FEATURE: Con artists lure women looking for love
For some West African men mired in poverty and squalor, pseudo marriage to foreign white women in Europe or America is a path to a better life. But some are in it for the con.
PRETORIA, November 6 (ANA) – For some West African men mired in poverty and squalor, pseudo marriage to foreign white women in Europe or America is a path to a better life.
However, there are con artists from West Africa, Nigeria in particular, who have refined a scam where they target white women and lure them into marriage so that they can get residency or visas in the women’s country.
Often, these scammers target women who are middle-aged or older, single or widowed and potentially vulnerable. They then prey on the person’s insecurities and her hope to find love.
According to NBC4 Washington, each year, roughly 450,000 American citizens marry foreign spouses and petition for them to get legal permanent residency. It’s one of the shortest paths to citizenship – just three years.
Normally, these romance scams start on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or dating sites.
In 2015, a British woman, Deana Charles, told The Sun UK how she was swindled by her Nigerian husband.
“He told me he’d only married me for a visa. It explained why he’d been so keen to get me pregnant: the authorities would find it harder to deport him,” she revealed.
However, these scams are not limited to one pattern. Sometimes the victims are lured to Nigeria to get married, after which they are compelled to succumb to the unpleasant demands of their spouses.
In July, a man was arrested for allegedly luring an American woman to Nigeria and defrauding her of US$48,000.
The 64-year-old woman told US broadcaster CNN that she met Chukwuebuka Kasi Obiaku, 34, on Facebook and he invited her to Nigeria under the pretext of love and marriage.
CNN said the woman, a retired government worker, arrived in Nigeria from Washington, DC, in February 2019 and they married three months later.
However, the relationship deteriorated soon after the wedding and Obiaku allegedly kept her captive in a Lagos hotel for more than a year.
Obiaku used the woman’s identity to extort her associates and swindle international companies, according to CNN.
“He also took over her credit cards and collected her retirement payments for 15 months,” CNN reported.
In some cases the romance doesn’t lead to the altar but stays online. While the lovers never meet during the virtual dating, this doesn’t deter the scammers from extracting exorbitant amounts of money from their victims.
According to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Americans lost US$143 million to romance scams in 2018, with the average victim getting scammed out of about US$2,600.
The FTC said that in 2019, US citizens reported losing US$201 million in romance scams. They reported losing more money to romance scams in the past two years than to any other fraud.
It’s not just the money that hurts in these types of schemes, but that the victims also have the emotional rug pulled out from under them.
– African News Agency (ANA); Editing by Yaron Blecher