One of the victims of the ‘black money’ scam, which lost $292,400 thinking it was selling an inn to a wealthy African man, admits he was struck by the physique of the man presented as ‘the diplomat’.
• Also read: Local entrepreneurs targeted: lucrative “black money” scam foiled
If an important part of this scheme is based on the scale reported by the scammers themselves, this approach worked particularly well for a man from Bas-St-Laurent. In 2018, this victim had sold his tanker business in Alberta and withdrawn the $650,000 he needed to return to Quebec from the bank in $100 denominations.
After helping her friend, who owns an inn in Trois-Pistoles, for a year, the place had been put up for sale on Kijiji for $299,000, drawing the attention of the fraud cell. At several meetings in Trois-Pistoles, Quebec and Montreal, the man convinced himself of the wealth of the buyers.
Impressed
Introduced as “the diplomat”, who called himself “Her Majesty”, impressed with his clothes, his Porsche and above all with his briefcase filled with so-called $100 bills for cleaning. “I was impressed,” said the man, who cannot be named by court order.
At a cleaning demonstration, in which defendant Wilfried Christian Mbounou played the diplomat’s son, the victim was convinced the chemicals were turning the pure white bills into real $100 bills. “Wow, I saw that that’s really true,” said the 42-year-old.
Photo submitted as evidence in court
The victim therefore agreed to borrow $292,400 so the scammer could clean up the money by alternately placing a real bill and then a fake to form an aluminum brick covered in red tape. “It took 5 hours to put together the tickets,” says the witness.
A few days later, after a friend told him about the black money scam, the victim opened his two bricks and found nothing but paper. “It wasn’t money, it was black cardboard, like in the little school,” explained the disappointed man.
Now the man who has “a penny left” believes his money was taken when the scammer placed the two bricks in a “vibration box” for a few minutes, only for two fake bricks to be pulled out.
A total of $800,000 stolen from three of the eight victims could not be recovered.
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