Ghana has come up in the international media for yet another dishonourable mention, after a local cyber scammer, aka Sakawa boy, scammed a retired American businessman out of all his money and left him too broken-hearted to live.
Alistair Selly blew his head out in the living room of his Yonkers apartment which now faces foreclosure because he had wired all of his mortgage payments to a certain Nuhu Suleiman in Ghana.
This Nuhu Suleiman had been presented as the point man through whom money could be transferred to a bikini-kicking sex bomb called Ayisha, who was supposed to be a girl smitten with Selly.
Obviously, Ayisha was a fake personality carefully conjured in what Ghana has become infamous for as a haven of Romance scams.
According to Selly’s son, Peter, his late father had wired more than US$50,000 to the supposed Ayisha through Nuhu, after buying the scammer’s story that she was stranded in Ghana and needed money for a number of things, including airfare to travel to Yonkers, New York to be united with Selly.
Peter tells ABC News that he returned from work and met his father sitting in his living room with a bullet in his head.
Amidst the tragedy and the confusion he looked through his dad’s things and discovered all the Western Union money transfers which added up to more than US$50,000.
The distraught Peter, who is himself a businessman based in Englewood, New Jersey, also found out that his dad had maxed out his credit card, and even taken advances to send to Ayisha – to fund his reckless romance online, Selly Alistair had resorted to stealing from his son when he ran out of money.
Because he stopped making the mortgage payments, Peter now faces foreclosure over the house he thought he had been paying for.
On the day that Selly Alistaire blew out his brains, he was expecting Ayisha to arrive in Yonkers on a Delta Airlines flight. However, she never turned up.
Later, after Selly had shot himself, he received a message on his laptop from Nuhu, claiming Ayisha had also committed suicide in Chicago.