The Other McCain

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Was Ayoola Ajayi a Scammer?

Posted on | July 3, 2019 | 1 Comment

Does the name Osei Kwadwo Boakye ring a bell? No, you’ve never heard of the guy, and if someone by that name sent you an email asking for money, you’d never do it. Osei Kwadwo Boakye is an Internet scammer from Ghana whose online aliases include “Brandon Smith,” a fake U.S. Army officer who is part of a variation of the Nigerian email scam. Using fabricated military profiles, these scammers target older women. Such scams are a billion-dollar industry, according to tech executive Yaacov Apelbaum, who used a fake profile (“Olga Schmatova”) to lure Boakye into a trap: Yaacov’s replies as “Olga” included spy software that mapped the network of Boakye’s scammer ring and you can read Yaacov’s report “Military Romantic Scams — The Theory and Practice” for the rest.

An alert reader tipped me to Yaacov’s article after I’d blogged about the murder of Mackenzie Lueck by Nigerian immigrant Ayoola Ajayi. Since his arrest last week, we’ve learned a lot about Ajayi. For instance, he had been reported to ICE in 2012, when federal officials said he’d overstayed his visa, and was apparently in the country illegally. We also know that he was married to a woman who lives in Texas:

Ajayi’s ex-wife, Tenisha Ajayi, told KUTV for a story that aired Monday that she hasn’t spoken to her estranged husband in years. Though she was shocked by the most recent accusations, she said there were also signs of violence in their relationship.
“I just stopped talking to him because I was fearing for my life,” Tenisha Ajayi told KUTV’s Ginna Roe.
The ex-wife lives in Texas, and said she first met Ajayi through a family friend. The two never lived together, KUTV reports — he was in Utah, while she was in Dallas. She said he would send her money for her two children, but she stopped speaking with him when he began threatening her.
“If I wouldn’t do what he told me to do, he got real aggressive,” Tenisha Ajayi told KUTV. “He was like, I’ll have someone come kidnap you and kill you.”

Doesn’t it seem weird that Ajayi and his “wife” never lived together? Shouldn’t we suspect that this “marriage” was a fraud arranged to prevent Ajayi from being deported? What was Ajayi doing when he was caught at Utah State University with a stolen iPad in 2012?

An officer searched the iPad’s web history and found that, though Ajayi was married, he accessed dating sites, listed himself as single and was pursuing “a female as a prospect to marry to keep from being deported.”

Seven years ago, then, Ajayi was running scams on dating sites, and given what we know about about the Mackenzie Lueck case, isn’t it possible she was lured to her death by some other scam he was running?

Watch this report by Inside Edition:

 

The owner of a model and talent agency in Salt Lake City is opening up about her close encounter with murder suspect Ayoola Ajayi. Evie Keener said Ajayi, an avid bodybuilder and wannabe model, first approached her at a networking event for models and their agents last summer. She said he wanted to sign with her agency, but there was something about him that she found off-putting. After going to several networking parties, Ajayi began reaching out to Keener on social media, she said.
“Once the surface, he seemed perfect. He seemed very smart, very good looking. . . . He wanted to sign on with my agency and I did not feel comfortable having him in the same room with my young models. So I just listened to my gut and I didn’t have anything further to do with him.”

She listened to her gut — there was something “off” about this guy. We still don’t know how Ajayi convinced Mackenzie Lueck to meet him at a park at 3 a.m., but it seems likely that Ajayi must have used some kind of deception to get her to do something so stupid.



 

Category: Utah, Violence Against Women

Comments

One Response to “Was Ayoola Ajayi a Scammer?”

  1. Daybook – Dark Brightness
    July 4th, 2019 @ 2:46 am

    […] was looking for props my beloved needs in her work. Today — nothing but ads for those props. (Scamming now involves email, phone calls and ads — only the later is legal). On the phone. Continually. No, my phone does not use Android, but […]