Ben Taylor received this
random Facebook message: “My name is Joel from Liberia,
West Africa. I need some assistance from you. Business or
financial assistance dat [sic] will help empower me.”spend ripping me or other people off.”
He told Willie he owned a photog-
raphy business and could use some
pretty pictures.
“How about a nice Liberian sun-
set?” Taylor asked.
Was Taylor planning on paying for
the photos? Willie wanted to know.
“If they’re good, sure,” Taylor said.
Willie wasted no time. He snapped
a couple of sunset photos on his old
dinosaur flip phone and sent them to
Taylor’s phone the next day.
“I told him, ‘Hey, this is great,’” Tay-
lor says. Another fib—he wasn’t even
sure it was a sunset in the photos.
Willie said he could take better pic-
tures if he had a better camera. Taylor
decided to play along and see what
happened. So he picked up the cheap-
est camera he could find—a shiny red
one—and shipped it off to Liberia. The“HOW ABOUT A
PICTURE OF A NICE
LIBERIAN SUNSET?”
TAYLOR ASKED
HIS SCAMMER.No one likes Internet scammers,
Taylor included. So the 32-year-old
marketer from Ogden, Utah, insin-
cerely responded, “How can I help?”
“I wanted to see how this whole
scam operation worked and how they
bait people,” Taylor explains. “I just
wanted to go down this rabbit hole
and see what are the tricks that they
use to get people.”
But there’s no way he could have
guessed what would happen next. Joel
Willie was indeed in Liberia, and he
proposed a business partnership. He
asked Taylor to mail some used elec-
tronics to an address in New Jersey.
Supposedly the electronics would be
resold and the profits split between
the two of them.
“I looked the place up on Google
Earth,” Taylor says. “There were broken-
down cars all over the place.” He wrote
back to Willie and told him he was
skeptical. Willie insisted he would
never take advantage of someone.
“Bible says in Proverbs 22 a good name
is better than silver n gold,” he wrote.
Taylor didn’t buy it, and he replied
with a small lie of his own. “I figured
the more time of theirs that I can
waste, the less time that they’d have to88 march 2019