The Internet Chump Who Became a Champ
An online con goes wonderfully, implausibly right
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 brokendown 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.
“I told him, ‘Hey, this is great,’” Taylor says. Another fib—he wasn’t even sure it was a sunset in the photos.
Willie said he could take better pictures if he had a better camera. Taylor decided to play along and see what happened. So he picked up the cheapest camera he could find—a shiny red one—and shipped it off to Liberia. The
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.”
“HOW ABOUT A PICTURE OF A NICE LIBERIAN SUNSET?” TAYLOR ASKED HIS SCAMMER.
postage cost as much as the camera. And now Taylor was really invested in this—whatever it was. “My family thinks I’m crazy because I’m interacting with this guy in Liberia,” he says.
Willie kept in close touch, telling Taylor he wanted to be a journalist. He wrote, “I’ve decided 2 really commit n devote myself 2 dis business, what other pictures you want me 2 take?”
Still skeptical, Taylor said he’d like to see 20 shots of life in Liberia. A week later, a bunch more blurry photos came through on his phone.
“Joel has to be the worst photographer on the planet,” Taylor said in a Youtube video he made chronicling his adventures. By now, he had realized something interesting was happening and decided to document it.
When Taylor wrote back, he shared some advice for taking better pictures— hold the camera steady, for one thing. The next batch of Willie’s photos came a few days later and contained about 20 more shots of people doing everyday things: walking in town, tinkering on their houses (some of which could only generously be described as shacks). For Taylor, the images were heartbreaking. He had never seen such poverty. But their quality was much better—which posed a big problem.
“When he put in the work, I thought, Oh no, now I’ve got to figure out a way to compensate Joel for these pictures, or I’m going to be the scammer,” Taylor says.
He decided to make a booklet using the pictures, calling it By D Grace of God, a phrase borrowed from Willie’s messages. Then Taylor took to Youtube, where a few thousand people had started to follow his dispatches, and to the crowdfunding site indiegogo.com, where he figured he’d sell a few copies of the 16-page booklet, featuring a dozen of Willie’s Liberia photos, for $8 a pop. Sales exploded.
“People from around the world and places that I’ve never even heard of were buying Joel’s book,” Taylor says.
Soon he had raised $1,000. He told Willie he could have half. And the rest? Well, Taylor decided that Willie would get that, too—but with a catch. Taylor told him he had to donate that $500 to charity.
That is more than a year’s salary in Liberia. So Taylor didn’t really expect an unemployed, impoverished hustler to just give all that money away. Then another batch of pictures