The New York Times International - 31.07.2019

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I NTERNATIONAL EDITION | WEDNESDAY,JULY 31, 2019

ORIGIN STORY

COMICS SHAPE

ACHILDHOOD

PAGE 15 | CULTURE

USAIN BOLT

CATCHING UP WITH

THE FASTEST MAN

PAGE 13 | SPORTS

THE FISH THAT FISHES

UNCOVERING THE SECRETS

OF A DEEP-SEA DENIZEN

PAGE 12 | SCIENCE

sleeping pills and vodka and downed

them.

The man in the Facebook pictures had

no idea who Ms. Holland was. His real

identity was Sgt. Daniel Anonsen of the

Marine Corps, and he had joined the so-

cial network a decade earlier to keep in

touch with friends and family in Mary-

land. Now he was contending with doz-

ens of Facebook impostor accounts us-

ing stolen photos of him at the gym, at

his brother’s wedding and in Afghani-

stan.

“For every one that I deleted, there

was 10 more that were popping up,” he

said. “It turns my stomach.”

Ms. Holland and Mr. Anonsen repre-

sent two sides of a fraud that has flour-

ished on Facebook and Instagram,

where scammers impersonate real

American service members to cheat

vulnerable and lonely women out of

their money. The deception has entan-

gled the United States military, de-

frauded thousands of victims and

smeared the reputations of soldiers, air-

men, sailors and Marines. It has also

sometimes led to tragedy.

The scheme stands out for its audaci-

ty. While fraud has proliferated on Face-

book for years, those running the mili-

tary romance scams are taking on not

only one of the world’s most influential

companies, but also the most powerful

military — and succeeding. Many scam-

mers operate from their phones in Ni-

geria and other African nations, work-

On a Monday afternoon in June 2017, Re-

nee Holland was draped in an American

flag at Philadelphia International Air-

port, waiting for a soldier she had be-

friended on Facebook.

The married 56-year-old had driven

two hours from Delaware to pick him up.

Their blossoming online friendship had

prompted her to send him a care pack-

age and thousands of dollars in gift

cards. She had also wired him $5,000 for

plane tickets to return home.

Now she was looking for a buff, tat-

tooed man in uniform, just as he looked

in his Facebook photos. But his flight

was not on the airport arrivals board. A

ticket agent told her the flight didn’t ex-

ist.

From there, Ms. Holland said, it was a

daze. She walked to her car, with “Wel-

come Home” written on the windows

and sobbed. She had spent much of her

family’s savings on the phantom soldier.

“There’s no way I can go home and tell

my husband,” she remembered telling

herself. She drove to a strip mall, bought

ing several victims at the same time. In

interviews in Nigeria, six men told The

New York Times that the love hoaxes

were lucrative and low risk.

“Definitely there is always con-

science,” said Akinola Bolaji, 35, who

has conned people online since he was

15. “But poverty will not make you feel
    the pain.”
    Facebook has long had a mission to
    “connect the world.” But in the process,
    it has created a global gathering place
    where the crooks outnumber the cops.
    For digital criminals, Facebook has
    become a one-stop shop. It has plenty of
    photos of American service members.
    Creating an impostor account can be
    easy. Facebook groups for single women

and widows are full of targets. Scam-

mers can message hundreds of potential

victims. And they congregate in their

own Facebook groups to sell fake ac-

counts, Photoshopped images and

scripts for pulling off the cons.

“There are so many people out there

that are lonely, newly divorced, maybe

widowed,” said Kathy Waters, head of a

group called Advocating Against Ro-

mance Scams. “Everybody wants some-

body to love and to listen to them and

hear them. And these scammers know

the right words to say.”

There are no exact figures on how

many service members and civilians

have been affected. The F.B.I. said it re-

ceived nearly 18,500 complaints from

victims of romance or similar internet

scams last year, with reported losses ex-

ceeding $362 million, up 71 percent from

2017.

Facebook said it removes impostor

accounts with the help of software, hu-

man reviewers and user reports. Its

software also scans for scammers and

locks accounts until owners can provide

proof of identity. It has a video warning

people of scams.

Facebook said it requires people to

use their real identities on its sites. To

eliminate impostor accounts, it has in-

vested in technology and more human

reviewers. The company works with the

authorities to prosecute scammers. Bil-

lions of fake Facebook accounts have

S CAMS, PAGE 5

Renee Holland spent thousands of dollars on a man she met on Facebook. Ms. Holland said she felt motherly toward the man, “Michael Chris,” who said he disarmed bombs in Iraq.

ADAM BECKMAN

Fake soldiers, real heartbreak

FORT PIERCE, FLA.

How scammers use

Facebook to trick lonely

women out of money

BY JACK NICAS

One of the many fake Facebook accounts

using photos stolen from Daniel Anonsen,

whose images were used in the account of

the man Ms. Holland knew as Mr. Chris.

ANDREAS BURGESS

On a Tuesday afternoon in early July, Al-

ison Grace Martin, a British artist and

weaver, joined a steady stream of city

residents along the elevated freeway

that curves through downtown São

Paulo. The two-mile roadway, known as

the Minhocão, after a mythic gigantic

earthworm, was closed to cars that day.

The only traffic was on foot and bikes,

skateboards and scooters. Picnickers

lounged on the median, sipping wine.

Children ran after soccer balls. A re-

triever chased a coconut; a pit bull peed

on a pile of bamboo.

The bamboo — freshly cut and split

into strips about 20 feet long — had ar-

rived with Ms. Martin and the engineer

James Solly, who were leading an urban

design workshop, “High Line Paulista,”

inspired loosely by the High Line, the

Manhattan park built on a raised former

railway. Their students for the week had

carried the strips, which would be put to

use in an experimental dome construc-

tion, like a barn-raising but with bam-

boo.

