Last year, a group of people bilked a South Korean steel company out of hundreds of thousands of dollars by pretending that they could plan a Pharrell Williams concert for them. Now, one of them has been fined and sentenced to prison, mainly for his role in a dating scam.
According to Billboard, the culprit is Sigismond Segbefia, a 29-year-old native of Ghana who was living in Silver Spring, Maryland, when both scams happened. In the dating scam, he got eight women to send him large amounts of money using the names, addresses and pictures of other people in his online dating profile. Between August 2014 and January 2015, he got one woman to send him more than $505,000, and got a woman in Pennsylvania to send him more than $222,000.
Segbefia was sentenced to two years in prison, and has to pay around $1.2 million in restitution. He has agreed to be deported to Ghana after serving his sentence. The judge in this case described him as preying on lonely women.
As for the fake Pharrell concert, Segbefia “acknowledged” participating in the scam, which got Dosko Co. to give the scammers $375,000 in exchange for promoting the nonexistent show. The U.S. government believes that other people were involved, and that they live overseas.
(Via Billboard)
