The Internet Chump Who Became A Champ

An online congoes wonderfully, implausibly right

- Steve Hartman

One day in the winter of 2017, 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.”

No one likes Internet scammers, Taylor included. So the 32-year-old marketer from Ogden, Utah, insincerely 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 electronics 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 to spend ripping me or other people off.”

He told Willie he owned a photography business and could use some pretty pictures.

“How about a nice Liberian sunset?” 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.