Plans have long been in the works to

turn the Minhocão into a park. Since its

opening in 1971, the freeway has been

the subject of controversy: a concrete

scar that bifurcated neighborhoods,

smothering residents with noise and

pollution.

“It ripped apart the urban fabric,” said

Franklin Lee, director of the workshop

with his partner Anne Save de Beaure-

cueil. (The workshop is part of the Ar-

chitectural Association’s international

visiting school program.) In January,

the mayor, Bruno Covas, announced

that the freeway would eventually be

deactivated, finally making way for the

Parque Minhocão.

WEAVING, PAGE 2

Exploring ‘the logic of the weave’

Camila Calegari Marques, an architect, weaving bamboo strips for a dome partly de-

signed by the British artist Alison Grace Martin for a proposed park in São Paulo, Brazil.

GABRIELA PORTILHO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

Artist uses complex math

in building apt, creative

structures with bamboo

BY SIOBHAN ROBERTS

AND GABRIELA PORTILHO

The New York Times publishes opinion

from a wide range of perspectives in

hopes of promoting constructive debate

about consequential questions.

No country on earth has benefited from

President Trump’s trade fight with

China more than Vietnam.

The country’s factories have swelled

with orders as American tariffs have

caused companies to reconsider making

their products in China. Now, more big

technology companies are looking to

bulk up their manufacturing operations

in Vietnam, lifting the ambitions of a na-

tion already well on its way to becoming

a powerhouse maker of smartphones

and other high-end gadgets.

First, though, Vietnam needs to get

better at making the little plastic casings

on your earbuds.

Vu Huu Thang’s company in the

northern city of Bac Ninh, Bac Viet

Technology, produces small plastic

parts for Canon printers, Korg musical

instruments and Samsung cellphones

and phone accessories, including ear-

buds. He said it would be hard for his

company to compete against Chinese

suppliers as long as he had to buy 70 to

100 tons of imported plastic material ev-

ery month, most of it made in China.

“Vietnam cannot compare with

China,” Mr. Thang said. “When we buy

materials, it’s 5, 10 percent more expen-

sive than China already.” And the Viet-

namese market is too small, he said, to

entice plastic producers to set up plants

there.

Negotiators for the United States and

China are meeting in Shanghai this

week to try to find a way toward resolv-

ing their bruising trade war. But for

some companies, spooked by what now

appears to be a definitive darkening in

America’s relations with China, the ap-

peal of working in the world’s second-

largest economy may already be tar-

nished for good. With smartphones, vid-

eo game consoles and other consumer

favorites potentially next on Mr.

Trump’s tariff list, gadget makers in par-

ticular are feeling pressure to find new

low-wage places to have their products

made or finished.

Apple has homed in on Vietnam and

India as it searches for ways to diversify

its supply chain. Nintendo has acceler-

ated a shift in the production of its

Switch console to Vietnam from China,

according to Panjiva, a supply chain re-

search company. The Taiwanese elec-

tronics behemoth Foxconn, a major as-

sembler of iPhones, said in January that

it had acquired land-use rights in Viet-

nam and had pumped $200 million into

an Indian subsidiary. Other Taiwanese

and Chinese partners to Apple have in-

dicated that they are considering ramp-

ing up operations in Vietnam as well.

V IETNAM, PAGE 8

Vietnam

is gathering

the spoils of

a trade war

BAC NINH, VIETNAM

Tariffs have companies

looking outside of China,

but there are hurdles

BY RAYMOND ZHONG

Last Wednesday, after Robert Mueller’s

terse and sometimes halting congres-

sional testimony, conventional wisdom

quickly congealed: Mueller’s perform-

ance had made Donald Trump’s im-

peachment far less likely. “Robert S.

Mueller III’s disastrous testimony has

taken the wind out of the sails of the

Democratic impeachment drive,” wrote

Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post.

CNN’s Chris Cillizza declared Mueller’s

testimony “a bust — at least when it

came to generating momentum for

impeachment.”

Less than a week later, it’s clear that

these hot takes were wrong. At no point

in Trump’s wretched

rule has impeach-

ment appeared more

probable. Indeed,

Democrats on the

House Judiciary

Committee, which

would oversee im-

peachment hearings,

argue that an inquiry

into impeachment

has already begun.

An inexorable con-

frontation between

the House and the president has been

set in motion.

Before Mueller’s testimony last

Wednesday, 93 House Democrats had

come out for an impeachment inquiry.

As I write this, the number is up to 109;

among them are Katherine Clark, vice

chairwoman of the House Democratic

caucus, and Mike Levin, a freshman

from a swing district. By the end of the

week, more than half the Democratic

caucus could be on board.

Mueller’s presentation may have

been underwhelming, but he allowed

Democrats to put a bow around his

findings, clearing away some of the

deliberate confusion created by Attor-

ney General William Barr’s misleading

summary. “The press focused on the

performance and the optics instead of

on the substance,” said Jerry Nadler,

chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

“Mueller said we were attacked by the

Russians, the Trump campaign cooper-

ated in many ways with that attack, they

welcomed it, in many ways they worked

with it.”

Democrats already knew all this, of

course. But just as Trump’s recent racist

outbursts forced renewed attention to

his bigotry, Mueller made Congress

Impeaching

Trump may

have begun

OPINION

Mueller’s

testimony

may have

lacked thrills,

but it marked

a turning

point in the

case against

the president.

G OLDBERG, PAGE 11

Michelle Goldberg

Here to steal your heart.

nytimes.com/mlpodcast

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