnerable Western women and the scam involved creating a believable online persona and gaining their trust over several months. He then claimed to find himself in financial trouble, or encouraged them to invest in a fake project.
Fadola had been accused of extracting the money from 19 women in the UK.
Katherine Clark, a 71-year-old grandmother from Southsea, in Hampshire, was the first British witness to travel to Ghana to give evidence in a romantic fraud case.
Sky News travelled exclusively with her in November 2011 and can tell her story for the first time.

Mrs Clark lost tens of thousands of pounds, looking for love. She was a widow who lost her husband more than 30 years ago and said Fadola claimed to be a British builder living in London.
She said: “He made me feel great, he made me feel wanted and that he was genuine. It was a nice feeling.”
They never met but he showered her with attention and sent flowers on her birthday. When he told her he was moving to Ghana, he encouraged her to invest in a bogus mining company.
At one point she actually traveled to Ghana to meet ‘Bruce’ and Fadola pretended to be Bruce’s driver. He showed her a luxury mansion and a case of gold to assure her that her investment was genuine but he claimed Bruce was being held in prison and needed her money for bail.
After giving evidence and seeing him in the dock, Mrs Clark said:

“I hope it’s going to be worth it because he’s got to be stopped. It’s not pleasant, (seeing him). I don’t know how another human being can do this to a vulnerable person.”

Sky News also spoke to Clare, who did not want to be identified. She knew Fadola as an American soldier in Iraq. In an elaborate fraud involving several characters, she paid him more than £200,000 to help get him out of bogus difficulties.
British police tracked him down through bank transfers to his luxury mansion in Ghana.
The trial was endlessly delayed – often because the judge was on holiday or because Fadola tried several delaying tactics.
Research suggests up to 200,000 men and women have been victims of what is dubbed the Rom Con. In Ghana the con artists are called “Sakawa” men.
Some victims never speak about it, some have committed suicide, but in the Fadola case, four British women were the first to confront their perpetrator in an African court.

Source:OMG Ghana